I hope everybody had a nice Labour Day weekend. I know I did. Saturday I made my weekly visit to Zone 51, my local comic book store and picked up my comics. In the evening, I played a PS3 port of the classic X-Men arcade game with my friend, Frank. Good day.

Sunday, I finished working on my Animus Firefly posters. I put them up on Facebook yesterday and I’ll put them up in the Artwork section a little later. Those shrewd observers amongst you may be able to guess that this week’s theme for the mash-ups is Firefly. I made arrangements to have them printed up poster size from two different places. One that says it’ll take 5-10 business days (which would mean it might only be available on the Monday after Comic-Con) and the other said that it’ll ship in 24 hours and should arrive by the 13th (the day before I leave for Comic-Con). So in both cases, I’m cutting it pretty close and if I had waited any longer to finish, then I would have missed out. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that at least one of them arrives in time so I can bring it to Comic-Con and get it signed by Adam Baldwin (Jayne on Firefly).

After all that artimifying work, I was invited to my friend Fab’s for a campfire in his backyard with Fab, his girlfriend Lyne, and our friends Frank and Steve also in attendance. I had my can’t-call-it-nerf shotgun with me and I took shots at everyone throughout the evening. I was amused (and deep down, they were amused too). We got to see the fireworks that were held for La Classique weekend. It was a fun night indeed.

Today, I drew my two strips for the week and napped some. Not as fun as the previous two days, but a good day nonetheless.

Every weekend, I intend to work on my project that’s soon to start going up, but I never get around to it. This weekend my attention was directed towards my Firefly posters. Next weekend I’ll be working on mash-ups again since the following weekend I’ll be at Comic-Con and unable to work on anything. I don’t want to delay the project, but I don’t want to burn out on the project either, so it’ll start going up as intended, and if there are breaks in between, so be it. Maybe once it’s started up on the site, I’ll be more keen to work on it.

Have a good week everybody!

Wednesday, August 15th, was my friend Fab’s 40th birthday (I created Big Oonch last year for Fab’s birthday). His girlfriend orchestrated a surprise party for him yesterday. Now Fab is a pretty clever guy and hard to pull things over on, so we had to be sneaky. Sneaky involved holding a fake party for him the Sunday before. The fake party had to be just big enough to make him think it was all we had planned for him without being complicated. It worked as he never saw the real party coming. So Sunday I was one of (I’m told) 80 guests who came down to celebrate my friend’s birthday. He was very moved.

I was wearing my Animus Funnies cast t-shirt at the party and Fab and his girlfriend (whom I created Zoë for) mentioned the site to some of their friends and family pointing to “their” characters. I said that Todrick was my goofy side and Cyran was my insecure side. I’ve been thinking since then of the parts of me that I imbue into each character.

Even though he’s not the most-featured, I consider Cyran to be the central character in Animus Funnies. The heart, if you will. He loves tinkering even if he isn’t very good at it (a metaphor for me and this site perhaps?) and even his friends doubt his abilities (my friends are not cruel as Cyran’s sometimes are).

Todrick is exciteable and silly, as I find myself to be. He’s energetic as I’d like to be. He likes to have adventures even if they usually backfire on him. I’d like to be as brave as he is and not be afraid to fail.

Nektara is my voice of reason. Like me, she sometimes gets exasperated with the craziness that surrounds her. I try to be very careful that she never appears too mean when she’s being honest. I’ve sometimes given lines that I’d originally written for her to other characters for that reason.

Sass’ blind passion for Shinies represents my materialistic side. I collect stuff. A lot of stuff. I can get really excited when something new comes out that I find cool and have a “it must be mine” attitude, much like Sass does when she sees a new Shiny.

Red Rich is great fun to write because he’s charmingly full of himself. At least, I hope it comes off as charming. He clearly loves himself. I can be a little narcissistic myself as I love to share when I do or create something I’m proud of (like this site). Because I don’t think I’m nearly as charming as Red Rich, I always worry that people will get tired of me talking about my projects all the time.

Deema is warmth and sunshine. She just loves everybody. I wish I could be as open with my emotions as she is.

Barnaby is slow. Everybody feels slow sometimes, but nobody likes it when others call them slow. I know I don’t. I just don’t hit people when they do. 😉

What was the point of all this? I guess there isn’t really a point. Just looking at myself through the characters I created. How Red Rich of me!

Today was my first Monday working since the end of June. It passed by pretty painlessly. I expected to be dog tired since I tossed and turned all night last night. I *am* tired but not as much as I expected.

Some people on Facebook got an unexpected preview of this week’s mash-ups. I was chatting with one of my friends and I sent him a gif of the mash-up I’d just finished and he liked it so much he put it up on his page for his friends to see. It was Red Rich as Man-E Faces from Masters of the Universe, or as I called him, Many Masks. The Man pun doesn’t work in a world where man is extinct, and Red Rich has many masks. The math is simple. It’s one of those cute little coincidences that each time a mash-up preview has shown up on Facebook, it’s involved Red Rich (you can check Age of Animus’ Facebook page if you don’t believe me).

Speaking of the mash-ups, I’m going to be scaling back the number of pictures shown each week. The mash-ups are taking longer to draw overall as I’m getting a little fancier with my techniques and I just can’t keep the pace while working four (and eventually back to five) days a week. Not if I also want to create other content for the site and you know…do other things, like play video games and sleep.

Even though all nine mash-ups for the heroes of the Masters of the Universe theme are drawn, I’m going to put up half this week and the other half next week. This way I’ll have a little buffer for the mash-ups as well. A buffer never hurts, not to mention it allows me to keep the feature running longer. Eventually, I’m going to run out of themes I feel make for good mash-ups. The further away that date is, the better as far as I’m concerned.

Clever readers will deduce that if I just finished drawing the mash-ups for heroes of the Masters of the Universe , that the villains of the Masters of the Universe will follow. Both are full themes with all 9 cast members featured, so that means 4 weeks of He-Man and his friends and enemies. I’m thinking Firefly might follow, because I want to have mash-ups of that series done before this year’s Montreal Comic-Con so I can have Adam Baldwin sign them. In October I’ll be able to have Jewel Staite sign them as well. The goal being to have all nine Firefly cast members sign. I’m thinking Nathan Fillion and Gina Torres are going to be the toughest to get since to my knowledge, they don’t make many convention appearances, making it even less likely that they’ll be at a con that I’m attending.

Speaking of Comic-Con, that’s quickly coming up. I’ll be dressing up this year. Not as Todrick or Cyran or anything like that sadly, as mascot costumes are a huge pain to wear let alone make. I’ll hopefully be recognizable as Flint from GI Joe. That’s the plan for Saturday. On Friday and Sunday I’ll be rocking Age of Animus Tees. Be a member of the cool crowd and buy your own Age of Animus T-shirt to wear at Comic-Con. Just click on the Store tab and head over to the Age of Animus Cafe Press store.Woo! Shameless plug!

On that crass salespitching note, I declare this blog entry closed. See you next week.