treebeerdstuff

Man, it’s been busy! Trying to finish commissions, get a couple things in by deadlines and my ever continuing battle to get caught up on The Cabinet.
As far as my health, everything seems to be fine. I still find I get tired a little easier than I use to, but that’s getting better as well. So that’s something!
This post is for a couple of reasons, so I’ll just get to it…

As a lot of you might be aware, my wife, Mandy, had some gal bladder issues a little over a year ago that put her in the hospital. What should have been a simple issue to deal with, loads of people have the procedure to remove the gal bladder every year, turned into a large headache peppered with bills and her not having the surgery to remove her gal bladder.
There is a slight complication in the procedure for her because she has a cyst on her pancreas. A cyst that’s just in a awkward spot when dealing with the gal bladder is what they said. Then, of course there is the other issues one thinks about when finding out about a cyst on a pancreas.

It became fairly apparent that the reason no one was really doing anything for my wife came down to one simple factor… we didn’t have insurance and weren’t wealthy. I had just lost my day job when this happened as well.

So, now that there was a little recap, let’s jump ahead to now. Again, as some of you already know (bear with me, I know this “I was in the hospital” thing is getting old) I ended up in the hospital for about a month in December. I was released in January and spent the next month resting and trying to get back to normal. During this (full, including hospital) time our friend J was here with us from Seattle. He flew back the beginning of February.
The week he was suppose to leave, Mandy ended up in the hospital again for a couple of days because of her gal bladder issues. Lot’s of things happened, tests, confusion and an almost rehash of the year prior. She wasn’t able to go with to take J to the airport and in fact ended up going to the hospital AGAIN that day.

I’m not even going to talk about our medical bills at this point.

I realize I’m getting a little long winded here, I’ll get to the point. We had to do an epic song and dance, I’m talking original Footloose if they danced with machetes in their mouths and shot at each other, but we finally got a surgeon to get things taken care of.

Again, I’m not even going to talk about medical bills at this point.

So tomorrow is the day. Tomorrow my wife, my love… goes into have a pretty involved surgery that is expected to leave her in the hospital for 3 to 5 days and at home (out of work) for up to 6 weeks.
I worry a lot about pretty much everything, so obviously I’m a little nervous about tomorrow, but I am more relieved that she will finally be able to relax and get back to normal.

So, because of all of this, I am putting Alphabots to the side. I’m going to be pretty busy taking care of my wife and handling day to day things as well as a pretty hefty drawing workload. I do hope to maybe catch up on it down the road, but we’ll just have to see.

What does this mean for The Cabinet you might ask? Not much hopefully. I’ll still be able to work on it daily now. My goal by the end of this month is to have The Cabinet the only comic I’m working on with hopes of finishing up the art in the next couple months. I truly am sorry for the delay on the book as well as updates. Lot’s of unforseen things have happened, but I assure you Christian and I are working to get this out soon! Christian posted an update on the kickstarter recently that includes new art, you can view that HERE.

There is another project or two I’ve been working on that will get proper announcements soon. I’ve also finished up a illustrating a couple short stories for a couple different Grayhaven anthologies. One of which is available now and features the first bit of drawing I did once I got home from the hospital, you can get it at the GRAYHAVEN WEBSITE

To finish up, a drawing, because I hate doing these posts without some kind of art.
I have met or become internet friendly with a lot of comic creators over the last year or two. Some of which I work with, some of which are just good people with good work. One such person is Fabian Rangel Jr. Fabian and I have talked about working on something and hopefully that will happen one day! I am a fan of his stuff, Fabian is an excellent comic book writer!
The newest book from Fabian (artist Ryan Cody and letterer Ed Brisson) is “Doc Unknown”. A fantastic pulpy hero romp that brings to mind classic serials and Mignola-ish fun. I liked it so much, I did a drawing of it this past weekend….

So that’s that for now. Oh, I do have that facebook page, a lot of drawings and sketches get posted there that don’t make it on here.