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Creative Spaces: The Oregonian talks to Portland creators about where they work.

Erika Moen and Periscope made it onto the front page of the O! section in The Sunday Oregonian.
Read the article at Oregon Live.
Photo by Beth Nakamura. Here it is annotated by Erika.

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Periscope Coup

One of us didn’t go to Emerald City and she went completely berserk in our absence: http://tinyurl.com/cqfeth. The report begins 3:48 PM Apr 3rd.

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Public Safety Training

Rich Ellis organized a Periscope Studios field trip to the Clackamas County Public Safety Training Center. That is, the sheriff’s gun range. It was research. For illustration purposes, y’ know. Nearly a dozen comic book artists with loaded weapons–and no one was killed! Paul Guinan took some snapshots and posted them on his website.

 

Susan Tardif and her little friend

Susan Tardif and her little friend

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Interning at Periscope.

We get a lot of inquiries about our internship program, so we’ve put the instructions for applying on their own page.

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Oh, Canada…you crazy northern pal.

David Hahn goes North On Sunday, Oct 5th, I was a guest at the Calgary Comic and Toy Expo in calgary, Canada. My host was show owner Stephen Fuller, and it was a great weekend. Upon landing in Calgary, I discovered that Air Canada had ‘lost’ one of my bags, but delivered it to me at the hotel around midnight. In the mean time, they gave me a complimentary overnight kit that had a razor, shaving cream, soap, toothbrush, comb, deodorant, and an extra large white cotton t-shirt (!), all in this neat little blue nylon bag that said “Air Canada” on it. AND they also gave me a voucher for up to $50 dollars to purchase ANYTHING I might need (except food and alcohol). I send them the receipts and they reimburse me for the expenses. So, basically, I can get $50 worth of free stuff.

Speaking of stuff, I was stuffed with sushi and booze the first night. The next day Stephen, I had the option to go to Banff, an outdoor…place that had mountains and trees, OR go to the world renowned Royal Tyrell Museum to see dinosaur fossils and complete skeletons of T. Rex, Albertasaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and more. Needless to say, I chose the latter. I was shocked to learn that when my pal Jeff Parker was here last year as a guest, he chose to go to Banff. I don’t get you sometimes, Jeff. The museum was better than Disneyland and the gift shop was championship. I bought many dinosaur models and toys for my collection. Thanks, Air Canada!

Later that day we went to the airport to pickup Young Justice artist Todd Nauck. We were in the mood for beef, so Stephen took us out to dinner at a place called Jack Astors, whose logo is exactly what you would think, a donkey. Our chesty waitress, Jocelyn, was friendly, but seem harried, worried and distracted. Every time food or drinks were brought to our table, it was by a different waitress, so we had about 5 people who served us. The food was good though, and the corn on the cob was especially tasty.

The following morning was the show and it was quite steady and busy for a small show. I spent most of the day doing sketches and sold many pages of original Fantastic Four art and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane art. People are so polite in Canada, though, throughout the trip, there seemed to be an inordinate number of screaming (and I mean SCREAMING) kids almost everywhere we went. Screaming like these kids were being stabbed with knives or something. The show also featured a costume contest in which first place was a beautiful pencilled pin up of Spider-Man by Todd Nauck, and second place was $100. I did some shopping when it slowed down a bit and bolstered my infantilism by buying some sweet Alien and Predator toys.

After the show, Stephen took Cary Nord, Cary’s girlfriend Kate, Todd, and I to a place called The Big T’s Country BBQ. There, we had BBQ meat, followed by more BBQ meat, a side of meat and beans, cornbread, meat, BBQ sauce with a serving of meat under it, beer, and some meat to round it all off. It was great. All this red meat would make Jeff Parker cry and force Matthew Clark to go right to the airport leave the province.

I am now in my hotel room trying to figure out how to pack my bags with all this extra stuff.

The end.

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First Thursday comics domination (and some damnation)!

As part of Portland’s monthly First Thursday festivities, Matthew Clark has a show opening tonight at Vorpal Space entitled “Sketches from Hell.” Last month Jim Valentino had a show at Sequential Art Gallery and he posted a virtual tour of it. The First Thursday before that, Paul Guinan had a one-man exhibit called “Multimedia Man.” Periscopians and their pals continue to dominate the local gallery scene.  Bow to us!

Periscopians

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We love a man in a uniform.

You know one day, you look out the window and there’s guys in hazmat suits doing god knows what.

The next day, you look out and it’s Santarchy.

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So I guess you’re new here.

I’ve sent out several dozen copies of this email today:

When our studio changed its name from Mercury to Periscope, I thought we were sort of stuck with our old blog URL. Today though, I was happy to stumble upon a button in the blogspot dashboard that enables you to move your content to a new blogspot URL, and I used it. Bang! All of our content was now available at http://periscopestudio.blogspot.com. Boy, was that easy, and since it didn’t offer up any sort of warning, so I assumed that the mercurystudio.bl-gsp-t.c-m address would keep the old content.

Um… no. Within minutes a spammer took possession of our old URL and pasted viagra and porn ads into a google cache of our site’s template. I’ve written blogspot’s support, but their help forum is full of people complaining about never getting any reply from blogspot support. I’m not expecting much help there. In the meantime, we’re sending out emails to you, our friends in comics, asking you to change your
Mercury Studio blogroll links to this:
http://periscopestudio.blogspot.com

And if you’re really kind, you could spread the word via your own blog. Thanks!

(Someday we’ll have enough time to put an embedded blog into our “real” site, but we’re all too busy with clients right now to do any development on that, which for a bunch of freelancers is hardly something to complain about…)

So that’s that. If you’re new here and don’t know who’s writing this, I’m Steve Lieber. I illustrate comics, draw storyboards and all sorts of commercial art, and maintain the blog for the twenty or so cartoonists here at Periscope studio. For background, Publisher’s weekly just ran a nice story about us. And if you’re here in Portland, Oregon a lot of us will be guests at the Stumptown Comics Fest at the end of the month.

That’s enough of that. Here’s a picture of Modok by Colleen Coover:

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party and the glove


We had our housewarming for the new digs on Sunday. Here’s a flickr photoset.


And these are some photos Paul Guinan shot.
Viva Zapander!


And here’s an interview with Periscope’s own Aaron McConnell.

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This week, the town is ours.

I love that photo. Anyhow, Periscope has the feature illustrations in both of this week’s free papers. Colleen Coover’s done all the art for the Portland Mercury’s Pride Week supplement. and Rich Ellis has the cover and nearly a dozen illustrations in the latest Willamette Week.

The Mercury also announced that they’re changing their name to the Portland Periscope.

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