Yes, I’ve been MIA for a while now. Here’s a little something I was working on when the blog blew up a few (6?) months back. The night I was going to publish it and that shout-out for Mike Turner was the night I realized my blog–along with my professional and clients sites–was hosed. That was a bad day to say the least, and like most shared hosting companies, DailyRazor was completely unapologetic about their incompetence.

Well, when that happened, I had to focus mostly on getting my business-related sites back up and then moved off of DailyRazor. Then things got busy, one month bled into another… and now it’s October!

I’m working on getting Ankhammentu moved onto a new hosting plan. Will it be more reliable? Who knows. I do know I’ll be doing my own database backups from now on. It will at least be a Linux server, so some of the strangeness that comes from running Wordpress on Windows will disappear.

Along with this move is going to come a redesign, and a refocus of this blog. Andrew and I have young kids and are running businesses, and there’s just no way we’re going to be able to put a comic together. I know, that stinks, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t make some cool stuff related to our comic dreams. I’ve got a few works in progress, and I bet he does too.

In addition, I’d like to up the ante on the vector tutorials around here. I have a lot of little-known Illustrator tricks up my sleeve to share, and I think there’s a small but growing community who’s interested in recreating pen-and-ink effects in AI. Those are my peeps, and I want to help you guys out.

The Poser stuff has been the biggest draw of this site, but I’ve been burned out on Poser for a long time now, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to feel it again. Poser is an expensive and time-consuming hobby, and two things I don’t have are money and time!

SO… this was a long way of saying sorry I’ve been gone! Hopefully things will be changing around here pronto. DON’T HOST WITH DAILY RAZOR.

JW Out!

In case you didn’t notice, my webhost did a major fubar on my site last night, and they lost–quite literally–all of my MySQL databases, for this and all my other sites.

Luckily I didn’t post too much so far this year, but it still sucks. I’ll be restoring things gradually, trying to place them at approximately the right dates. I’m most disappointed about the comments that are gone. There’s no way I can bring them back.

I might do an open call for commission work soon to help make some money to move this blog into a more healthy environment. Stay tuned or drop a comment if you’re interested.

I heard late last night that Mike Turner passed away shortly after 10PM this past Friday night. He had been battling cancer for several years, but it really isn’t something that you usually thought about when you picked up a Mike Turner cover. Usually you just said “Damn, that’s cool!” And then you opened it up, and the interior was nowhere near as cool

Some people don’t like his art, but the fact is that he was a great inspiration to lots of people, including me. I will never be able to draw in the same league as him, but just to know that there are people like that who can bring a fresh style and totally throw the comics industry for a loop, and then break off and create their own micro-sized comic publishing businesses (and succeed!) makes me feel good.

Kind of sad to know that there will never be another Mike Turner book or cover. But his fans will never forget him.

~JW