Macro Monday Went Into The West, But Did Not Diminish

I HAVE RETURNED.

I have returned, in fact, from that place. Well, not just there — I bee-bopped around the Pacific Northwest with the family. Portland to the coast, then the coast to Seattle, with even a brief stop in the San Juans. It was lovely. The food is amazing. The sights range from “ooh” to “whoa” to “that’s so breathtaking I peed myself, for all the muscles in my body have gone slack in the revelation of the sublime.” I’ll pop some more photos at the bottom of this post, and also you can find the PNW photoset here — not it’s not robust yet, as I’m slowly processing and adding photos as I go.

It’s important to note that the photo at the fore of this post was taken with an iPhone X. Only tweaking I did was to the colors, using Lightroom. I took the DSLR, and also brought the new 100-400 lens, and only had that attached at the time of this shot — so I used the iPhone in the hopes I’d get a good image, and, well, there you go. Digital camera phones are increasingly bridging the gap between them and high-test photo equipment.

An example of one not taken with the iPhone, but rather, the DSLR:

Anyway, you get the idea.

Portland and Seattle are two very different, and very same, cities — they’re like family members. Portland is the scrappy younger sibling, an alternative artist, is really into weed and fancy sandwiches, doesn’t like to hold one job for any long period of time. Seattle is the older sibling, has a good job, interested in pop culture more than weird fringe shit, has mostly shed its free-spirited chaos and traded it for a little humility and grown-upedness, still dabbles in weed, because c’mon, way more techie, likes finer cuisine, etc., etc.

I really love the area.

Back now, in rangy, rabid Pennsyltucky.

Where it’s very humid. It was hot out in the PNW, maybe unseasonably so, but it was never really humid. Here it’s like walking through a sticky toffee.

What else is going on?

Hey, Darth Vader Annual #2 released, by yours truly, with sublime pencils by Leonard Kirk, inks by Scott Hanna and Walden Wong, Nolan Woodard on colors — they really made the issue sing, and I’m in awe of what they managed to do with my dumb words. You can find a review round-up here — I’m so glad people dug it. I know some didn’t dig my TFA adaptation as much, because that was really less of an adaptation and more of a translation — the job there wasn’t to tweak and add and find cool marginalia, but to take that film script and put it into comic book form.

So, it’s nice to see this is being well-received. Thanks, folks.

What’s weird is, for me, this is my only release left in 2018. (Well, there may be one other thing, but it’s secret and I can’t talk about it yet.) 2019 will be a big year — Vultures in January, Wanderers in July, plus some other stuff (like a seeecret comics project). But it’s weird for me to slow down, it’s feels… antithetical to how I normally do things? But that’s okay, too, as in the meantime I’ve got this brand new book to write, The Book of Accidents.

More as I know it.

(I’ll be announcing the winner to the Awkward Author Photo contest later today.)

Here, have some more photos.

BYEEEEEE.