I got home too late last night for trying to post anything on the blog to make any sense– so for that, I apologize. But I had a wonderful time with my parents. The trips to visit them usually revolve around food and watching TV– and the food consumption didn’t change this time, but instead of gluing ourselves to the television as is our habit, we spent the weekend talking politics, local events and doing a lot of joking and laughing. It really was a fun time. I always enjoy visiting my folks– but I usually go in with the realization that hanging out with them is going to be kind of like hanging out with your couch potato buddy or something (which I could do here)– and it was a great suprise that we skipped the TV this time. I think the highlight as far as a “feel good” moment was when my father and I drove to the local STAPLES to pick up their incredibly cheap yearly “BACK TO SCHOOL” supplies sale items. My folks do this every year and donate the items to my old Elementary school, YELLOW BRANCH ELEMENTARY. With government budget cuts, and the fact that most of the kids in the area my parents live come from VERY low income families, the school can use all the supplies it can get. The teachers usually end up spending some of their OWN MEAGER SALARIES to buy these kinds of things (like spiral notebooks, pencils, crayons) for the kids. It’s a sad reality of the state of our public education system these days. Hell, they’re still using double-wide trailers as classrooms at YELLOW BRANCH, just as they did when I attended there some 30 years ago. But it felt good to contribute in some small way, at least.

Thanks to everyone who left comments about the kinds of things they’d like to see here. I’ll definitely be throwing all that into the blog in future posts. It HAS been rather superhero-centric, and it’ll be fun to break away from that as much as possible. In that spirit, I’m posting a page of pen/marker sketches that I came across– something that I used to do for fun and warm ups some time ago, but quickly fell out of the habit. It was neat to try to draw a bunch of quick sketches without many pencil guidelines beforehand. It really brought out the cartoonist in me, I think. So– here it is…

Back around this time last year (before I started making regular blog entries– more like when they would come about once every month or so….) I posted a link to a prototype sculpture of what was to be a SERRA action figure sculpted by the husband and wife team of Gabriel and Terri Marquez of GWIN SCULPTURE WORKS. I remember lamenting on how incredible it looked (and still DOES) and how sorry I was that it never actually went into production. Well, in combing through all my digital files recently, I actually found a file of what the figure would have looked like COLORED as well. It’s only served to make my lament at the figures not being produced that much deeper. And with how utterly beautiful the SERRA figure was looking, I can only imagine the thrill of seeing how they would have handled KOJ and JEREK. As I said in the original post about this figure– maybe some day.

OK– that’s it for today. It’s nice to be back and posting again. It’s odd how much I missed it after only one dey.

Mike