Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. People all over the world are shouting, "End the war!” …and the band played on.

Study of a Bust of a Roman Emperor

Watercolor on 7” x 10” paper

The joy of doing these studies is that there’s no stakes to them, it’s just making a painting for the sake of doing it. I don’t need to worry about sales performance or client approvals, I can just make it simply to make it, seeing how different colors interact with each other or trying out different techniques.

I glean joy from most any art I make, but doing something pure like this and just for myself, it brings harmony to my creative soul. Art for art’s sake.

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s first-ever Mina Shirakawa painting. I was honestly surprised by this one when it was done. You’ll see.

Card subject to change.

Rob’s Art on ShopAEW
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Rob and Jason Arnett's novella Rudow Can't Fail!
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Rob’s prints and shirts at Pro Wrestling Tees
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Bluesky
Cara
YouTube
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Katy’s book Oldest Kansas City

I went Thursday evening to see Honey Don’t!, a movie I’ve been looking forward to for a while now. I guess you could describe it as an irreverent lesbian noir, which is cool enough on its own but it’s so much more. I’m a Coen brothers fan and this is directed by and Ethan Coen and co-written by him with Tricia Cooke, his longtime production collaborator (and wife), and it feels right in the pocket with his prior works like Raising Arizona. The story seems to be about Margaret Qualley’s PI Honey O’Donahue investigating the death of a client while in a passionate early relationship with Aubrey Plaza’s MG Falcone, a police clerk. But it’s like…not about that? There’s also a very French lady assassin, Chris Evans as a drug-dealing sex pastor, and Honey’s own complicated family. There’s those things, but there’s also a meditation on how it takes a while to get to know someone. Oh, and Charlie Day barks up the wrong tree a lot, too.

I finished watching Outlander season two a few days ago and it’s starting to make the most of its time travel premise as well as using that as an excuse for some excellent set pieces. Claire and Jamie flee Scotland for Paris and find themselves embroiled in the madness of King Louis XIV’s court at Versailles. There’s an excellently hilarious moment of a bunch of the royal court standing around Louis while he’s on a toilet fashioned to look like a throne, cheering him on as he attempts to break through his constipation. You just KNOW that JD Vance and Mike Johnson have done this with their own madman, right? Anyway. They make their way back to Scotland for a rather righteous beheading but this still isn’t Highlander and I’ve yet to hear a song by Queen.

Invasion season three started up on Friday, simultaneously picking up from where season two ended but also taking place a couple years later. It’s a huge ensemble and a lot of them haven’t been shown yet, but that’s the format of the series with each episode focusing on only a few of them at a time. It seems like the aliens have been defeated but maybe they were just evolving into something even more horrifying. I’m sucked right back in and looking forward to where things go next.

Speaking of alien invasions, I finished reading the Strikeforce: Morituri omnibus by Peter B Gillis, Brent Anderson, James Hudnall, Mark Bagley and friends earlier in the week. If you’re unfamiliar, the fantastic high concept for the series is that the Earth in the near future has been invaded by aliens, and humanity’s greatest weapon is a process that gives volunteers superpowers but it kills them within a year. You’re already hooked, right? And they don’t pull any punches on this with characters that you think are too important getting killed off left and right. No one is safe in this book. Years ago I read the Gillis/ Anderson stuff and remembered really liking it. My memory was good. Gillis brought a strong amount of humanity to this and Anderson was inked by Scott Williams who was a perfect fit. It’s like a mix of Neal Adams and Barry Windsor-Smith in all the right ways. This was my first time reading the Hudnall and Bagley stuff and…it’s fine. More plot-based than character-based and Bagley hadn’t quite come into his prime yet but it was still readable. The first half for me was worth the price of admission.

Drome by Jesse Lonergan is one of the best graphic novels of the year so far. It’s so fresh and original that my brain is trying to find anything to compare it to. The closest I have is it’s like Chris Ware and Fabio Moon adapting Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Does that make sense? Maybe. It’s a sci-fi fantasy creation myth that pushes the sequential art form to its limits in a way that’s so good it made me energized to get back to my own art. There’s very little dialogue, with most of the story told through the dense amount of panels per page and it really couldn’t be better.

Yesterday I read Absolute Superman by Jason Aaron, Rava Sandoval and friends, another of DC Comics’ reimaginings of their characters for a modern audience. There’s a lot of familiar names but they’re all in very different roles. Superman is Superman, but how he came to Earth and at what age is not what you’re used to. Who he is now and how he interfaces with Lois Lane and the world as a whole is brand new. And just wait until it’s revealed who his nemesis truly is!

I’m doing my best to hang in there. My depression hole’s been hanging on but I’m actively working on it in therapy. I know what caused it to start and why it’s stuck around and I’m doing to work to address it instead of pushing it back down. Sometimes we feel things, those feelings are real and it’s valid to feel them.

I’m working on a super-involved painting for AEW that’s taken up all of my work time this week. It’ll be my first Wrestling Landscape with them. Remember those? More on that in the months ahead.

Otherwise I’ve been hanging out with the cats, watering my garden (it was Phosphate Phriday this week, which is VERY exciting), and spending time with Katy. Just kind of letting my discomfort coexist with the pleasant smaller moments in life, without one invalidating the other. Some days are easier than others but I keep moving forward.

Love you more,
Rob