Summertime for the Sellout

by Chad Sell on June 10, 2012 at 10:18 am

Hey! So! I haven’t been updating The Sellout much since the fourth season of Rupaul’s Drag Race wrapped up, but I did want to give everyone an idea of what I’ve been doing. The past few months have been some of the craziest, busiest ones of my life, and I’m still kind of playing catch-up after all that, and figuring out where I want to go next.

Throughout March and April, I was working with laser focus, finishing up my giant arc of MANTA-MAN and illustrating the Drag Race. I LOVE putting out exciting new work every week, and I’m SO happy with the reception of both those projects, but I was nearly burnt out by the end of it. To pile on top of all that, I was racing to publish MANTA-MAN’s collection Swimming with Sharks in time for a bunch of comics conventions I attended in April and May. Back-to-back, I went to SPACE in Columbus, MoCCA in NYC, and TCAF in Toronto! That was a lot of travelling and a lot of work. Awesome and exhilarating and eye-opening, but still. Right in the middle of that, I got involved in some intriguing new illustration jobs, too, which I hope to reveal soon.

And THEN my brother got married, and I got a new computer, and my birthday came around, and I’m still sending out Drag Race orders, and playing Diablo III…

Anyway, things have been busy. But I’m thinking, hoping, praying that things settle down a bit this summer so that I can get back to making comics again!

Granted, I have been posting weekly comics over at MANTA-MAN, which you should absolutely be reading, but I need some time before jumping back into any of my bigger book projects. The problem is that I have a few too many different comic ideas in mind–the next giant story for MANTA-MAN, finally returning to my VREELAND stories, starting over with my kids’ graphic novel… I need to figure out where to focus my efforts, right? Also, I need to write these damn books, too.

Rest assured that I am working on a lot of cool comics projects and playing around with my style, process, and stories, but it might be a while before I’m able to post anything substantive. That being said, check out some inking studies I did of Sachiko and Dixie–sexy, right? Mmmm, brushwork.

I’ve also been doing some personal commissions, which have been lots of fun. So if you want to hire me to draw nice pictures for you, let me know!

OH! And I’ll be exhibiting at a few more conventions this summer!