And then I...

I'm gonna try and cover what happened over the last few days. It's gonna be a bit of a list of stuff, but I'm gonna try and cover all the highlights.

MONDAY

So we woke up today to find that after five days of beautiful sunshine, it was raining its ass off. We decided that the zoo would be a bad idea and decided to make our way to LA. We headed to the station (packed with incredibly beautiful women) and hopped the 2 hour train ride to LA. Via a clueless taxi driver we eventually found our way to the Venice Beach House, a beautiful ivy covered old building 20m from the beach. Yes. 20m. What's the catch? Well... we booked for August not July. Anyway, the owner Brian went above and beyond the call of duty to find us an alternative hotel for tomorrow night and accomodated us last minute for that night.

We decided to chill out and walk along the beach. I'm gonna upload 4 million photos of the sunset and the beach in the next few days. After about 2 hours of walking we found our way to the Santa Monica pier (with only one cute goth chick for eye candy, crazy monkey dudes on roman rings, massive black dudes doing pushups, amateur soccer games, inline hockey and countless volleyball matches.) Grabbing burger and onion strings underneath the ferris wheel of a carnival on the beach we looked out on the ocean and just chiled the hell out. We dragged our asses back and crashed out.

TUESDAY

We woke up for breakfast and Sandra the awesomely cool chick who manned the desk drove us to the car rental place where we hired a Ford Taurus. Driving on the right side of the road freaked me out, but apart from what JAn calls, "DRIFT!" where I meander to the right side of the lane (in an attempt to get the driver's seat on the right side of the lane) I found it a lot easier than I expected. We drove to Beverly Hills and wandered around Rodeo Drive and all those places. We continued our addiction to the coffee bean and enjoyed the sun. The sun is actually beautiful here. It's 35 degrees and just beautiful, I wasn't even sweating. It's such a more temperate sun than in Australia.

We then headed to the Grove which is like Fox Studios meets an outdoor Chadstone to meet Roger, his lovely wife Yvette, Roger's mother and their two friends Michelle and Dean. Great Greek dinner and we said our goodbyes and went off to see Clerks 2, which is a worthy but not innovative sequel to the original. We dragged our asses back to the Jolly Roger Motel where I drew all night trying to fill our Shania's order. I pencilled a beautiful Wonder Woman for Renae (that I later totally ruined with watercolour).


WEDNESDAY

Highlight day cos we actually slept in. Every day we'd been running on 5-6 hours sleep, and wednesday we just crashed out. First up we headed back to the Grove for breakfast, Coffee Bean, some sunglasses for me and some presents for Jemma (JAn's uber girlfriend.) Then we headed to the Le Brae tar pits, which are a natural tar pits in the middle of LA (imagine that the museum is right next to a live paleontological excavation site complete with bubbbling tar pits. Inside the museum was fascinting, and I will post photos. Some of the photos may even have the cute 18 year old that was wandering around behind us. =)

Then over to Beverly Hills. People warned us that Beverly Hills was really sleazy, and I want you to imagine Richmond meets St. Kilda with the odd building that would do Collins St. justice. We wandered in and out of tattoo/metal parlours looking for gifts. The day was getting on and half the road was blocked cos Mann's Chinese theater was previewing Will Ferrell's "Talgeda Nights" which I was totally uninterested in. Somehow I convinced JAn to go to Hooters for dinner. We actually had a great meal and got served by the hottest chick in the place... A beautiful black girl by the name of Jelani (sorry, no photos) with the body of an Adam Hughes Wonder Woman. It was this and the great shredded pork that made it unnecessary to spend the rest of my night apologising to JAn.

After we left the Hooters, we were heading to the car when JAn had the great idea to stop and buy a mango off this lil old mexican lady. The mango was on a stick and she was cutting it into a flower. She would then cover it in lemon juice and then sprinkle salt and then chilli powder on it. It was absolutely incredible, and look forward to making the delicacy for people as summer hits.

Then we realised that we had to check in for the hotel! We rushed back to Venice beach (1.5 hours in the car - my back is killing me!) missing Ripley's Believe it or not, the Guiness Book of Records and Wax museum. We went for a walk along the beach and spent the night in, with me continuing to draw while we watched Stan Lee's "Lightspeed" (worse than terrible) and Blade: the series (not too bad).

THURSDAY

Spacedog meeting in Beverley Hills at 10am. We got so lost and got there at 10:30am. We then popped over to meet Renae Geerlings (Editor in Chief of Top Cow) and chatted to her for at least an hour or so. She showed us around the Top Cow offices, which are much more of a 70s office meets art studio and hella cool. She's awesome and was really gracious about all the bad art I dumped on her (apart from a cool pic of Sabertooth/Tyler I did, Wonder Woman and Grace (from the Innocents) were both pretty average.

We rushed back to Spacedog for a HUGE production meeting which went from 2pm til 530pm. It was a matter of going through deadlines, projects and assignments. ZER0: GENESIS issue 1 will be out by the February New York Con, and then showcase at San Diego next year. The TPB will be out by Sep.

From Spacedog we ducked back to the hotel, cleaned up and headed to Alex Zamm's house. Alex is the writer of ZER0: GENESIS whom we met at San Diego. To give you an idea of how cool and nice Alex is, within 10min of meeting him, he'd invited us to have dinner at his house, which we had arranged for tonight. Alex is the director of Inspector Gadget 2, a film he is immensely proud of (which he gave me a copy, which I can't wait to watch). His wife Denise is the costume designer for Die Hard 4, and their son, Dashell is one cool kid. Their house is one of the coolest houses I've ever seen. It looks over the house that was both Deckard's house from BLADERUNNER and the HOUSE FROM HAUNTED HILL. They have a curio cabinet which contains everything from Bob Hope's teeth, sharks in formaldehyde and their son's foreskin. Their coffee table is a showcase table of incredible jewellry made from human hair. Alex has a wall in his study with orginal art and dedications from Bill Watterson, Terry Gilliam, Joe Sinnott, Gary Larson, Matt Groening, Charles Schultz and a bunch of other huge names.

Dinner was incredible and we chatted to Alex til 1am about ZER0: GENESIS. He's got some incredibly inspiring ideas.

More on JAn and my thoughts about the dinner and its affect on us tomorrow...

If anyone wants to hear about anything in more detail, just post a comment.