The Machines Mocked Me at the Saturns

May 10th was the 33rd Annual Saturn Awards. For those of you only familiar with "televised" awards shows, like the Oscars,the Grammies, the Emmys, the Golden freakin Globes, and the Oh-my-god-could-we-please-have-one-more-award-show People's Choice- The Saturns are for geeks. The good kind. Not the chicken-head biting kind. The kind of geeks who bring you all those wonderful sci-fi, fantasy and horror films and shows. Watch Heroes? It's a geek show. It's a live action comic book.....but don't worry, I won't tell anyone you watch it. So yeah, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror pays tribute to some really great genre work every year, and throw a pretty good shindig. And I got to go! Monster House was nominated for best animated feature (we didn't win, Cars did. Go figure.), and through Gil Kenan, my most-of-the-time director, I scored tickets. "Totally rad" thanks to Gil and Rebecca for the hook up.
This was my first award show. Nothing too big and fancy, but there were plenty of Hollywood faces for me to point out to friends. I even got to geek out a bit myself at some Battlestar Galactica cast. I tell you, every bit of integrity Edward James Olmos brings to Adama on screen is 100% him. He's too cool. And Katee Sackhoff is just plain adorable. So I got a free meal and even more free drinks and enjoyed watching Hollywood give itself another little pat on the back. Of course I was applauding with all the rest when friends won. A big fat "congrats" to Guillermo del Toro and Mike Dougherty.
Oh yeah, the picture...well a few more drinks and one gigantic bag of geek swag later, my friend Kyle and I made our way to the after-party, which was being held at a bar in the deserted Universal Citywalk. Which, in and of itself, was kind of creepy. If the mall in Dawn of the Dead was lit like Vegas. The After Party was pretty much more free beer, another bag of geektastic swag (where do they get this crap?) and sitting around, because I knew all of five or six people there and mingling was silly. Kyle must have snapped this with his phone while I was busy chickening out of talking to James Gunn and trying to text Mike Dougherty.
Yeah chickening out. Not that big of a deal, but James Gunn IS a director of monster movies (he directed Slither) and I happen to draw pictures for directors of movies (preferably those with monsters). But he looked to be having a good time chumming it up with Nathan Fillion, which was pretty shiny, and I hadn't had enough to drink to be sociable with strangers.
As for texting Mike. I hate texting, but it's the best way for me to get him. In the time it takes me to text "hey what are you doing?", I could have just called whoever and been done with it. What's the damn point of the text message?
Anyway. That was the Saturns. If you ever get a chance, go. You could meet some cool people. I did. Hell, the guy sitting next to me at dinner was sort-of working there, and a huge genre fan, and when I told him I worked on Hellboy his eyes grew wide and he excitedly asked, "Wait....you're not the guy? The guy who showed Guillermo his book and got a job?" Yup. That was little ol' me. The guy. I didn't know I had that kind of folk hero status amongst my fan-boy geek brethren. Boosted my ego for bit. Or maybe that was the beer.
Here's a little bit of news to throw out there. This is the cover to a small-format Hellboy comic that'll be shipped out June 12th with a couple hundred thousand copies of the Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron DVD. Neat, huh? By the way, Theatre of the Dead was the story I provided the art for....feels like a millenia ago. Why it was chosen as the title for this collection? Beats me. So head on over here to check out the DVD and if you want to see some black and white versions of my pages from the comic, go here.
Now this Robot Operator must go kill things in God of War 2.

watching: Ultraman Mebius & the Ultraman Brothers!
listening to: Magnolia Electric Co.