Overcome procrastination:

I suppose procrastination is different for everyone, but for me, procrastination is more about performance anxiety than anything else. It has been crippling at times. I suppose that getting into comics in the 1980’s when women creators weren’t very welcome had a rather serious effect on my self-confidence, and no matter how many nice things are said about my work, there is always the little voice in the back of my head telling me to go work at McDonalds.

Every piece of blank paper is an enemy. Every deadline is terrifying. For someone who absolutely loved to draw and was winning awards for it from the age of five, performance anxiety is a learned behavior and like any learned behavior, it can be unlearned.

I went to great lengths to learn how to control the anxiety even going so far as to do one of those motivational fire-walk seminars where a stroll across a bed of hot coals was the graduation ceremony. All procrastination is linked to some kind of anxiety or discomfort. In other words, the pain of producing the work becomes greater and more real than the reward of doing the work. This can simply be knowing that you are working with a difficult creative team, or having a really tight deadline that makes the job unpleasant. Whatever, the trick is to learn how to make the pain of not doing the work more real than the pain of doing it.

I use a simple two-step process. First, I recreate the feelings and circumstances that enabled me to work at a time when work was pure pleasure. The best time for drawing and writing for me was when I was a kid in my room and I spent hours and hours working on my stories or drawing pictures simply for the fun of doing it. The work was not meant to be seen by anyone. It was just for me. I sat on my frilly canopy bed with a lapboard on my knees and worked for hours every single day and it was heaven. Whenever I hit a snag, I go right back there. I get away from the drawing board, I grab my lapboard and I go to my room. I put up the frilly pillows, put something silly into my DVD player, and get something to eat or drink that is bad for me. It takes me back to the time when I was a kid drawing for fun and it never fails to work for me. (more…)

Toon Books, the children’s book line created by Pulitzer Prize winning Art Spiegleman and Francois Mouly will release Little Mouse from Bone creator Jeff Smith.

TOON Books are the first high-quality comics designed for children ages four and up. Each book in the collection is just right for reading to the youngest child but perhaps more remarkable: this is the first collection ever designed to offer newly-emerging readers comics they can read themselves. Each TOON book has been vetted by educators to ensure that the language and the narratives will nurture young minds. Our books feature original stories and characters created by veteran children’s book authors, renowned cartoonists and new talents, all applying their extraordinary skills to fascinate young children with clearly told tales that will welcome them to the magic of reading.

From the press release at ICV2:

Little Mouse, which will street September 7th, tells the story of the title character’s simple pleasures in getting ready to go to the barn. He has to master all the intricacies of getting dressed, from snaps and buttons to Velcro and tail holes.

Dang. It’s creepy.

Made of Wrong…Filipino Batman movies.

This is obviously not an officially licensed work. Sometime between the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, several Batman features were filmed.

Here we have a bunch of Amazons menacing a young woman. Fear not, the Dynamic Duo will appear any moment!

Despite the fact that these young women are all scantily dressed, there’s not a lot to see. They have the figures of young boys. If you stacked them up, their combined breast measurement wouldn’t match Mamie Van Doren’s.

If these were officially licensed, the foreign rights department at DC should have been lined up and shot en masse.

Utterly, mind-bendingly bad Alyas Batman and Robin below! Gird your loins!

Wait! Where did that coconut come from?

Batman asks: “Would you like Bat-tea? Or Bat-coffee? Or Bat-milk? Bat-juice?”

And in this hideous, and yet oh-so-memorable clip, The Joker and The Penguin do a song and dance number in front of the Smith and Wesson Dollar Exchange.

Is there such a thing as a Smith and Wesson Dollar Exchange?

Hey, babe. He’s Mr. Joker!

The Penguin character’s name in Tagalog is, apparently, a reference to oral sex.

This is what happens when you do not jealously guard your intellectual property rights. The Penguin blows.