We had a blast today at Comic Con. Lived in San Diego almost 20 years, and have never gone. As many of you know, I use a lot of cartoons in my marketing so this was right up my alley.

Most of it was focused on Space Aliens and super heroes.

You get to run into lots of random cartoon characters brought to life,

But also random uber-hot undead cheerleaders.

One of the main reasons i went there was to find Dean Yeagle, famous Playboy cartoonist for a project that we are working on.

Initially, the only Playboy cartoonist we could find was Doug Sneyd, who has been cartooning for playboy magazines for around 40 years!

Ya gotta love his work!

He was nice enough to do a little sketch for my wife.

He was amazingly full of the joy of life! Can you imagine 40 years of taking the hottest girls in the world, and having to carefully study them and turn them into cartoons?

Then I found Dean. He is famous for his cartoon Mandy. Dean told me that until the head brass made them take her down, she was painted on many vehicles and planes in Iraq. You can see Mandy in the background with the blonde hair. The drawing I am holding is the girl that the poker tournament graphic will be based on this year. Dean is going to make us something very special!

Here is the new poker girl in closeup from a print we got to hang at home.

Here is another drawing that is also going up.

Dean’s works have all been copyrighted, so please don’t copy these images. 🙂

They have a wonderful place called Artists Alley. You can find amazing artists, many of whom have not become fully appreciated yet, meaning their work is very affordable.

Because of the small format, a lot of these sites don’t do justice to the artists.

Alain Viesca  does lots of women, and fantasy stuff. It is just breathtaking to see these in large format prints.

Stephen Silver is much more polished at promoting himself, and has had good commercial success. He has some great characters. He also keeps a blog of his cartoon work.

Molly is from Santa Barbara and does really light fun characters.  You can even buy these high fashion t-shirts with her characters on them.

There was a fascinating guy by the name of Todd Klein, not a relation that I know of, who does lettering for comic books and has for decades. One never thinks about it until you sit there and look at his work. In a world of fonts it is amazing to see someone who creates fonts from his mind, and does these amazing hand written styles of lettering.

One of our final places we stopped at was the booth of Travis Hanson. The first thing you notice about Travis is himself. He just glows. You can tell from the second you talk to him that he is a hard working, friendly, good guy. In a place like Comic Con, the majority of the work involved demons and devils, and the lighter funner work was naked women. Travis does incredibly detailed works that focus on the creativity and inspiration that live inside of us. Looking at his work just makes one happy!