Wow, I expected 2010 to be a better year than 2009, but I didn't think it'd start this soon. For 2010 I had half of a graphic novel and a comic for the Department of Defense scheduled as far as work goes. Other than that I was going to pretty much just work on my own stuff (Fastback and Everclear) and Mike Farah and my comic strip "Bernie's BOT."

Olivia and I had planned on getting the eff outta New Jersey and move to California (where I'm originally from) sometime mid-year after I finish the DoD comic because we'd have the money after that to live off of if nothing comes in for a while. Well, the client I am working for the DoD through is still working on their end of the project so I am just sitting finishing up the first part of Bernie's BOT waiting for them to give me the go-ahead to start.

Olivia recently got a pretty huge animation gig, definitely the biggest of her career. She's been working on it for a few weeks now and the deadline is approaching and I guess the client needs the work sooner than she had hoped they would so I will be helping her out as soon as I finish coloring this last Bernie page and do the lettering. I will be doing the inbetweens for all (3?) of the animations. A local friend of ours who used to run ad agencies gave Olivia the job. From what I understand the client is a former client of his from wayyy back. He's acting as our art director on the project so he's been coming over every couple of days and on the phone multiple times a day. The other day he came by to check out Olivia's progress and I was checking it out and we were discussing me helping out when I finish my current obligation to Bernie and I half-jokingly said, "Hey Joe, why don't you see if they want to do a comic type advertisement to go with this?"

A couple of hours later, after he had left he called and said that he pitched the idea to the client and they went for it. It'll be something like a 4-6 page story as part of a brochure or advertisement to be given to their new clients or something like that. Joe and I will plot it out and I will do layouts, Olivia will do loose pencils over my layouts to keep the company mascot character she designed for them on model, I will tighten the pencils where needed then ink, color, and letter it. This is going to be pretty cool because Olivia hasn't done any sequential work since we were first-year students at the Joe Kubert School and I haven't done any animation since then, getting back in to it shouldn't be too hard for either of us. The best part about it though (other than the money $$$$$$), is that this will be Olivia's first professional comic book work and my first professional animation work all in the same job. I thought that was pretty neat.

After we finish this job we'll be pretty set for a little while financially, so, what I'm thinking is maybe instead of moving to SoCal after my comic gig for the DoD, maybe when I get the go-ahead from them we'll move and once we are out there I will start that job. We'll pretty much be set for a year to two years if we're frugal about our spending. Right now we're looking at moving back to the Coachella Valley where I grew up, probably Palm Springs and then eventually move to Los Angeles.

So far a pretty nice start to the year. Let's hope it keeps up.

Ok, enough blabbering, I need to get "Hero of the Day" #4 done then get back to these robots. These colors are taking foreverrr. I'm definitely hiring a flatter for the DoD comic...

Sigh, thinking of the move back to Cali gives me a craving for In-N-Out Burger.