And to my great honor, I’ve been asked to be a guest at FenCon IX! FenCon is a fan-operated Science Fiction and Fantasy Literary and Filk Convention. I know, what is a guy who worked on The Wannabe Pirates doing at a literary convention? Well, for starters, there will be a screening of “Stalled Trek: Amutt Time” in their video room! About the closest I’ll come to having a big movie premiere.

If you get the chance to come to either or both, stop by my table and say hello!

Here’s something we hope you like! Some of you may remember that last year I took several scenes from the “The Curse of Greyhawk Island” story and animated them with the vocal/audio/musical interpretations of reader Scott Maitland! Well, it’s finally finished and viewable. I originally intended to make a book trailer or commercial to hawk the graphic novel, but it soon grew into just having fun bringing a bunch of the scenes to life! Hear you go, around four minutes of what an animated The Wannabe Pirates story would look like!

I’m not sure when I will make them available online, except that it will likely be after the convention on May 19-20.

Once the DVD is finished, I’m going to work to finish up all of the episodes for the first web series and get those up.

I’m not sure when The Wannabe Pirates will return. I will say, that my feeling is that I should come back to it when I can actually give it the attention it needs, rather than coming back for a strip or two here and there.

I need your help, though! I need to raise the funds to actually replicate the DVDs and print covers, so I’ve started a Kickstarter campaign!

Please spread the word! Share it on Facebook, tweet about it, blog about it, anything you can do to help get the word out!

Contributing is also a way to get a copy of the DVD if you’re not going to be able to come to the Dallas ComicCon in May!

Thanks everyone and please help get the word out!

Anyway, although I’m not officially launching the show until April, here’s the pilot episode!

Unfortunately, The Wannabe Pirates will be on a hiatus for awhile.

But on the plus side, I’ll be doing this!

“Amutt Time” is a parody of the classic episode “Amok Time” and something I’ve wanted to do for a VERY long time.

Back in 1995, in the early days of the web, I had a Star Trek fan site called “Largent’s No New Trek Page,” a loving tribute to the Original Series. In 1996, I wondered if it would be possible to do an animated Star Trek parody. This was before the days of Flash, but I was thinking it might be possible to do on the computer. I ended up compromising and doing it as a sort of webcomic on my fan page. It was static, but I did have a couple of animated GIFs. I ended up abandoning the project before it was done, but returned to the idea around 2000. At this point, McCrary and I were selling digital PDF versions of Greyhawk and another comic called Harbinger via a site called InfoPost. I completed a comic book version of Amutt Time to sell there. InfoPost went out of business when the bubble burst and I let it go again. Over the years, I toyed with doing it as a Flash animation, but never made any strides. In 2004, I bought a copy of Animation:Master, a 3D animation application with the idea of doing it in 3D. Unfortunately, I was too impatient at the time, became frustrated with trying to learn 3D and abandoned it again. In early 2007, I once again decided to give 3D a try and this time was more committed to learning. I was finally making some progress on Amutt Time, but I was still too green and there was so much to learn. In September of 2007, I came up with the idea of  putting Amutt Time on hold while I tackled a less difficult project. I thought it would be fun to do a short animated sequel to the home movie McCrary had made. This would be really easy, probably only take a few months and then I could get back to Amutt Time. Well, as we all know, The Wannabe Pirates turned out to be a much, much longer project. And now, almost 4 1/2 years later, I’ve decided to put The Wannabe Pirates on hold and finally do Amutt Time!

I’ve left myself a very limited amount of time to do this in, so it’s going to be a tremendous amount of work, but I’m excited about it and the progress I’ve made just in the first week of starting has been incredible. If all goes to plan, Stalled Trek will be a webseries and the first “season” will be ten episodes long. The first five making up a parody of “Amok Time” and the next five making up a parody of “Balance of Terror.”

I will be buried up to my eyeballs in this for the next few months, but I’ll keep you updated on my progress and let you know when it’s up!

I hope each an everyone of you have a great year …and I’m sure that the siren call of Flemm’s adventures will be heard again!

Well, as I struggle to get my act back together, I remembered this year to link to the ol’ Christmas card I did for Christmas of 2008. It’s certainly looking its age, but still fun to remember. The annoying part is that the video clipped a scene from the original. It’s a very short flash (which is why I guess it was cut), but it was one of the first gags I thought of for it and much of the impetus for choosing this song. It’s supposed to appear directly after Flemm “sings” ‘And my dear, we’re still good-bye-n’ and shows that Henrietta is already tucked into bed asleep.

If you want to see it complete, you can at this link. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

REPORTER: I’m your Action News reporter here on the scene where aliens from outer space have been spotted! Who knows what their alien intentions are?

ALIEN: Actually, we just came for the sales.

REPORTER: You mean you traversed those great interstellar distances just to go shopping?

ALIEN: Well, that $199 Xbox 360 Kinect bundle was pretty hard to resist.

REPORTER: So then, you can assure us that you are not here for hostile reasons?

ALIEN: The lady in front of me almost caused an interstellar war when she grabbed the last Xbox, but it was averted by a high ranking official.

REPORTER: Someone from the State Department?

ALIEN: No, the store manager. He gave me a rain check voucher.

For those folks who aren’t familiar with the old Captain America theme song parodied in today’s comic…

NARR: When Captain America throws his mighty shield…

SFX: ZZATT! TWANG!

RED SKULL: OUCH du lieber!

NARR: …It blows when it goes off a nose into a wheat-field!

NARR: He’ll give up the fight, what else can he do?

CAP: Got to be around here somewhere.

NARR: He’ll search day and night ’til his ears turn blue!

CAP: Oh, for the love of Bucky!

NARR: When Captain America throws his mighty shield…