Judging a book by its Cover

They say you shouldn't "jugde a book by its cover, but a lot of people do." I have been struggling with the cover for my book. It is absolutely essential to have a cover that attracts attention, and projects the right message. The cover for Kat and Bunnie, my first comic, flopped at the con. It was too conservative. So for my next book I want a cover that sticks out, but how the heck do you do that? Whenever I have a question I google it. So I Googled, "Top Selling Comic Covers of All Time." This yielded an array of results, but the pattern I see is that simple and iconic images trump complexity. The goal is to attract people walking through a sea of imagery, and get them to come to your table and flip through your book. Once they start flipping through then it is up to you to make the sale. The Head Trip is primarily about relationships and I wanted an image to convey the struggle between the sexes. Please give me your feed back and ideas. I would love to have some help creating a cover that will help push the book.

Sketch Done with: MyPaint

Going open source cold turkey

Black Friday 2010, I sat staring at my out of commission mac mini, "What had I done?" The mini was brought down by a very amateur attempt to install Ubuntu, a free distribution of the Linux operating system. For the past 4 years, it's been my holiday tradition to use my time off to move my personal projects forward. This holiday's project is a 30 page comic about a girl band called "Kat and Bunnie: Legend of the Broken Hearts", but without a computer to do the required layout and design or share it with the outside world, I had to find a way to get up and running. With the holiday season upon us, I was not going to fight the crowds to get my mini to the Mac store. So I decided there is no better time then now to go open source.
"Eat your own dog food," is a term use to describe companies that use the products they produce. For the last few years since being introduced to Blender, an open 3D application. I have been developing the Sequential Media Learning Center, a course on the use of free software in the development of products that help support free software. So, I opened the can, scoped out a big spoon full, and bit off way more open source then I could chew. I expected a free ride, free operating system, free software, free media, what I found was humility. For the first time in a long time I was helpless at the keyboard, stumbling through very simple tasks like, installing software, mounting external drives, connecting to the Internet, and even browsing the file system. I felt as though I was pulled back in time to my first computer, a Gateway 400 mhz PC running Windows 95. I encountered a lot of the same frustrations of naivety, unfamiliarity and system issues, but I am ok with it. It is nice to be a nu-be again, and I am excited to see what free software can really do.