I wanted to take a moment to mention a wonderful podcast that I listen to every week, hosted by the students of the sequential arts department at the Savanah College of Art and Design. The podcast is called SEQALAB and it is hosted by Professor Jeremy Mullins and his sequential arts students. It is the audible treat of my week.

I had the honor of being asked to come out to SCAD last year with my buddy Dave Kellett to give a talk to the students about Webcomics and see the campus. It was my favorite trip of 2008 and I am looking forward to returning there soon. Since then I’ve gotten to know some of the students that I only met briefly while on campus, both through the podcast and their journal comics. I must admit that I am living vicariously through them as they are getting to experience something I longed for at their age: teachers who understood that cartooning was real art.

Understand that when I was in high-school, my art teacher hated me drawing comics. She reluctantly allowed me to enter a comic book into the Senior art show and despite the fact that it won the award for best of show, she still never really came around on comics until after I graduated. In college I studied advertising art and our professors threatened to fail us if we used computers, insisting that commercial design would always been drawn by hand. So to walk into SCAD and see these kids studying Sequential Art as a major. To see classrooms full of Wacom Cintiq drawing tablets attached to top of the line macs, I was blown away. I was astonished. And I was bitterly jealous.

Cartooning is my thing, and so SCAD is an institution I can get behind. Their sequential department is something I can champion and I’m happy to do so. I’m pleased to announce that your subscriptions to the PvP fan-club over the last couple of months have raised just around $700 that I’ll be donating to the Mike Wieringo Scholarship fund to benefit a SCAD student.

If you follow our shop-talk at Webcomics.com, if you enjoyed our book How To Make Webcomics, then you owe it to yourself to check out the SEQALAB podcast. And now is a great time to start listening because they just interviewed me and that show should be posted some time next week.

Power to the pod!

Links of interest:
SEQALAB homepage
SCAD homepage
Kevin Burkhalter’s journal comic
Lunarboyland, the work of Jarrett Williams
Pranas T. Naujokaitis’ journal comic
Brett Muller’s The Daily Oddesy

My twitter feed already knows this, but I thought I would make it official on the site: Toonhound Studios, LLC will continue to use Basset Hounds as our official spokes-dogs despite the loss of our beloved Kirby. We just couldn’t take the sad silence of an empty house and we have adopted not one, but TWO new basset pups.

We all miss Kirby and know we can never replace our boy, but the house was just too quiet and empty for me. Working from home again was getting sadder and sadder without some clicky-clacks of basset nails hitting hardwood floors. I guess I moped around long enough to convince Angela to seriously consider another dog.

We adopted from the North Texas Basset Rescue rather than go to a breeder. A momma basset had been dropped off to the rescue a day before giving birth and they needed to find the pups a good home. We adopted two: Butler and Bella.

Of course, I’ll keep you updated on their status. I’m sure that Butler and Bella will become as much a part of the PvP site as Scratch and Kirby.

For more pics visit my Flickr page.

And yes, I’ve already posted a video