Gold Digger Annual 2009 by ~Suprspr0de on deviantART

I made a comic for the GD Annual in 5 days. Quite a rush but slightly fulfilling.


Also I began flatting for Wes Hartman. More responsibilities = more pride!


PS: Its always fun to mess with Wes' coloring station!

Why don't we just Scan it?!

This has been quite a working week. Only one more day till I can take a break with the family. What mission does today bring from Antarctic Press?


We continue with out Ted Nomura Collection Project. You see, we have to do a bunch of things to get these decades-old Issues from the CDs to an up to date Adobe Acrobat file. However, we sometimes have some dud CDs and so I have to look through...


...THE SHELF OF CD (COMPACT-DOOM)!!!

Its pretty much a shelf full of past comics and files. I assume these were made before external hard drives were available. See, this is the last line of defense; I have to find a copy of the missing or corrupt comics that may or may not be available. In the case that there is not backup, we have to manually scan the comics.

I sometimes wonder if scanning is slightly faster than looking through the shelf.


Surprise, surprise! It seems AP Intern Force Member: Eugene is somewhat of a professional in the field of Graphic Design, With his freelance works and sleek websites he seems like someone I could probably learn much more from. Also he is tremendously mild mannered.

Proofreading for Tpyos

For some reason I never ever considered the fact that manga used text and therefore, must be proofread. I guess you get caught up in the medium and you forget that it is a mixture of things; one of which is text. So today I got to proofread a bunch of to-be-released comics.


AP Intern Force Member Aaron, here, got the next Gold Digger while Eugene got the next issue of Bad Kids Go to Hell (I think it was Issue #3). I wasn't so lucky.


You see, while those gentlemen got comics to proofread, I got a Gold Digger Tech Manual which is, essentially, a book of text which detail the instruments, equipments and machines which Gina Diggers, the main character of the series, utilizes through the GD universe. The manual used complex text; Complex in that it has scientific, pseudo-scientific and context based terms that someone with knowledge of the Gold Digger universe would probably find completely intriguing.
Seeing as I am only half way through the first gold digger pocket manga, I have quite a bit more to learn before I could get the full impact of the stats for the items listed in it.

However, reading through this, I was amazed by how much consideration goes into all the items that appear in the comics. I generally accepted that the items have their usages and am fine with simply knowing their capabilities. But that was not enough for Mr. Perry. Apparently, the items have connections with similar or interchangeable power sources and configurations that repeat themselves for varying effects. After reading through the manual, I had been made so much more knowledgeable and confident about GD.


You know, it's summer and that means very hot weather here in Texas. Thats why it's important to keep hydrated with cool water from the Water Cooler/Dispenser that DOES NOT COOL the water. Aparently its coolant is broken so that puts a damper on things for me. For some reason bananas and room-temperature water make me want to throw up so the water fountain works against me.

But I wont go down without a fight. Lucky for me, the heating part works and it dispenses hot water. I happen to enjoy drinking tea and so I will drink lots of tea. I read somewhere that it opens up your pores and lets in cooler air or something. Supposed to be more efficient that drinking cool water.

Take that, Bad Luck!

Keeping Cool DVDs and not the other way around

I entered the office today to find NO ONE. For some reason everyone decided to go on a lunch break... TOGETHER. Odd thing to happen. It was only two interns and Robby Bevard left and he kept being distracted by the phone.


I spent time working on a Ted Nomura Collection which AP Intern Force Member: Katya is in charge of. We've recently got a deadline and for that reason have beefed up our approach. You see these stacks of CDs?...


Katya and the other members of APIntern Force have been slowly chipping away at the piles. Converting, watermarking, de-quarking, updating, batching, flattening, categorizing and laying out each of the many works of Mr. Nomura. I've helped her a little bit but its basically a drop in a bucket of water.


We now turn our attention at this Box Set Box in front of Mr. Perry's cubicle. This basically tells you the range of interest the staff here have and its a pretty big range in my opinion. Most fascinating of all it the collection of 24 box sets. Jack Bauer Power Hour for the win!

Intern Force x3

Its my third day and I've come to appreciate the fact that everyday in the Antarctic Press office is different and generally unscripted. I was told that but I could never really understand how that could be.

Today's missions were to get comics ready for Comic Con 2009 and so we needed to prepare 2000 comics to be given for free.

First we open up a box of Gold Digger #101...


Then we take out one of these 10% off stickers...


and then stack them...


Its not difficult at all and though we were supposed to finish it by next week, we simply did it all that day due to the super-speed sticker-sticking technique of Katya... a member of the Antarctic Press Intern Team:


Katya claims to be the Number 2 Intern off all time as told by Fred Perry. She is second to Robby who is still an intern despite the fact that he... well... he isn't one.


Aaron, is a Silent awesome-dressed dude interested in Graphic Design. He has fantastic hair.


Eugene, interested in animation and wears glasses. Yes, that's all I can say about him.

Adobe Automated Batching

A new day at Antarctic Press. This time, with less boxes. Got to work 10 minutes late for reasons I should probably not say (it involved a lot of Cattle and Rhubarb).


My first instruction was to convert old .tiff and .psd files into .jpg while decreasing their resolution to 150. A simple task but when you consider the amount of files I would have to do that to (think 48 pages PER disk) and how many disks there were (8 disks), not to mention the computer terminal I had to use (make-you-want-to-stab-your-tendons slow); all these obstacles make this out to be one of the most tediously slow things I ever had to do. Thank goodness for Adobe Photoshop.


Adobe was able to do it all for me without me actually being there. This was I was able to go around the office taking more pictures of things and people. Decided to start with a more detailed look at [name not found]s action figures.



He also has a Kaneda (from Akira) action figure but it was upside down and I didn't think he would be comfortable with me picking up his stuff so I let it be. Perhaps another day.








One thing that you may notice is the number of comics on shelves around the entire building and I'm not talking about just AP comics, just many manga related things including Shojobeat, Newtype, anime music sheets and much more both translated and untranslated.

Luckily one man, Ray Elliot, knows where everything is. If there is anything you need but have no idea where it is, Ray will point or hand it to you almost as if he didn't need to remember where it was kept. I guess that makes the office more his than anyone elses. (Don't quote me)

So when Rod Espinosa was trying to explain how he uses Google Sketchup in his work (I will rant about this in detail some other time) and needed to find Issue 3 of The Prince of Heroes guess who handed it to him... thats right... Ray!

Also theres this dog... don't know much about this dog yet.

First Day

Here I am at my first day as an Intern in Antarctic Press. I wonder what they'll have me do. Will they make me color some flats? Will they show me how to operate the printing press? Will they make me manage the Website? So many possibilities.


Turns out my first day, just so happened to be the very day where interns are desired the most. Its shipping day, where Diamond distributor company, or something like that, send comics in boxes all over the US. So These boxes...


... were manually carried down one by one down to the sidewalk, in a very Egyptian-pyramid-laborer fashion. Eventually we got them stacked downstairs like so:


and then I got to meet some of the nicest members of any business I have ever seen, it's just too bad that my camera was out of power so I didn't get to take any of their pictures. The office is any comic or general young cartoonists dream. Its smallish but chucked full of comic-distributing goodness. There are stacks upon stacks of many different comics, posters everywhere, how to draw books, and original works by the artists on paper, prints, and other such random places.



Anyway I can't wait for my second day. Hopefully I can finally remember all their names. Maybe I should do some sort of spotlight thing.