With a beautiful Labor Day weekend finishing up in New York City, it’s time to take a look back at the summer, don’t you think?
June kicked off with me tabling at my first comics/book convention at the Filipino-American Comics and Book Festival. It saw the debut of not one, not two, but three print collections of my work. For those keeping score, those titles are:
- Four Worlds: An Illustrated Collection. A collection of my 2017 Inktober project “Four Worlds.” The story follows a hobby artist (yours truly) who finds himself traveling across the fantasy worlds he created in his youth. It was the most ambitious of my projects to date, with each roughly 6” x 6” drawing taking about three to four hours to complete.
- Valentine’s Day. The complete collection of the webcomic featured here on glenisip.com from 2019 to 2020. It tells the story of four knights who defect from their kingdom, only to find a deadly final opponent near the end of their journey.
- Kelly Ranger. An updated version of my Inktober 2021 project. It stars Kelly, a middle-schooler who wants to become a crime-fighting superhero, but her wish gets a little twisted in the process. This book features redrawn images for about half of the book, so while you can still read a similar version of the story on Instagram, you’ll only see the new artwork and text in the print edition!
For those of you who couldn’t pick up copies at the show, I’m happy to announce that you’ll soon be able to purchase each of them online through an upcoming shop. Expect more on that later in the month.
July and August saw me completing my first non-comics artwork in a while, which I’m calling “Lady in the Forest.” This was inspired by a vacation to the woods I took in June, though the execution took far longer than I expected. For the time being I will not be revealing the full artwork, the reasons for which I’m hoping to detail in a future blog entry on a subject that I’ve been meaning to address for a while. In the meanwhile, enjoy a few details:
In late August, Anime NYC 2025 saw me tabling again, this time at the Denpa booth. We debuted new books (March Comes In Like a Lion, vol. 4, as well as the first Under Ninja box set); were nominated for American Manga Awards (Short Game and They Were 11!, both in the running for “Best New Edition of a Classic Manga”); and hosted our mangaka Kengo Hanazawa (Under Ninja) for an autograph session at the booth. I even managed to hold my own again at the Denpa panel on Saturday night. I’m grateful to all the fans who showed up to the booth and expressed their support, and especially grateful to Hanazawa-sensei who roughed out a busy four days of panels, signings, and awards.
Here are a few shots of the Under Ninja box I designed to house the first 6 volumes of Hanazawa’s action comedy thriller:
So, what’s next on the horizon? Well, now that I’ve finally gotten everything else in order, I’m continuing on to the production phase of my next story, an as-yet-untitled medical drama set in the same world as Valentine’s Day. I’m also working on resetting a public domain book, offering a fresh layout for an older text. I hope to unveil that before the end of the year.
That wraps it up for now; with any luck there will be more news in the coming months!
