Good Morning World!!! This is it – the final piece of the four part mini. I would recommend reading them from start to finish as a set – they were written that way.

In other news – this week has been insane with school starting tomorrow I am feeling the pressure. I did spend the day yesterday working on centering my being through the act of sewing patches onto the ugly love seat we have (in hopes of beautifying) it was fun and I am starting to get a rhythm for sewing. This week I will be hurriedly working on finishing the next issue of Hipster Picnic which I have about a quarter of inked. I believe it is the best strip yet because it hearkens in the format that will be norm for Hipster Picnic for the foreseeable future. (And it only took me 7 strips to get there!)

What else, what else? Hmmmmm… I suppose there is news happening – something about a Mosque near ground zero that has everyone in a twist. Nah – thats not fun to talk about.  There was a funny story about an ebonics translator position the FBI is hiring for…

NO the coolest thing I did all week was watch Jack’s Big Music Show it was ridiculous and made me want to skip school cause I have a stomach ache and watch kid’s shows all day.

There really isn’t much else. I might be starting to go to Aikido again. I would really like to.

Enough about me. See you next weekend!

~HeadComic

Another week has passed! I am busy to work on the strip I will be releasing in two weeks. Pencils are nearly done and the issue will feature a local eatery that has been become quite the hotspot in SD right now. (I ate there first.) I’ve been listening to a ton of This American Life. The entire backlog of episodes is online and free to listen to! So flippin cool. This week’s newest episode entitled “Superpowers” was an amazing listen, very fitting for me to mention because it is all about superheroes, but also features some super interesting stories. I also want to promote the “This American Life” Iphone App – yes it does cost 2.99, but hey they are giving their amazing program away for free, why not support them?

Speaking of iphone I am getting an Evo from sprint this week. I have already ordered it. It feels good to be gangster (especially because Sprint gave me a 20% discount cause I’m a teacher!) Will report on whether the switch was worth it later.

I have been fantasizing the question being screamed at me: “what the heck is this comic about?” by my adoring future fanbase.

“is it about Superheroes?”

“is it about Zombies?”

“is it a Buddy Comedy?”

“is it a Wierd Sitcom?”

“is it about Ironic Hipster Mockery?”

I am going to go with all of the above. And most importantly influenced by this. And this. I am trying as I may to develop something that remotely amuses me and gets me producing. I am playing in the sand and making something able to be printed at the end (if I so feel like printing it).

Have a rock n’roll week. I start teaching actuall teenagers for my third year starting a week from Monday. Yay! (But seriouly, I am looking forward to another year.)

Peace. ~HeadComic

Well another week has gone by. I can’t believe that it has already been five whole weeks since I began this project. The evolution has been amazing and I know somewhat about the direction this is going to be heading in as I start to produce regular strips each week.

So this week was fun. I got back from Boston on Thursday (my birthday). My Lady-friend and I had to stay in beantown an extra night when our plane broke. (bad American Airlines, bad!) It was pretty awesome to be able to stay with an old friend, Chris O’keeffe, while in town.

Last night was fun, I partook in a Comic creation fest at local 24 hour Hipster Coffee Bar – Lestat’s. It was fun. Maybe I will post pictures at some point.

I need to get this website working nicer. I am on my way.

Till next week.

~HeadComic

SOooooooooooooooooo. I did just complete a week of comics camp at the Center for White River Junction in Vermont, so the improvement on this week’s installment ought to be palpable.

Now I know this mini-comic above more than completely interrupts the flow from the first two strips to here – but I am fairly confident that this mini-comic will be a vast improvement in color, composition, and flow. The mini comic was critiqued by the the talented minds of Jason Lutes, Alec Longstreth, Steve Bissette, and Robyn Chapman. It was a wonderful experience and informed me quite a bit about how I will be making moves in the future as a comic artist.

The following 4 page mini is completed – it needs to be colored is all. I will be releasing a page a week for another 3 weeks and I hope to use the extra time to develop a 24 page script for Hipster Picnic. (FIngers crossed!)

Let me know what you think!

~HeadComic

Page 2 is done! This is definitely already a hard process, rewarding though. Creating a page a week is challenging.

Went to Comic-Con with the students today. We started the process of figuring out how we were going to display and setup our booth for The Graphic Novel Project. Saw some awesome artists and talked to some amazing people. I went immediately to buy the new Bob the Angry Flower Book “Rothgar” by Stevn Notley. As always it was a pleasure to talk to him.

I was also pleased to stumble across Jim Calafiore. His work on Marvel’s “Exiles” was nothing short of stellar. I remember loving the way that he captured the campy giant “Rob Liefeld” era muscle look, while actually achieving something spectacular – the comic was as readable as “Preacher” or “Y-The Last Man“. Granted Calafiore did mention that it had a lot to do with good writing, but tell anybody who has tried to draw something by Chris Claremont in the last ten years that. (I am convinced that Claremont was put on Exiles to get it purposefully canceled – but I might be angering the comic gods by saying that!)

We also were able to see a panel on Comics and Digital Media. Jeff Smith was there with representatives from PSP, Apple, Macworld Magazine, and IDW who were all talking about the evolution of comics into a digital media. The panel started as a promo for these companies launching their own digital comic media campaigns. When it came time for audience interaction the panel shifted to very interesting questions regarding Comics competing with pirated comics (like the format “.cbr” popularized for downloading  and reading comics off the grid.) It posed some interested questions about how comics would adapt to lessening their resource consumption for print and also the idea of working as an industry to develop a file type like “.cbr” that would be universally recognized. Something in the way of how “.mp3” became a norm in the way of music at the end of the 90′s. The company people seemed to have little to say on the issue, of course, though Smith did talk about how he, as a creator, was ok with embracing changes because he just wants his stories to be accessible to more people.

I would posit that, as we all know, piracy is bad – but it was piracy that forced the big music companies to change and rework their ways. (i.e. the evolution of Napster to the advent of Itunes.) My question is – are the comic companies going to wait to be challenged by the ever increased piracy to their in-comic-shop-sales to start to look to their future in digital media? I am jumping on board now with the webcomics game because it is easy to do. But I am still wary of ever presenting final story-lines digitally because of the whole computer glare issue. I was actually surprised that no one even talked about the possibility of comics moving to e-ink formats or how far off that is as a possibility.

More to come next week as I head off to the great Northeast to attend the summer retreat at the Center for Cartoon Studies!

See you then!

~HeadComic

Hipster Picnic by Patrick Yurick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.head-comics.com.

So this is where I begin.

The mission: One comic a week for one year.

Some might ask – why? To those askers I answer, because.  After years of talking about how much I love comics, reading comics, going and getting a design degree because I thought it would be fun to learn about how to print comics, reading thousands of comics, creating and instructing a very successful after school comics program called the Graphic Novel Project (gnp.hightechhigh.org) – well after all of that I feel it is time to start doing something.

This past Monday I got up in the morning and started to draw because I thought to myself “it is time”, two days later I have this site, which is running on WordPress (www.wordpress.org) and the  ComicPress theme (www.comicpress.org). I expect the looks of this site to change drastically over the course of the next year as this timy little thumbnail business is not what I want at all. I have to learn more about CSS and editing wordpress templates. Luckily the guys who created ComicPress seem to have an extensive forum of people who seem to be able to help, and over the course of this year I will be working with them to understand how to edit and modify my webcomic space to be exactly how I want it.

So I proudly debut Head-Comics.com Presents, which will bring you amazingly hip and funny stories about anything I can think of. We start with “Hipster Picnic” – who knows where this will go? I know that next Sunday by 12am you dear readers will find out…