Perhapablog

Friday, July 29, 2011

TALES From The PERHAPS~!

okay...

well, word just in--part 2 of scott weinstein's clever, creative, and innovative entry into the very popular TALES From The PERHAPS feature has been posted and it is both free and funny and free. and it's easily accessible too--just click that TALES button up there on the browser bar and you'll be whisked right to it!
go now!

today's installment--as well as last week's--was drawn by our dear friend and perhapa-buddy, the renowned KELLY YATES! if you haven't yet downloaded kelly's awesome comic series, AMBER ATOMS, for your iPod, Android, of iPad you don't know what you're missing...!

also big thanks go out to our pal CHRIS SUMMERS for providing the colors on this segment--thanks for the beautiful hues, chris!

not much else to say about that except that, while we have three or four other stories being worked on for future tales from the perhaps adventures, we are still keeping the door open and inviting you and anyone you know to come up with their own cool tale~!

that's all for now~!
have a great weekend!
smell ya later!
todd

Monday, July 25, 2011

where monsters dwell!

okay...




last wednesday night, right after i got back from seeing the final harry potter (i LOVED it!), i was honored to once agin be the guest on the cool comics podcast WHERE MONSTERS DWELL and chat for a while with mike and remy! i had a great time--those guys are a lot of fun and ask some curious questions--and if you'd like to give it a listen, you can pick it up here...


http://wheremonstersblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/episode-159-with-todd-dezago.html



...and if you haven't yet checked out part one of scott weinstein's "we interrupt your regularly scheduled programming..." over on our Tales from the Perhaps...well, what are you waiting for...?!


smell ya later~!
todd

Friday, July 22, 2011

Tales From The Perhaps--"We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming..."

okay...

well, i don't know what you're doing here...?!
i mean, if i were you, i'd be heading over to the Tales From The Perhaps page a fast as my little mouse-click could carry me...

why, you ask?

oh, just 'cause we've just this morning posted the very first part of our newest Tale--"We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming..."--by our good pal, scott weinstein, and wonderfully illustrated by an awesome collection of friends, perhapanauts artists from stories past, including leanne hannah, rich woodall, jason copland, and kelly yates! this one is a lotta fun with some twists and turns you won't see coming! man, i just got done being all proud of rich and jason for their cool story, and now i gotta be all proud of scott! : )

it's a great tale and a great addition to what is shaping up to be a really cool feature here on the perhapa-blog!
go check it out--and tell your friends!

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years ago, when mike and i were doing tellos, we had a tellos message board and a very large, very loyal family of posters. one of them was a young kid named jared, who went by the screen name 'kojee', and over the years jared and i have stayed in touch and become friends. he also has a great love of the paranormal and the unexplained--has even reported here on the perhapa-blog about his own investigations and ghost hunts--and we have recently been spending a lot of time chatting about old comics and why we love them so.

about a month or so ago, i got a very cool package from jared with a note saying that he had unexpectedly gained access to an etching machine at work and thought he'd throw a couple of fun things on the grid and see how they came out. the first is this awesome reproduction of ( one of my personal favorites ) one of mike's last sketches of koj and jarek from his blog...





the other is this craig-drawn pic of choopie, etched into a piece of plexiglass which took me about an hour and a half trying to figure out what to put behind it on the scanner to get it to show up...which was fun!



thanks for both, kojee!
they're awesome!
bts~!

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now go and read the new Tales From The Perhaps!
have a great weekend!
smell ya later~!
todd

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

This Just In...

okay...

i was, of course, still away on vacation last week when craig posted (thank you, brother~) the final installment of rich woodall and jason copland's awesome SAINTS And SINNERS over on our TALES From The PERHAPS page! i wasn't here to praise them on the amazing job they did on the story and to thank them for launching this new feature in style! what a fantastic premiere of, what is shaping up to be, a very different, very unique new series! fantastic job, you guys! thanks so much!




for those of you who may not have ventured over to our TALES section yet--and even for those of you who have--SAINTS and SINNERS has now been re-posted in order, top to bottom, for your reading convenience.



be here this friday for the debut of our all new TALE From The PERHAPS--SCOTT WEINSTEIN'S "We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming..." brought to you by Scott Weinstein and a Cavalcade of your Favorite 'Haps Artists!
It's gonna be FUN! Don't Miss it!

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and, speaking of rich, he and i are always tipping one another to the weird and wild things we find on the internet and he just wowed me with a link to this freaky item over on the huffington post--

Hydrothermal Worm Viewed Under An Electron Microscope (PHOTO)
The Huffington Post Dean Praetorius
First Posted: 7/18/11 05:24 PM ET





This is not photoshop, no clever graphics, no movie scene... it's a hydrothermal worm.
And it's a real creature.
It's just really, really small. So small in fact, that this image comes from an electron microscope.
Taken using an FEI Quanta SEM, this image is amazingly zoomed in 525 times. The real width of the field in the image is 568μm, or 568/1000 of a millimeter. It's far larger than an atom, but still among the smallest living things.
The worm, as scary as it looks, is something most people will never actually get to see (or have to worry about, for that matter). Hydrothermal worms are deep sea creatures, almost as small as bacterium, and are largely found near hydrothermal vents in the ocean.
This shot was captured by Philippe Crassous and submitted to FEI's gallery. Other amazing shots taken using FEI's microscopes can be seen here.
Last month, scientists reported they had discovered the first multicellular life in the deep subsurface biosphere, or rather, "worms from hell." But perhaps the title is more fitting for this hydrothermal worm.

The full image, courtesy of FEI and Philippe Crassous

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and here are a couple of items i found over on monday morning randomness at ebaumsworld.com












that's it for today!
smell ya later!
todd

Friday, July 08, 2011

revisiting the haps...part 2

okay--

as i am about to embark on a week's long vacation to north carolina's outer banks with my brother, niece, and nephew for, what is sure to be, a wonderful family reunion with my aunt and uncle and large extended family, i am posting some more of craig's fantastic perhapanauts art from over the years, just because, even though i'm the co-creator of these crazy cryptids, i'm also a huge fanboy when it comes to craig's art!

last week, in with several other cool pieces i posted, i slipped in one of the elusive and mysterious covers craig did for our "lost covers" portfolio. truth is, i loved ALL of those plates and so thought i'd re-post the other four here so that you can see how craig made even stories that were just a little tease on the letters pages come to life...


foreshadowing a story we eventually DID get to tell (in perhapanauts:triangle no.3)--well, sort of, this cover not only features big on his first expedition to find the loch ness monster, but also gave me a gift of going all retro on the design/layout! i dig all over those marvel and dc covers from the early seventies that ran a vertical roll call along the left margin and the dream of having a haps cover from that era still makes me smile ear to ear--!




this one, of course, features one of our men in black--who are nothing like will smith or tommy lee jones. i loved the cover once it was done, but felt that the logo and copy really took away from the starkness of this powerful piece. here it is in it's original 'clean' form...





this too was a cool piece craig did to shut me up. at the time i was groovin' all over the style of flash and green lantern artist, daniel acuna, i dug the tone of it all and the sculpting that relied more on color and less on lines. craig said, "oh, yeah. you just do this and this and this and..."
and i was stunned.
i posted one of the earlier alternate color versions (the one i wanted to go with) so you could see another take on it.



and this one--easily one of my all time favorite perhapanauts pieces--i also feel i had a hand in, conceptually speaking. years ago, i started writing a very long-winded, rambling, never-ending children's story called the adventures of punkinhead wheeler. i dreamed of one day publishing it with illustrations of my own. one of the pieces that i actually did and was--surprise!!--proud of featured the characters being hung like a string of paper dolls by a gigantic version of the villain. when we were discussing this lost cover, i suggested the image to craig and he went and made magic out of it.
i love it!



so that's it for this installment of let's look back.
i'll try to post a little something from cape hatteras next week,
but mostly look forward to the startling conclusion to rich woodall and jason copland's SAINTS and SINNERS on Tales from the Perhaps next friday!!
smell ya later!~
todd

Friday, July 01, 2011

revisiting the past...

okay...

the big thing you need to know is that the latest installment of rich woodall and jason copland's SAINTS and SINNERS is up over at "Tales from the Perhaps"! click on the link above and get into this spellbinding story~!

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revisting the past--part 1

i was looking through some files here on the computer the other day and somehow realized that it has been nearly ten years that craig and i first started working on this crazy, cool project featuring these colorful, creepy, cryptid characters that, we had hoped at the time, would find a publisher, a voice, and, most importantly, an audience!
well, we seem to have done all that and, though there have been many bumps in the road along the way, craig and i couldn't be happier--or more grateful--to everyone who's supported us and given our gang a chance.

and because i think craig is one of the most awesome--and one of the most underrated--artists working in comics today, i thought i'd tromp out some of the gorgeous pieces that craig has produced to help the haps along on their incredible journey...


first, to get things started, we went all ashcan and published this charming little intro--the perhapanauts dossier: CLASSIFIED!
i always dug the stark simplicity of this cover and how perfect it was for this somewhat crude format...




it's hard to do scary in a comic book. because a comic book image is static and fixed, you don't have the advantage of, say, a movie, where something can jump right at the camera or right out at you. as a writer the best that you can hope for is to pace your story so that a really unsettling image awaits you after a page turn.
oh, and a really good artist who can pull it off.
i was always pushing for scary and craig delivered in spades with this chilling shot--the first appearance of the demonic aswang! i remember feeling the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when he first sent it over...and then rico colored it in a way that jacked the scary up about 8 points! yeah, man--that's what i'm talking about!




one of my most favorite covers from our dark horse days, perhapanauts:second chances no.4.
dunno why--i just dig it.





this cover was one of several "lost" covers that craig did for a portfolio we put together a few years back. these five covers were based on the letters pages that i had confabulated for the first handful of haps issues from dark horse.
this one depicts the gang confronting the infamous flatwoods creature originally seen on september 12, 1952 in the town of flatwoods, west virginia, by a local woman and a gaggle of neighborhood kids. don't believe me? go google it, monkeys!


look for more stuff from the haps already storied career next week~!
til then, have a great weekend and a great fourth of july!
smell ya later~!
todd