Item—The Johnny Saturn Store is officially open!  I haven’t got the eBooks formatted and uploaded, but they are coming soon and will probably be on site for next week.  Everything else is primed and ready to go!

Item: People at conventions have often asked Benita and me where our ideas come from.  The answer is easier than you might suspect, because most ideas become self-generating idea machines in their own right.  In other words, once we’ve established a character, he will often become semi-autonomous, telling us how he will react to any given situation.  Good characters write themselves!  Settings are the same way, really, and they will tell us what type of stories fit well in their fictional environment.  When you have a world as well established as Spire City, it’s virtually a machine with ideas as parts, and it will chug along, producing more possible stories than we could ever write in a human lifetime.  I don’t really have time to explain this at conventions, but now you know.

Item: Here’s a great piece of art contributed by Canadian artist, Brad Bowers, the regular penciler on Spinner Rack’s “Honor Brigade.”

Good friend John Wilson has made “Johnny Saturn” today’s Sketchmag Spotlight over at the Sketch Magazine site.  We are, of course, quite honored.  Plus, he mentions Benita’s spinning wheel, which is a long-standing presence when we do comic shows.

You may have noticed that there is no Johnny Saturn store up.  I’ve had technical difficulties, to be honest.  I’ve tried to install Zen Cart three times, all failing, and the third time it took down the whole site for a while, forcing me to do a restore.  I can’t go back to eShop, because it did a real job on our database.  So, a store is coming, and it will be sooner than later, but I’m just not sure when exactly.

Over at Webcomics.com, I put Johnny Saturn up for a critique by my webcartoonist peers.  The advice and observations I’ve received have been invaluable.  I mention this because, if you think I’m above criticism, you are incorrect.  I will never be too good to stop working on improving the strip.  I consider myself to be a journeyman, and my masterwork is still out there, in the future.

Speaking of “Sketch Magazine,” I would like to make sure that at least all the readers of this blog know about it.  Having been published for well over thirty issues, and featuring interviews with many of the comic industries top stars, Sketch Magazine has offered valuable advice for learning cartoonist for some years now.  It has covered every aspect of the comic creation process in some detail, and it has adapted to the times by recognizing and offering instruction to the world on the rise of webcomics.  I have been very proud to be a semi-regular contributor to this fine publication, and I would strongly urge all learning cartoonists to buy or subscribe to it.  It’s available in virtually all comic shops, and online.

Scott.

The store, found here, should be up and running as you read this.  If anyone has any difficulties with it, please let me know.  For reasons that escape me, the store looks good in all the browsers I own but Internet Explorer.  I haven’t quite figured out a good way to deal with that, yet.

On another front, please note that I’ve taken off Capcha and put in a new, more friendly spam protection plugin.  This one will even read out the letters for you as a WAV file, making it much less difficult to post here.

Thanks!  Scott.

I haven’t written a new blog in a while, so I figured it is time for some long, candid thoughts.  If you don’t care for such mental meanderings, that’s fine, just skip this post.

There’s been a particularly nasty head cold going around in central Indiana, and Benita and I traded it back and forth twice, so that each of us was sick twice.  We developed coughs, and that meant lots of cough syrup, much of it with Codeine.  We slept a lot. Now we are largely past this little bought of illness, and getting back to our normal lives.  The only positive thing I take away from this experience is that it is reasonably comfortable to lie on my back and draw in my sketchbook.  (I would not have thought this to be the case, really.)

I purchased Riven Phoenix’s course, “The Structure of Man.”  I strongly believe that drawing the human form well calls for a life-time commitment to learn the skills and anatomy necessary.  I go to life drawing studios at the Indianapolis Art Center weekly, and this has helped tremendously, but I’ve long felt that I’ve hit a plateau.  So, I ordered this course, which has 45 hours of video training on it. It is my sincere intent to use the knowledge held within to polish of some the weak points in my drawing ability.

We set up a store for Benita on www.basicallybenita.com, and we have three t-shirts for sale there.  I did the penciling, and Benita did the coloring and lettering on these.  I’m really proud of all this, because it took a lot of effort to figure out how to effectively set up this storefront.  It took three plugins working in concert, and I actually paid for the premium version of one of them.  (I mention this because we have all gotten so used to getting software for free online.  There are even free versions of many high-end programs out there!)  Anyway, as I was saying, there will soon be a new, replacement Johnny Saturn store, and we plan to sell (among other things): comics, trade paperbacks, t-shirts, posters, prints, PDF or CBR downloads, and much more.  Really, this is just over the top exciting for us.

Scott.

I’m really proud to announce that our “Johnny Saturn” Store has gone live.

This means that the single page store that was formerly on this site is gone, replaced by the much more expansive “Johnny Saturn” Store site.

In addition to our comics and graphic novels, we are also selling original art and shirts. Comics are available as single issues, or in combo packs.

As original art goes, so far we have the pages from issue one posted for sale. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be adding art on up through issue 13.

In the near to intermediate future, we are also going to offer one-of-a-kind commissions, Scott Story sketchbooks, and digital versions of our books in various formats (pdf, cbr, etc.)

As the store develops, it is also our plan to ad professional grade posters and buttons.

So, please go to the “Johnny Saturn” Store, look around, and let me know what you think.

Scott & Benita