Well, drop by the Katsuya Art Gallery in Glendale, CA TONIGHT from 7pm to 10pm and see Josh’s awesome exhibit!  He’ll be showing sculptures, his monster works and costumes, and a ton of awesome artwork and paintings!

Here’s the address:

702 Americana Way Glendale, CA 91210

Hope to see you guys there, if you’re around!  And remember to check out Josh’s Blog for some of his other work!

As promised, here are the entries (and winner) of this year’s horrific fan art contest!  It just so happened to work out so well that Halloween to Friday the 13th was a good two week period, giving our amazing fans out there a good period of time to come up with some wild-looking stuff!

So in no particular order, here we go!

A corrupt looking Coal Miner.

Very literally, Tuna Carpaccio P.I.

A cybernetic Iron Chef.

A super-fly Dead  Beat

A re-imagined police officer (preferably the one that busted De Jesus).

A hive of puns for Busy Bee, clearly modeled after “The Fly”

And the official winner of the Horrific Halloween Contest is our pal Hammerhead for this particularly dark revamp of King Pin that brings to mind images of Shakespearean lore… in particular Hamlet’s ghostly father, the gruesome reanimation of King Lear, or the image of MacBeth after he had been a cruel and murderous King for 10 years.

Except, you know, involving pins and bowling.

Congratulations Hammerhead! And thanks for keeping the momentum rolling!  (insert comedy drums here)

TOMORROW THE TUNA CARPACCIO P.I. HORROR-IFIC FAN ART CONTEST ENDS ENDS ENDS!!

So to sum it all up, the contest ends.  At the end of the day, we’re closing submissions and picking a winner!  Then we’ll put all of the art we get up online to all eyes to see and rejoice!

So send your scaried-up version of a Tuna Carpaccio P.I. character to Tony@TunaCarpaccioPI.com as soon as humanly possible.  Or as soon as inhumanly possible.  Whichever’s faster.

Just because we’re waiting around for Josh’s power cord doesn’t mean that we don’t have tons of good friends with creative projects!  I’ve got to warn you though: all of these things involve amazing artists and fantastic writers and creators.  You have been warned.

1) My good friend and colleague, the Los Angeles Art Critic and writer Amanda Moret has just released her first catalogue called Remembrance of Paradise Past, which explores two new works from Los Angeles artist Lisa Adams!  The catalogue coincides with Lisa Adam’s appearance in a group show at the Riverside Art Museum on November 21, called Edenistic Divergence.  It looks really awesome, and I recommend that you check it out, check out some more of Amanda’s articles and more of Lisa Adam’s awesome artwork!

2) Just a reminder that our pals over at Eben07 have been selling their latest publication, Operation: Mongoose, with a unique and totally original Tuna Carpaccio P.I. print inside!  For that reason alone, I think you should check it out.  And check out their comic while you’re at it!  New fans and interest never hurts, that’s for sure.

3) Our pal, the amazing artist Axel Ortiz & his friends at SwalleyLamaVision put together an absolutely gorgeous IPhone application!  Between the people at SwalleyLamaVision being ridiculously intelligent and Axel being ridiculously talented, I think this is a game you might seriously enjoy! (if you have an IPhone, i mean).  Just check out the video!

4) Last, but certainly not least, we want to do another fun fun plug for our friends Gary Phillips and Manoel Magalhães super-noir super-online-comic Bicycle Cop Dave! Gary’s comics for Vertigo and Boom! Comics have been full of wild twists and turns, and lots and lots of betrayal and seduction.  When you get right down to it, you wouldn’t be reading Tuna if you didn’t appreciate just as many crazy twists and turns… just expect them to be a little less funny and little more “Holy Crap!“  CLICK HERE AND START READIN’!

As the Beatles once sang (sorta), you get by with a help from your friends.  So definitely click through to our friends’ fantastic artistic efforts, we wouldn’t be posting them unless they were!

Things have been a little annoying here on the home front, as Josh and I wait around for a power cord for his laptop to come in so we can push forward with the plethora of new strips (I swear, we must’ve been cursed by malevolent technological Elder Gods), but it doesn’t mean that we don’t have a bunch of new and cool things going on!  Let’s list them, shall we?  Yes, let’s shall.

1) Site Re-Design! So out of no where, the awesome designer, programmer and illustrator Mr. Tyler Martin (of ComicPress fame and fortune) has been nice enough to offer to help us redesign the overall look and organization of our site!  Things should roll out by the end of the year, so keep your eyes peeled for an awesome and very slick revamp!

2) TGT Webcomics Podcast Interview! Mr. Kurt (VertigoX) Sasso and Phil (Frumph) have both been so cool to us over the years, both by helping to spread the word about our comic and by helping us bring the site back from the dead after our unfortunate hacker/takedown situation.  Now they’ve invited Josh and I onto the TGT Webcomics Podcast November 27th (the day after Thanksgiving) at 9pm EST!! Should be a fun and wild situation for all, but especially us… remember our last podcast interview with Jamias at Webcomic Review and Interview?

3) Horror Fan Art Contest! A big reminder, Friday the 13th is the last day to submit your horrific revisions of Tuna Carpaccio P.I. characters for a pair of awesome Tuna & De Jesus T-Shirts!  Of course, we’ll let everyone see them after we’ve submitted them… But imagine how much scarier Snake Eyes could look?  Or Iron Chef?  Or Dead Beat?  I say, go nuts.  We certainly would.  And mail them to Tony@TunaCarpaccioPI.com by the 13th, in case I haven’t written that enough times.

4) Christmas Contest… TBA! Josh and I have a really awesome new contest in the works that we can’t wait to announce!  In fact, we decided recently that we’re going to start doing a ton of new contests, only because they’re totally fun for us.  That means new and more interesting prizes, and new cool merchandise at the store to come!  T-Shirts are only the beginning, and Christmas is just about the corner!

5) I’m Starting to Panel Our Book! But it’s clearly taking forever, since Tuna Carpaccio P.I. wasn’t originally intended for publication.  That being said, expect that Josh and I approach publishing our first 2 years of Tuna Carpaccio P.I. the way we write, draw and panel it.  And by that, I mean haphazardly and with no foresight.  At all.  It’s a bit early in terms of heads up, but who cares?  The more notice the merrier, right?

Right.

Thanks for the patience everyone, and remember to join in the contest mayhem!

While we’re putting together the next few strips for you guys, I wanted to drop a quick mention for another noir comic done by our pals Gary Phillips and Manoel Magalhães called Bicycle Cop Dave.  Bike Cop Dave is a sleazy LAPD bike cop in downtown LA, and judging by the first few pages you can already tell that Gary and Manoel are looking to push the limits of what they can put online.  Although you probably know Gary, since he’s had publications both for Vertigo and Boom! Comics in the past and they’ve been some intense crime/noir stuff.  Needless to say, it should be a fun read!  (I just like to say it anyway)

Anyway, Bicycle Cop Dave’s off to a fun start, and you know we can’t say no to good noir.  Click here to check it out!

Since we did a contest for our writer pals out there, we figured that a similar contest for artists was in store!  The winner will get both the Tuna and the De Jesus shirts as particularly awesome pre-Christmas prizes!

THE TASK!

Take any character from our comic (villain, hero, bar owner, shady flip-flopper, henchmen, whatever) and re-imagine them in a darker, scarier, and more horrific visage appropriate if we were to completely change up Tuna Carpaccio P.I. into a fearsome horror comic!  Let your mind wander and be sure to let your inner horror artist break loose!

Email your submissions to Tony@TunaCarpaccioPI.com by 11:59pm on Friday, the 13th! Seemed appropriate, the two weeks between Halloween and Friday the 13th… winner will pretty much be announced and put up on our site right away!

Good luck scaring the hell out of us!

Here ye here ye!  Announcing a new contest where the winner will get ONE OF EACH OF OUR TUNA CARPACCIO P.I. SHIRTS!!

And it’s SO easy!  Just answer this one question with three simple sentences:

“What did Jose Maria De Jesus do for Halloween this year?”

Post your answers as a comment to this blog and we’ll announce the winners on Halloween!   You should know his habits pretty well by now.  Best answer wins… GO!

You’ve already seen a sneak preview of Malta’s prowess with a gun, but she’s about to get herself into a situation she might not be ready to handle with two small handguns.  Or maybe she’ll encounter a room a cuddly children.  Either or.

So click on the artwork and watch Josh’s preliminary sketch for panel 2 of this week GROW!  (also, feel free to drop by his blog occasionally to check out what other stuff he’s in the mood to show off!  he’s got the talent of a million artists, wrapped in his pinky finger.  In fact, he draws Tuna Carpaccio P.I. with his toes each week.  Fun fact.)

More to come, as you should expect by now.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! Our pals at Eben07 gave Josh and I the amazing opportunity of putting a 1-page advertisement in the recent publication of their strip anthology “Operation: Mongoose” and there’s no way I’m going to post it on this site.  Ever.  It’s actually something you’ve never seen before and actually something you need to check out when you pick  up your copy of their book! It’s only $4.99, which is practically stealing it if you ask us.  So get on it!

Clearly Malta was able to figure out where Rows 4 through 6 were, relative to the clues she put together with Pam’s help… but what she finds there you’ll just have to see for yourself (unless you’ve gotten so used to the way our comic flows that you can pick up on the details and hints already).  Have we gotten that predictable?  Maybe.  Or maybe you have no idea what’s going to happen next.  I’m hoping for the latter.  Anyway, click on this ink of panel 1 from this week’s strip!

More to come?  Sure, why not?