It's HML Time Again

Yup, it's HML time once again. For those of you that have dropped by now and then in the past year or so, you'll know that stands for Hot Mexican Love, which isn't just three words strung together, but the title of a fantastic collection of comic book work put together by some of the finest talent working in the Los Angeles TV animation industry.

The last issue went over so well at the San Diego Comic Con (and in a limited run at various comic book stores across the nation) that the publishers have decided to serve up another annual helping. Hopefully, it'll be an annual thing from now on, rather than "every decade, or so" as was the case previously.

Here's a sneaky-peak at my own submission, a story titled, "Planet Mexico". It outlines a future where the twin of the dinosaur-destroying Chicxulub asteroid (or perhaps, comet) arrives for strike two on Mexico, and this time knocks the entire country into its own planetary orbit. As the centuries passed, most of earth's citizens have long forgotten that the oddly shaped planet was ever a part of earth. That is, save for one lone soul who vows to be the first to find what, if any life exists on Mexico.

There's no word yet on the official release date for the next issue of HML, but we know it won't be available in time for the APE Con (The Alternative Press Expo) this year, April 21-22nd in San Francisco.

However, the publishers will have a special sketch book featuring the work of HML contributors ready in time for the APE Con, and the new issue of HML will be hot off the presses in time for the biggie- the annual San Diego Comic Con, July 26th-29th, 2007.

This post just wouldn't be HML-worthy, without ending with an exclamation in Spanish, so here goes:

¡Buonas díaz!

Flavio Premiere

Last week I was up at my good friend and fellow Zaptooner, Mike Milo's house for the world premiere of Mike's cartoon, Flavio. The house was packed- I'm not sure how many family, friends and co-workers of Mike's showed up, but there must have been 30 or more people on hand for the main event. We all gathered around Mike's brand new high-def TV and watched the cartoon from a screening DVD fresh from Viacom.

Standing room only as the crowd enjoys the world premiere screening of Flavio!

I have to say, I loved the classic look and feel to the cartoon. Have a sneaky-peek at it yourself, here, on the Frederator site. Go on, take a look. Then come back and finish reading this post.

Back? Okay... so what did you think? Pretty cool, huh?

Specifically, I like the look of the backgrounds, the character design, and the little details like the cartoony sound effect pop ups and funny sight gags. I also love that it's an all animal world, something I've always thought was more interesting than just human characters.

Flavio will eventually be on the Nickelodeon channel, on the show "Random Cartoons", but of course keep your fingers crossed that it'll be picked for a series. Mike did an awesome job on this cartoon!

Incoming....!

We've really taken a lot of hits lately. Last month, so many people visited Zaptoons.com that we exceeded our alloted server space- hence the bandwidth overage message you may have seen if you tried to visit this site within the last two weeks of February, 2007.

Since starting this website in 2003, I've watched the visitors to it climb steadily from a few per week, to several hundred to a thousand per day. Last month was off the charts; we had well over 1,000 unique visitors per day until the server limit was reached. We had visitors from over 100 nations. All I can say is, welcome to everyone, and thanks for stopping by!

Where I seem to run into trouble with my webserver is when so many people view the flash and animation files we host on this site. In the coming weeks I'm going to begin a content transfer to a larger server so we can handle the steady increase of traffic.

At any rate, I just wanted to say sorry for the outage we experienced last month, and hopefully the same won't happen again before we can make the move.