Category: Personal

Work done just for fun.

It’s Transducin’ Time!

I just did a piece of pin­up art of Frank Squil­lace’s Trans­duc­er Man! ‘Nuff said!…

…No? Guess not. Okay; here’s more. Years ago, on my first day in ani­ma­tion (work­ing on X‑Men: The Ani­mat­ed Series) , the very first per­son I met was Frank Squil­lace. My friend Frank has always been one of those artists whom you could describe as an “idea engine.” For exam­ple, Jack Kir­by was clear­ly that kind of artist. Frank has always been com­ing up with ideas for dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters and sto­ries, as if it were the eas­i­est thing in the world. He’s got so many of them! I must con­fess to being a bit jeal­ous of Frank’s abil­i­ty to do that, because I’ve nev­er been wired quite that way.

Frank’s had his Trans­duc­er Man char­ac­ter for a good, long while, prob­a­bly since well before we ever met. The char­ac­ter’s gone through sev­er­al iter­a­tions over the years, as he peri­od­i­cal­ly played with the con­cept, hon­ing and shap­ing it. Back when we were work­ing togeth­er on X‑Men, I even did a few draw­ings of his char­ac­ter (as he was at that point) myself. I’ve includ­ed one here, below.

Frank and I have been talk­ing recent­ly, and he’s been real­ly fired up to do some­thing with Trans­duc­er Man again. Specif­i­cal­ly as a com­ic. As often hap­pens with Frank, the con­cept has been expand­ed and altered again. Cur­rent­ly, Trans­duc­er Man’s more in the vein of a clas­sic Gold­en Age com­ic char­ac­ter (while not entire­ly aban­don­ing his orig­i­nal more pulp-based roots). Hear­ing what Frank intends on doing with his com­ic, I could­n’t help but get the itch to take a crack at draw­ing the cur­rent iter­a­tion myself!

Mean­while, Frank is cur­rent­ly furi­ous­ly work­ing on his Trans­duc­er Man book, hop­ing to get it out. Stay tuned; I’ll let you know when it hap­pens! It will include my pinup…along with oth­er guest pieces of art!

Trans­duc­er Man is ™ & © Frank Squillace.

Funky Frankie

It’s that time of year when I have a tra­di­tion of doing some kind of Franken­stein imagery. Right after I fin­ished the one I did for last year, this one came to me in a fore­head-slap­ping “D’oh!” moment.

Unlike last year’s image, this is a real song, as some of you will know. The Edgar Win­ter Group’s “Franken­stein” is one of the coolest rock instru­men­tals of the ’70s. I’ll give you moment to check it out here, if you haven’t heard it before.

…Okay, you’re back now? “Franken­stein” was a big hit and actu­al­ly made it to #1 on the charts. My under­stand­ing is that in record­ing and fig­ur­ing out the song, the band end­ed up hav­ing to do a lot of phys­i­cal edit­ing of the song parts. Today, that’s just a mat­ter of hit­ting a but­ton or two. Back then, you had to lit­er­al­ly take a razor blade to the record­ing tape to cut it apart, then tape it back togeth­er again. With all the var­i­ous tape pieces lying around the stu­dio wait­ing to be pieced back togeth­er, the band’s drum­mer observed that the song had become “like Franken­stein.” The name stuck.

I knew what I kind of want­ed the illus­tra­tion to look like, but think­ing about col­or was anoth­er thing. Then I remem­bered that for awhile now, I’d been intrigued by the idea of try­ing some­thing with flu­o­res­cent col­ors, like a black­light poster. It struck me that this was the per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to try that out, so here you go!

Hap­py Halloween!

The Adventures of Santa Claus

Here’s one that’s been in my head since last Christ­mas, but there was too much going on then for me to get to it in time. So it feels good to final­ly get this real­ized this year!

I’ve always had a soft spot for those DC 80 Pg. Giants and 100 Pg. Super-Spec­tac­u­lars, and the idea of a some­what super­hero-style San­ta Claus 80 Pg. Giant com­ic sound­ed like a fun idea that need­ed to exist. And it’s a giv­en that Go-Go Checks auto­mat­i­cal­ly make any com­ic cov­er better!

Of course, there were a lot of pos­si­ble vil­lains to pick from, but ulti­mate­ly I grav­i­tat­ed towards these. For those who don’t know, Pitch comes from the 1959 Mex­i­can movie San­ta Claus. Voldar and Torg appear in the 1964 “clas­sic” San­ta Claus Con­quers the Mar­tians. The Heat Miser and the Snow Miser show up in the TV spe­cial, The Year With­out a San­ta Claus. And final­ly, Oogie Boo­gie comes from the Dis­ney clas­sic The Night­mare Before Christ­mas. Just real­ized: they’re all in chrono­log­i­cal order. I had­n’t real­ly planned it that way (I was think­ing more about even­ly dis­trib­ut­ing the reds and greens), but so be it!

That’s about all I can think of to say for this image, except: I’d like to wish all my site vis­i­tors a Mer­ry Christ­mas and a Hap­py New Year!

Do the Frankenstomp!

It’s that time of year again! Hal­loween! And long-time vis­i­tors to my site might recall that I have some­thing of a loose tra­di­tion of doing Franken­stein-themed stuff in hon­or of the hol­i­day. Here’s this year’s: a sin­gle from the ’60s by the Orloks, doing the Frankenstomp.

There was a big pop cul­ture fas­ci­na­tion with mon­sters in the ’60s, like­ly spurred ini­tial­ly at least in part by TV sta­tions look­ing to fill time, and resort­ing to run­ning old mon­ster movies. They caught on with young view­ers and cre­at­ed a demand for more, result­ing in all kinds of games, mod­els, TV shows, cartoons…and even nov­el­ty 45’s like this.

I’m a big fan of this kind of mid-cen­tu­ry art style (and the style of graph­ic design that goes with it). It’s very sil­hou­ette- and shape-ori­ent­ed. I must con­fess, it does­n’t come entire­ly nat­ur­al to me to try to draw this way (it’s like throw­ing a car in hard reverse, after years of try­ing so hard to get vol­ume and dimen­sion into all my work). But it’s fun to at least attempt it like this every now and then.

Enjoy, and Hap­py Halloween!

Frank? Is That You?

Long­time vis­i­tors here might recall I have some­thing of a loose tra­di­tion of doing draw­ings of Franken­stein’s mon­ster on Hal­loween. So here you go again!

…What? You don’t rec­og­nize this guy? That’s because he pre-dates the Uni­ver­sal Studios/Boris Karloff ver­sion we’re all more famil­iar with. In fact, you’re look­ing at the first film ver­sion of Franken­stein ever, from 1910! Released by Thomas Edi­son and run­ning between 11–16 min­utes (depend­ing on how fast the film passed through the pro­jec­tor), you could say it was some­thing of a “Cliffs Notes” ver­sion of the sto­ry. Like the lat­er Uni­ver­sal ver­sion, there were some alter­ations to Mary Shel­ley’s orig­i­nal nov­el for var­i­ous rea­sons (such as run­ning time).

For years, this film was thought to be one of the (sad­ly) many lost films of the silent era. Grow­ing up, I only ever saw a cou­ple of still images from it in library books about old sci fi, hor­ror and fan­ta­sy films. But the film was lat­er dis­cov­ered in a pri­vate film col­lec­tion! Appar­ent­ly, the Library of Con­gress did a restora­tion project of the film not long ago, and you can see it here.

One of the things I was struck by was how dif­fer­ent the mon­ster’s cre­ation is in this film. In place of the more pseu­do-/qua­si-sci­en­tif­ic birth of the clas­sic Uni­ver­sal ver­sion, we have some­thing that feels more magical/mystical/alchemical in nature. It must have been stun­ning for audi­ences 100+ years ago. As a mod­ern view­er, it’s not hard to fig­ure out how they did the effect here, but it’s no less effec­tive for being able to under­stand it. The whole film has some­thing of a dream-/night­mare-like feel to it.

I start­ed this off just think­ing it would be fun to do a creepy por­trait of the mon­ster, and def­i­nite­ly got car­ried away with the ren­der­ing, but I was hav­ing fun doing it. Obvi­ous­ly the film is in B/W, so my col­ors are only a guess. But they felt about right to me, and kind of worked with the val­ues in the still shots.

Hope you enjoy my ver­sion of Edis­on’s ver­sion of Franken­stein. Hap­py Halloween!

 

Captain Saturn Giant!

Some of you may rec­og­nize this as the cov­er of Odd Comics’ Cap­tain Sat­urn Giant, pub­lished in the ear­ly ’60s. Odd Comics as a pub­lish­er seems to have been large­ly for­got­ten these days, and it takes a lot of dig­ging to find their comics, but it’s worth the effort.

Okay, I con­fess: the above was a lie! It’s just a fake com­ic cov­er, by me. I’ll tell you the truth as to how this came about.

Over on LinkedIn, the very tal­ent­ed Thomas N. Perkins IV post­ed a draw­ing he’d done on the first page of a copy of his book If…. Thomas does a lot of cool stuff, but some­thing about this draw­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly caught my eye. It had a sort of Sil­ver Age-look­ing super­hero char­ac­ter, with a big mon­ster behind him. I com­ment­ed on how I liked it, and in Thomas’ reply, he said it was “Cap­tain Sat­urn and his pet Gulglammakus.”

Some­how, their being named plant­ed a seed in my brain. And sud­den­ly, I was envi­sion­ing Cap­tain Sat­urn fea­tured in a Sil­ver Age extra-length Giant com­ic. I told Thomas about this, and with his bless­ing, I went to work on this cover.

Thomas’ orig­i­nal draw­ing was in black and white with gray tones, and he want­ed to fig­ure out the col­or scheme for Cap­tain Sat­urn for me first, which I then trans­lat­ed into the Sil­ver Age comics col­or palette.

His response when I gave him a pre­view of the fin­ished cov­er was, “I won’t lie, I am sure this is a book I would’ve read as a kid.” I’m very pleased to get that kind of reac­tion. And I’ll con­fess, this is the sort of thing that would’ve caught my eye too. And prob­a­bly still would!

For a time after grad­u­at­ing col­lege, I used to have this recur­ring dream: I’d walk into a comics shop I’d nev­er been in, and dis­cov­er all these real­ly cool comics that I’d nev­er seen before! The sad part though is that I could nev­er remem­ber any­thing about them after I woke up, or maybe I’d have tried to cre­ate those comics myself. Maybe one of them might have been some­thing like Cap­tain Saturn!

Cap­tain Sat­urn is ™ & © Thomas N. Perkins IV. Thomas, thanks much for let­ting me play with your toys for a minute!

The Boop! of Frankenstein

Long time vis­i­tors to this site may recall that come Hal­loween, I have some­thing of a loose tra­di­tion of doing a Franken­stein draw­ing to celebrate.

This year, I was kind of wrack­ing my brain for inspi­ra­tion, look­ing at var­i­ous old comics cov­ers, movie stills and things, and none of the ideas I was com­ing up with were real­ly grab­bing me. Then I stum­bled across a two hour block of Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios car­toons air­ing on TCM, done by way of cel­e­brat­ing the stu­dio’s 100th anniver­sary. Watch­ing one of the Bet­ty Boop car­toons, an idea final­ly struck me that I had to do. It grew from there. This is the result.

Orig­i­nal­ly, I was just going to do the black and white image, but while work­ing on it, the thought struck me that this could also work as a com­ic book cov­er. Some of you may be won­der­ing: why make this a Gold Key cov­er par­tic­u­lar­ly? Because back in the Sil­ver Age, if you want­ed to read a com­ic fea­tur­ing a car­toon char­ac­ter, you were going to end up buy­ing a Gold Key com­ic. They had the licens­es to pret­ty much all of the char­ac­ters. Though (so far as I’ve been able to deter­mine) they nev­er actu­al­ly did a Bet­ty Boop com­ic, if any­one had pub­lished one back then, Gold Key would’ve been the publisher.

I’ve always had a gen­er­al soft spot for the “ball and rub­ber hose” school of ani­ma­tion. And more specif­i­cal­ly, I’ve always got­ten a kick out of the Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios car­toons, because they have their own per­son­al­i­ty that’s noth­ing like Dis­ney’s, Warn­er Bros., or any­one else’s. The Fleis­ch­er car­toons are chaot­ic in a fun way, where almost any­thing can hap­pen. Inan­i­mate objects come to life at a momen­t’s notice.

If you don’t know about the Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios car­toons, you real­ly should do some­thing to rec­ti­fy that. You can prob­a­bly find a num­ber of them on YouTube. They’re a real treat (no trick!).

“Dad joke” free of charge. Hap­py Halloween!

To Boldly Go where No Tastebuds Have Gone Before!

Recent­ly, cour­tesy of Net­flix, I’ve been re-watch­ing the orig­i­nal Star Trek. It’s not like I haven’t already watched all of these episodes mul­ti­ple times over the years, but they’re always enter­tain­ing (even the less­er ones have some­thing to rec­om­mend them). Yeah, I’ll admit it: I was a bit of Trekkie grow­ing up. I prob­a­bly built the Enter­prise mod­el three or four dif­fer­ent times (always hop­ing that maybe this time they’d fig­ured out a way to engi­neer it so the nacelles would­n’t sag out­wards). I even did my own lit­tle home­made 8mm Star Trek movie when i was in ele­men­tary school (but that’s anoth­er story).

Watch­ing the episode “The Cor­bomite Maneu­ver” again for the umpteenth time, I got struck by this sil­ly idea for a retro-styled ad. It was one of those things that gets stuck in your head, and you feel like you have to do it in order to get it unstuck. So here it is! If you’re as famil­iar with the show as I am, you’ll get it.

Though my his­to­ry with Illus­tra­tor goes back quite a ways (Illus­tra­tor 88, any­one?), I tried a tech­nique I haven’t done before on this. I’m used to Illus­tra­tor always look­ing pris­tine clean, so get­ting more of a tex­tured look was some­thing dif­fer­ent. I’d guess in the pre-dig­i­tal art era when peo­ple did illus­tra­tions like this, it was like­ly done using an air­brush set so it would spray in a more tex­tur­al way. Or maybe it was done by paint­ing with a sponge and frisket material.

It occurs to me this also kind of works pret­ty well as a year-end piece! I wish all my site vis­i­tors the best, and may 2021 be a much bet­ter year for us all!

Twistin’ with Frank!

If you’ve poked around my site for any length of time, you might have noticed I have some­thing of a loose tra­di­tion of cre­at­ing some kind of Franken­stein image for my site around Hal­loween, when I have the chance. Here’s this year’s!

I had the good for­tune that dur­ing my child­hood, mon­sters were a big part of the pop cul­ture land­scape. This def­i­nite­ly informed me (or warped me, depend­ing on your per­spec­tive). Mon­sters were kind of every­where! Car­toons, TV shows, books (like How to Care for Your Mon­ster), mod­el kits, toys, games…all kinds of fun stuff! There was even the occa­sion­al nov­el­ty mon­ster-themed 45 record.

That’s sort of where this idea came from. This mid-cen­tu­ry Car­toon Mod­ern type of style is not some­thing I’ve done a lot, but it’s how I envi­sioned this look­ing in my head. You spend years try­ing to get vol­ume into your draw­ings, but you kind of have to throw your brain into reverse and think more in terms of flat­ter shapes and sil­hou­ettes in order to do some­thing like this. I find it a chal­lenge, but a fun one.

When this idea came into my head, it just felt like a record that should’ve exist­ed back then, so I took it upon myself to make it hap­pen. I hope you enjoy my lit­tle illus­tra­tion and design experiment.

Hap­py Halloween!

Call the Nurse!

This is a bit dif­fer­ent, in that I don’t usu­al­ly do a lot of top­i­cal, cur­rent events-relat­ed things.

It’s impos­si­ble not to know about Covid-19. I’m aware that we have front­line work­ers, espe­cial­ly in the med­ical pro­fes­sion, who are deal­ing with it on a dai­ly basis. And for some rea­son recent­ly, I was think­ing about nurs­es and super­heroes, and thought of this odd­ball old Gold­en Age comics char­ac­ter called Pat Park­er, War Nurse.

Start­ing off as a straight strip in Speed Comics #13, about the adven­tures of a British nurse in WWII, appar­ent­ly it must have been felt by Har­vey Comics that she was­n’t dynam­ic enough in that form to help boost sales. So they end­ed up giv­ing her super­pow­ers and a cos­tume. At one point, she was even the leader of a group called the Girl Com­man­dos. Her last comics appear­ance was in March of 1946.

My brain start­ed to think about what would hap­pen if you updat­ed Pat Park­er, send­ing her into bat­tle against Covid-19. After all, she was a “war nurse.” She looks a bit dif­fer­ent here, because it did­n’t seem prac­ti­cal she’d bat­tle this with her orig­i­nal out­fit: bare midriff, short shorts and no facial covering.

And after the fact, I real­ized what I’d done was prob­a­bly also sub­lim­i­nal­ly inspired by anoth­er draw­ing I saw on LinkedIn by the very tal­ent­ed Thomas Perkins.

So this is my slight­ly sil­ly, but no less sin­cere, trib­ute to those med­ical per­son­nel on the front­lines. Thank you for your super­hu­man efforts. You are superheroes.

Art Vs. Artist!

So there’s this thing, and I guess all the cool kids are doing it over on the Twit­ters and the Insta­grams. It’s called “Art Vs. Artist.” You put some of your work togeth­er in this for­mat, along with a pic­ture of your­self in the cen­ter. It seemed like some­thing that might be sor­ta fun to take a crack at, so here we go!

To be hon­est, I’m not entire­ly sure what all the rules are (if there are any), so I’m prob­a­bly break­ing some of them. I did get the idea that this was sup­posed to cen­ter around faces, so there’s at least that. Some of these sam­ples are more recent and oth­ers slight­ly old­er. At the moment, I feel like this works pret­ty well. If I were to attempt this again tomor­row, it’s pos­si­ble I could pick a few oth­er images.

I feel like I might be break­ing one of the rules with my pho­to in the cen­ter. It’s (obvi­ous­ly) not a cur­rent self­ie. Not by a long shot! That’s a 12 year-old me, on my birth­day. If you could see more of the pic­ture, you’d see I was attempt­ing to paint a pic­ture (using oils) of the USS Enter­prise fir­ing on a Klin­gon ship. Why that pho­to? I fig­ure: don’t we all start some­place like that as artists? Every­thing else flows from that.

When Titans Clash!

Long­time vis­i­tors to this site may remem­ber that I got my start in ani­ma­tion work­ing on X‑Men: the Ani­mat­ed Series. That meant my first boss was Lar­ry Hous­ton, who I came to con­sid­er both my men­tor in the busi­ness, and a friend. Lar­ry’s now get­ting to enjoy much-deserved recog­ni­tion for his con­tri­bu­tions to X‑Men, as well as a num­ber of oth­er car­toons peo­ple think of fond­ly from their youth.

But before he got into ani­ma­tion, Lar­ry aspired to do comics. And he did! In his 20’s, he self-pub­lished three issues of his own com­ic, The Enforcers, with a lit­tle help from his friends.

Those comics have been out of print for years. But not long ago, Lar­ry decid­ed to re-pub­lish them all togeth­er in one big col­lec­tion. You can pur­chase it off of Lar­ry’s site, using the link above, in either dig­i­tal or phys­i­cal form. Orig­i­nal­ly his comics were in black and white (as was typ­i­cal for inde­pen­dent comics in those days), but this time it’s in full color!

I ordered myself a copy, and I found it a real blast. You can feel the excite­ment on the page, that “we’re doing our own comics!” Of course there are some rough edges, but you can see Lar­ry and friends learn­ing their craft and improv­ing vis­i­bly with each issue. It’s cer­tain­ly bet­ter than what I was doing in my 20’s! The art has a real ener­gy to it, and so does the dia­logue. There’s this ’70s Mar­vel/qua­si-Roy Thomas feel to it. I real­ly enjoyed the com­ic quite a bit!

So this is a bit of fan art on my part, recre­at­ing the cov­er of the col­lec­tion (which was also the cov­er to the orig­i­nal issue #3). But of course, it’s not just a straight re-cre­ation. I always have to have some kind of spin on it, or re-inter­pre­ta­tion. In this case, the idea was to tweak it slight­ly in some aspects to make it look even more like a main­stream com­ic from that late ’70s peri­od. Except for one or two pan­els, these sto­ries feel like they could have seen print in a Comics Code-approved book of that era.

So Lar­ry: thanks, and much respect always! Hav­ing read these sto­ries, I’d real­ly like to see you do some new comics with your char­ac­ters, using all the sto­ry­telling craft you’ve picked up in the inter­ven­ing years.

Lar­ry Hous­ton’s The Enforcers are ™ & ©1975, 1978, 1979 and 2018 Lar­ry F. Houston.

Harvey Girls Forever! Part 4

Here’s install­ment #4, of my countdown/celebration of the return of Har­vey Girls For­ev­er! to Net­flix, this Fri­day May 10th!

Today’s Post-It draw­ings are a pen­cil draw­ing of the Bow, and Tiny dressed up as Frankenstein.

Unlike the oth­er draw­ings I’ve been post­ing, this draw­ing of the Bow seemed like it should stay in pen­cil. It seemed to give it a bit of the feel­ing of an engrav­ing some­how, or an Edward Gorey drawing.

And Tiny, always want­i­ng to be taller, is of course wear­ing a Franken­stein cos­tume. Specif­i­cal­ly, it’s based on Dick Briefer­’s comedic take that he did for a bit back in the Gold­en Age of comics. I did­n’t mess up the draw­ing on the mask; that’s how he drew the nose, way up high like that! I kind of talked a bit about Briefer­’s Franken­stein here.

That’s it for these Post-It draw­ings. If things go accord­ing to plan, I should be able to post some of my board revi­sion work from Har­vey Girls For­ev­er! tomor­row at some point.

Harvey Girls Forever! Part 3

Wel­come back to our countdown/celebration! Har­vey Girls For­ev­er! starts a new sea­son this Fri­day, May 10th, on Net­flix! I’ve been putting up Post-It draw­ings I did dur­ing breaks, while I was on the show.

Two for you today! Audrey as Furiosa, and Tiny as Shaft.

Audrey was always fun to draw on the show. It took me no time at all to fig­ure out who she was: that kid who was total­ly impul­sive and ener­getic, fun to be around…and prob­a­bly would get you into some trou­ble. But you’d sure have fun while doing it!

And Tiny was a lot of fun too, for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. He was the kid who was a lit­tle small­er than every­one else, and could­n’t wait to be big. Despite his size though, he already had a big heart. Seemed like fun to have him cos­play­ing as Shaft (though most like­ly his par­ents would­n’t have let him see that movie yet).

Tune in tomor­row for anoth­er installment!

Harvey Girls Forever! Part 2

Wel­come back to my lit­tle countdown/celebration of the return of Har­vey Girls For­ev­er!, return­ing to Net­flix this Fri­day, May 10th!

Here’s anoth­er Post-It draw­ing, done dur­ing a break on the show. As I men­tioned yes­ter­day, Post-It draw­ings like this are a fun way of tak­ing ideas that lodge them­selves in your brain and clear­ing them out by get­ting them on paper.

This time it’s the Bow! The Bow was always some­thing of a crew favorite. I guess it was some­thing to do with the fact she’s the type of per­son who march­es to her own beat, and does­n’t care what any­one else thinks.

Reg­u­lar vis­i­tors to my site might recall that I’ve done a play on the OBEY stick­ers before, but the Bow sort of seemed to loan her­self to this too.

Thanks for tun­ing in! More to come tomorrow.

Harvey Girls Forever! Part 1

So com­ing up this Fri­day, May 10th, Net­flix debuts the next sea­son of Har­vey Street Kids, now re-titled Har­vey Girls For­ev­er! By way of celebrating/counting down, I thought it might be fun to post some of the Post-It draw­ings I did of some of the char­ac­ters dur­ing breaks.

It’s been awhile since I put up any Post-It draw­ings. I’ve prob­a­bly felt too com­pelled to have to always put up fin­ished work here. Post-It draw­ings like this used to be a lot more com­mon sight when ani­ma­tion stu­dios still worked on paper. It’s not as com­mon now, but our sto­ry­board revi­sions crew had some­thing of a wall of Post-It draw­ings like this going while we were on the show. Kind of a fun way to get goofy ideas out of your head by get­ting them onto paper.

Just Dot today. If you’ve watched the show, the idea of her cos­play­ing as Spock makes a lot of sense.

Stay tuned! More to come tomorrow.

Kirby 100, Part 4

This is the fourth and final install­ment in my cel­e­bra­tion of Jack Kir­by’s 100th birth­day this month. Which hap­pens to be today!

Like most of the oth­ers I’ve post­ed, today’s draw­ing came my way years back as a pho­to­copy of Kir­by’s pen­cils, from a sketch­book orig­i­nal­ly done for his wife Roz. It was lat­er repro­duced and pub­lished in book form as Jack Kir­by’s Heroes and Vil­lains. Like the oth­ers I’ve post­ed, this was a draw­ing that looked to me like it might be fun to take a crack at ink­ing it. So I did. And recent­ly col­ored it up for post­ing here.

This char­ac­ter (Ser­si) comes from a com­ic called The Eter­nals, which was one of a hand­ful of titles Kir­by pro­duced dur­ing his last stint at Mar­vel in the mid- to late-’70s. The seeds of this com­ic seem to have come from a very pop­u­lar book around this time by Erich von Däniken, enti­tled Char­i­ots of the Gods?. The book con­jec­tured that alien astro­nauts had vis­it­ed our world in the dis­tant past, and were mis­tak­en­ly thought by us to be gods. It’s easy to see how an idea like this could be fuel for Kir­by’s vivid imag­i­na­tion. Add to it Kir­by’s fas­ci­na­tion with myths and leg­ends, and he cooked up a very enter­tain­ing sce­nario from these ingredients.

Cer­tain sto­ries from Eter­nals still stand out in my mind. The saga of Karkas and the Reject, for exam­ple, which sub­vert­ed the usu­al assump­tions read­ers made about new char­ac­ters based on first impres­sions. Or “The Rus­sians are Com­ing!” in #11, or “The Astro­nauts!” in #13. Even in this lat­er stage of his career, Kir­by still had the goods.

If you caught onto the fact that each of my “Kir­by 100” posts has been in chrono­log­i­cal order of when the char­ac­ter first appeared, give your­self a gold star!

I men­tioned ear­li­er on that Kir­by’s work is very impor­tant to me. He was one of the ear­li­est com­ic book artists whose name and style impact­ed on me, and I was com­pelled to seek out his work. He may not nec­es­sar­i­ly have invent­ed all the “visu­al gram­mar” of draw­ing super­hero comics, but he cer­tain­ly per­fect­ed it! If an artist want­ed to do super­hero comics that had impact, it would have been a mis­take not to learn from Kir­by’s work.

Super­hero comics were not the only kind of mate­r­i­al he did, though. Kir­by worked in almost every genre of Amer­i­can comics, and brought the same inven­tive­ness and dynam­ic ener­gy to what­ev­er he did. He man­aged to cre­ate vital work in every decade, span­ning from the Gold­en Age of comics all the way up into the ’80s.

If for some rea­son you’re not famil­iar with Kir­by, do your­self a favor, and start delv­ing into the work of this tru­ly unique and impor­tant cre­ator! You are in for a treat!

Hap­py 100th, Mr. Kir­by! And a very heart­felt “thank you” for cre­at­ing so many great char­ac­ters and sto­ries that still live and inspire today. You were tru­ly one of a kind!

Kirby 100, Part 3

Wel­come back to anoth­er install­ment, cel­e­brat­ing Jack Kir­by’s 100th birth­day this month!

This time out is Thor. Again, the pen­cil draw­ing came my way years back in the form of a pho­to­copy, and I believe the orig­i­nal source was a sketch­book Jack did for his wife Roz, which ulti­mate­ly saw print as a book enti­tled Jack Kir­by’s Heroes and Vil­lains. It was yet anoth­er Kir­by draw­ing that caught my eye, and looked like it would be fun to try ink­ing. Fresh­ly col­ored for show­ing here.

When I first got to a point where I had suf­fi­cient funds to begin attempt­ing to col­lect more back issues of Kir­by’s Mar­vel work, I tend­ed to not seek out Jour­ney into Mys­tery (where Thor first appeared) or Thor issues. I just did­n’t like the inks as much as I did the inks over Kir­by on his oth­er strips. How­ev­er, as I read more about Kir­by’s work (and espe­cial­ly his Thor work), I real­ized that I was miss­ing out.

Kir­by’s Thor work is sig­nif­i­cant, because in it you see not only a bril­liant comics artist and sto­ry­teller doing a great job. You also see some­thing of Kir­by the man, and his inter­ests. Just as in Fan­tas­tic Four you can see Kir­by’s fas­ci­na­tion with the unknown, what’s out there, in Thor you see Kir­by’s fas­ci­na­tion with myth and leg­end (a touch­stone through­out his career). I feel that while all of Kir­by’s Mar­vel work is great, both Fan­tas­tic Four and Thor are the two main tent posts of his work dur­ing that peri­od which can’t be disregarded.

I tried in col­or­ing this to evoke the kind of col­or palette you see in those old Thor comics. It was fun!

Hap­py Kir­by 100! One more to go, if I can man­age it.

Kirby 100, Part 2

We’re back for anoth­er install­ment, cel­e­brat­ing Jack Kir­by’s 100th birth­day this month!

This time out, it’s the Chal­lengers of the Unknown. The pen­cils for this draw­ing came into my hands years back as a pho­to­copy. I believe the orig­i­nal came from a sketch­book Kir­by filled for his wife Roz, which saw print (in un-inked form) as a book enti­tled Jack Kir­by’s Heroes and Vil­lains. It looked like it would be fun to take a crack at ink­ing this draw­ing, so I did. And just recent­ly col­ored it for its appear­ance here.

There are a num­ber of inkers who got the oppor­tu­ni­ty to han­dle Kir­by’s pen­cils over the years. I like a num­ber of them for dif­fer­ent rea­sons (though if forced to, I could name a favorite). In the case of Chal­lengers, this strip is one of the rare instances of of Kir­by being inked by Wal­ly Wood. If you haven’t seen the pair­ing before, it’s kind of hard to imag­ine, but you’re in for a treat. Wal­ly Wood was a great artist in his own right, and the com­bi­na­tion of Kir­by and Wood on Chal­lengers (also on the syn­di­cat­ed news­pa­per strip Sky Mas­ters of the Space Force) plays to both artists’ strengths. Check it out, if you get the chance.

Chal­lengers is also sig­nif­i­cant in that it’s also pos­si­ble to view the strip as a dry run for the Fan­tas­tic Four: both are teams of four who go off on a flight at great risk, some­how sur­vive it, then in the wake of that expe­ri­ence, decide that it’s their call­ing to look into the unknown. There’s even an ear­ly Chal­lengers sto­ry where one mem­ber devel­ops flame pow­ers briefly!

There’s more to come, before the end of the month.

Hap­py Kir­by 100th!

Kirby 100, Part 1

This month would be Jack Kir­by’s 100th birth­day, and though things have been busy for me late­ly, I’m going to try to post some things this month by way of celebrating.

Most vis­i­tors here like­ly already know who Jack Kir­by is. I don’t think it’s pos­si­ble to over­state his impor­tance as a comics artist and cre­ator. So many of the char­ac­ters we’ve been enjoy­ing in the Mar­vel films, more often than not, Kir­by either co-cre­at­ed them or flat-out cre­at­ed them himself.

But you can find all that his­to­ry else­where. The point I want to make here is that Kir­by’s work mat­tered a great deal to me per­son­al­ly. I believe he was the one of the first com­ic book artists who I came to rec­og­nize by his name and his work. When I first came across it, it was pow­er­ful. It was, to my think­ing, comics the way they should be.

I went through a phase in high school where I was try­ing very hard to draw like Jack Kir­by. Not the most uncom­mon thing among fan artists back then, but (this is the embar­rass­ing part) my rea­son­ing was that at some point Mr. Kir­by would retire, and there need­ed to be some­one to pick up the baton. I thought (in my naiveté) maybe that should be me. As I said, it’s embar­rass­ing to admit, but I was young, and this shows how impor­tant I tru­ly felt his work was.

Of course, I grew out of this phase of think­ing I need­ed to be the next Jack Kir­by (A change I’m sure Jack would approve of). But there are still valu­able artis­tic lessons I picked up from study­ing his work that I can see in my work even today.

An expla­na­tion of this piece: years back now, a pho­to­copy of a Jack Kir­by Red Skull sketch came into my hands. Dat­ed 1970, as my trac­ing over his sig­na­ture indi­cates. It was clos­er to a lay­out than the full pen­cils we usu­al­ly see, but some­thing about it spoke to me, com­pelled me to take a crack at ink­ing it. I col­ored it for its appear­ance here.

I’ll be back soon with anoth­er piece.

Hap­py Kir­by 100!

“Oh, the Pain…”

PainI had­n’t planned on post­ing this one espe­cial­ly, but things have been busy here, and I did­n’t want to let anoth­er month go by with­out post­ing any­thing. So here you go!

I was asked to do an edi­to­r­i­al-type illus­tra­tion visu­al­iz­ing “pain” in a par­tic­u­lar way, and this is what I came up with. Style­wise, for some rea­son I grav­i­tat­ed towards want­i­ng this to look like it was done as a poster, per­haps some­what in the style of David Lance Goines. It remains for oth­ers to say whether or not I achieved that, but I was hap­py with the end result, not pained. 🙂

Jeff Bonivert’s Atomic Man

Atomic-Man“And now, for some­thing com­plete­ly different!”

I’m dig­ging deep for this one. The ’80s saw a lot of inter­est­ing, fun, odd, inde­pen­dent comics. Jeff Bonivert’s Atom­ic Man Comics was one of them.

I don’t remem­ber just how I first encoun­tered Jeff Bonivert’s work, but it most def­i­nite­ly caught my eye. It’s unique for the abstract geo­met­ric and graph­ic way he approach­es his draw­ings. I pick up a bit of an art deco or stream­lined feel to it in places. There’s no mis­tak­ing his work for any­one else’s.

I believe that like me, Jeff is from the Bay Area. There was a time in the ’80s when we even worked at the same place, but unfor­tu­nate­ly I nev­er got to meet him and talk comics (it was a pret­ty big place).

I some­how man­aged to get all three issues of Jef­f’s Atom­ic Man Comics back when they came out, and there’s a def­i­nite sense of fun to the pro­ceed­ings. Atom­ic Man is real­ly kind of a clas­sic-style comics hero. He has super-strength and invul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, but does­n’t appear to have any oth­er super­pow­ers beyond that. Jeff added some fresh ideas to the mix, in that Atom­ic Man is hap­pi­ly mar­ried, with two kids, liv­ing in San Fran­cis­co. Being from the Bay Area, that last part sort of mat­tered to me, because it seems like the tra­di­tion­al default for most super­heroes has been to base them in NYC (or some fic­ti­tious NYC surrogate).

For my Atom­ic Man salute, I thought a styl­is­tic exper­i­ment using Adobe Illus­tra­tor might be a good way of attempt­ing some­thing that could evoke the look of Jeff Bonivert’s work.

Atom­ic Man is ™ and © 2014 Jeff Bonivert.

20 Years

Kirby WatchmenIt’s come to my atten­tion that today marks 20 years since the pass­ing of Jack Kir­by. That brings a lot of things to mind.

I know where I was when I got the word. I’d start­ed a new career, work­ing in ani­ma­tion, and was not quite into my first full year at it. I was work­ing at Graz Enter­tain­ment on X‑Men, for my first boss in the busi­ness (who I also con­sid­er a men­tor and friend), Lar­ry Hous­ton. In those pre-inter­net days, Lar­ry was the one who first got word, and passed it to us. Obvi­ous­ly, for those of us on the crew who knew and loved Kirby’s work, our minds and our con­ver­sa­tion were occu­pied the rest of the day.

When I got home, I had a sud­den com­pul­sion to go to the long­box­es, and pull out every com­ic I had that Jack Kir­by had worked on. Then I sur­veyed what was left. There were a lot of big holes! I could have gone even fur­ther and pulled out all the titles that he’d had a hand in cre­at­ing, and that would’ve left an even big­ger hole. There would prob­a­bly be few­er comics in the box­es than out of them.

Jack has most def­i­nite­ly left his mark on comics, whether peo­ple want to see it or not. And he’s left behind a great lega­cy of work in all kinds of gen­res that we can still enjoy today. I can say he cer­tain­ly enriched my life with his work.

RIP, Mr. Kir­by. Your work lives on.

Heads Up!

Heads 1A sug­ges­tion was made to me recent­ly that it would be good if I were to do some kind of a post here that dis­played a num­ber of dif­fer­ent styles togeth­er, all at once. So this is what I came up with: a series of head shots, of dif­fer­ent types of char­ac­ters in dif­fer­ent styles.

It’s a pret­ty good exer­cise for an artist, I found. It makes you stretch a lit­tle bit, and it can be fun to see what you come up with. I think I may try this again at some point. Or maybe even a vari­a­tion on the theme: one char­ac­ter, dif­fer­ent styles. There’s a whole lot you can do with this idea.

Four Bananas Make a Bunch

Let It SplitI’m sure most of you remem­ber the Banana Splits. They were that famous and influ­en­tial rock band that changed the face of the ’60s with their music; songs that have stood the test of time and are still with us today. Late in the band’s career, things had begun to get hec­tic and stress­ful. The mem­bers’ lives were head­ing in dif­fer­ent direc­tions. They were grow­ing apart; no longer the same wide-eyed kids they were when they start­ed out. But before they called it a day, they put out one final album: Let It Split.

Okay, not real­ly. I just made up all that stuff. Knowl­edge­able vis­i­tors will real­ize that what I’ve done here is a riff off the cov­er of the Bea­t­les’ last album, Let It Be, only recast with the mem­bers of the Banana Splits. Going clock­wise from the upper left, you have Droop­er, Flee­gle, Snorky and Bingo.

Yes, when I was a kid, I would watch The Banana Splits Adven­ture Hour. Fun times. I’ll even admit to hav­ing sent away for the Banana Splits Fan Club Kit. No Sour Grapes Bunch for me! No sir! Sing it with me now: “Tra la la, la la la la,…” 🙂

Qui est Cette Fille?

BandetteI’m con­tin­u­ing with the theme from last time, talk­ing about good comics I’ve read recent­ly. The rea­son this post’s title is in French will become clear in a bit.

This time out, it’s Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover’s Ban­dette. From the moment I first saw art from this com­ic, I knew it would be right up my alley. But it’s only recent­ly that I was able to buy a copy. This is because up until now, Ban­dette did­n’t exist in phys­i­cal form. It was part of the Mon­key­brain line of dig­i­tal comics.

Here’s where I might sound like a bit of an old fogey, but I haven’t quite been able to cross over yet to pur­chas­ing comics that exist sole­ly in dig­i­tal form. I’m not anti-dig­i­tal media by any means! I love check­ing out my favorite web comics, and I love the fact that if I devel­oped a sud­den ran­dom crav­ing to buy mari­achi music at 2 am, I could pur­chase it instant­ly on iTunes. But even so, I can’t quite get past feel­ing a lit­tle odd over the fact there’s noth­ing phys­i­cal to show for those pur­chas­es. Feels a bit like buy­ing air, even though I know it’s not the case.

Any­how, in this case, I knew that as soon as Ban­dette became avail­able in phys­i­cal form, I’d want to pick up a copy. And I was not dis­ap­point­ed! Ban­dette Vol­ume One: Presto! is an absolute blast.

Her adven­tures take place in Paris (hence my post title). You might think from the visu­al that Ban­dette would be a super­heroine, but no! Actu­al­ly, she’s a thief! Albeit an incred­i­bly gift­ed one, (with “Presto!”, as she’d say) who occa­sion­al­ly comes to the aid of Police Inspec­tor Belgique.

Ban­dette is adorable, irre­press­ible, with je ne sais quoi and joie de vivre (and per­haps oth­er French phras­es that go beyond the extent of my lim­it­ed recall of my high school and col­lege French). You can’t help but like her! Some of it is due to the writ­ing (Paul Tobin dis­plays a tal­ent for giv­ing the dia­logue a French-feel­ing rhythm with­out resort­ing to pho­net­ic accents). A lot of it also comes from Colleen Coover’s art, which imbues Ban­dette with so much life and appeal, and spontaneity.

I’d think most read­ers junior high age and up (or old­er read­ers who are still some­what young at heart) will love this book. My only regret is that there isn’t a Vol­ume 2 ready to read right now! I’d def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend check­ing Ban­dette out, if you get the chance.

Before I close, it seems appro­pri­ate (giv­en my tim­ing, and the top­ic) to wish all my site vis­i­tors a joyeux noel et bonne année!

Ban­dette is ™ and © Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover.

Go, Molly, Go!

Molly Danger ColorIt’s occurred to me that it’s been awhile since I talked about any new comics I’ve read that I liked, and there’ve been more than a few recent­ly. So I thought this would be a good time to do that again.

This time out, I’m going to talk about Jamal Igle’s Mol­ly Dan­ger. Jamal is an artist and writer who has done a lot of work for DC, Mar­vel and oth­er pub­lish­ers. Mol­ly is the result of his decid­ing to throw his hat into the cre­ator-owned ring. I applaud when cre­ators do this. Not only is this good for the cre­ators, but we fans and read­ers win too!

Mol­ly Dan­ger is a ten-year-old girl, who just hap­pens to also have super-strength and invul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. She’s the res­i­dent super­hero of Coop­ersville, NY, pro­tect­ing res­i­dents from the men­ace of the “Super­me­chs” that crop up from time to time. Mol­ly even has a whole sup­port team work­ing with her, called D.A.R.T. (the Dan­ger Action Response Team).

This vol­ume is the first of a pro­ject­ed four vol­ume series. The book’s for­mat is larg­er than a stan­dard com­ic and in hard­cov­er, kind of like some of the Euro­pean albums I’ve seen. It’s a fun, all-ages ride that Igle has craft­ed here. And “craft” is the right word, as every aspect of this is lov­ing­ly and appeal­ing­ly crafted.

I get some of the same sense of fun from this that I used to get from read­ing my favorite Mar­vel or DC Comics when I was a kid. Not to imply that this book is done in some kind of “retro” style, because it’s not. Igle and his crew are using all the mod­ern tools at their dis­pos­al. There are ele­ments in the writ­ing that you prob­a­bly would not have seen in an old com­ic, but they make the char­ac­ters more relat­able to both young and old­er mod­ern read­ers alike. If any­thing, I’d say that what Igle’s got going here is per­haps some­thing of a sign­post for how peo­ple could approach doing mod­ern all-ages super­hero comics.

Style­wise, I’d put Jamal in the camp of the “com­ic book real­ists.” I sus­pect per­haps artists like Kevin Maguire might have been an influ­ence on him. But for my draw­ing here, I elect­ed to go my own way with it. I was kind of curi­ous to see what Mol­ly might look like with the old school col­or palette.

If you’re still a fan of good all-ages comics like I am, you might want to give Mol­ly a look!

Mol­ly Dan­ger is ™ and © Jamal Igle and Com­pa­ny LLC.

Thunder Enlightening, and a Big Bang

Thunder Girl Adventures #16What you’re see­ing here is actu­al­ly a draw­ing gen­er­at­ed some years ago for Big Bang Comics. It was a fake old com­ic cov­er, done for one of the His­to­ry issues we put togeth­er. Those issues con­coct­ed a whole fic­ti­tious back his­to­ry of Big Bang as a comics pub­lish­er (bor­row­ing their for­mat from the two com­plet­ed vol­umes of The Ster­anko His­to­ry of Comics). I did­n’t ink this image; if mem­o­ry serves, the inks were by Jeff Mey­er, who also inked my work on a num­ber of oth­er projects around that time.

The col­or on this is new, though (which is why you’re see­ing it here). I was recent­ly con­tact­ed by Big Bang head hon­chos Gary Carl­son and Chris Eck­er, asked if I’d be game to final­ly add col­or to this cov­er. They’ve recent­ly part­nered with a com­pa­ny named Pulp 2.0 Press to bring back some of the Big Bang prop­er­ties, and look at new ways of get­ting them out there. I under­stand this image might even­tu­al­ly end up on prod­ucts like t‑shirts, cof­fee mugs, etc. Which would be a very cool thing to see!

So this gives me the chance to talk about a cou­ple oth­er things, while this image is up. I believe I’ve men­tioned my Big Bang asso­ci­a­tion before, but haven’t got­ten into much detail about it. Though I did­n’t entire­ly get in on the ground floor, I came in pret­ty close to it. Gary and Chris had­n’t yet pub­lished their first few issues through Cal­iber, but were begin­ning to assem­ble the con­tents when I was intro­duced to Gary at Com­ic Con. This meet­ing came about because writer Nat Gertler and I had done a one-shot for Par­o­dy Press/Entity Comics called Mis­ter U.S.: 50 For­got­ten Years (This lat­er came out as Big Bang Comics #8). PP/EC tried to solic­it for it twice. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the num­bers weren’t there. But Pub­lish­er Don Chin thought there was some­thing there that might be of inter­est to Gary for what he and Chris were work­ing on, so Don made the introduction.

Gary and I hit it off right away. I was first brought in just to help design and draw a Simon/Kir­by-ish char­ac­ter they’d had an idea for, called the Badge. But they dis­cov­ered that I could also help with cre­at­ing logos, as well as design­ing a slew of oth­er char­ac­ters and doing occa­sion­al col­or work. I did­n’t just get to draw like Simon and Kir­by, but oth­er artists too, along the way. Plus I even had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to help out with sto­ry­line con­tri­bu­tions. It was a blast, and exact­ly the sort of thing you hope to get to do when you dream of doing comics as a kid. So, thanks, Gary and Chris!

And while I’m here, this is an oppor­tu­ni­ty for me to say some­thing about Thun­der Girl and Bill Fugate. Thun­der Girl was sort of Big Bang’s nod to Faw­cett’s Cap­tain Mar­vel. And Bill Fugate was the per­fect artist to bring her to life and draw her sto­ries. With­out Bil­l’s involve­ment from the begin­ning, she would not have been the same. Bil­l’s draw­ings just had “fun” com­ing out of every line on the page. His work was car­toon­ing of the high­est order, in the best pos­si­ble sense. I hon­est­ly think C.C. Beck would’ve liked Bil­l’s work a great deal. When­ev­er Bill man­aged to get a new Thun­der Girl sto­ry com­plet­ed for pub­li­ca­tion, it was an occa­sion. Heck, any time Bill pro­duced any comics work, you knew you were in for a real treat!

I admired many of my fel­low Big Bang con­trib­u­tors for their tal­ents and skills. With Bill, I con­sid­ered myself an out­right fan. I nev­er had the chance to meet him or exchange emails, tell him how much I tru­ly loved his work. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Bill passed away (much too soon!) back in Feb­ru­ary this year. He was not as well known a name in comics as I think he should’ve been. As I’ve told some peo­ple already: in anoth­er world, some very smart pub­lish­er would’ve paid Bill big bucks to cre­ate any comics he want­ed to draw. And those comics would’ve sold in real­ly huge numbers.

R.I.P., Bill. You are most def­i­nite­ly missed.

The State of Careifornia

Careifornia FlagApolo­gies up front. This was anoth­er of those visu­al ideas that get stuck in your brain, and have to come out. This one’s been lodged in there since one of my rou­tine morn­ing jogs some weeks back, see­ing a Cal­i­for­nia Flag stick­er on the back of some­one’s car. For some rea­son, my brain envi­sioned replac­ing the Cal­i­for­nia griz­zly bear on the flag with a Care Bear. And Grumpy just always seems to lend him­self to things like this.

So why am I draw­ing a Care Bear, this long after hav­ing worked on the prop­er­ty? Well, all I can plead here is that I worked with these char­ac­ters for two sea­sons’ worth of an ani­mat­ed series, as well as on sev­er­al direct-to-video fea­tures (in both 2D and CG). Plus Care Bears also has the dis­tinc­tion of being the only prop­er­ty I’ve done work on for more than one stu­dio. Maybe spend­ing that much time with it, per­haps the lit­tle guys are bound to be still some­where in the nooks and cran­nies of my brain, and they just have to come up for air sometimes.

Plus, the fact that some of the oth­er Care Bears posts I’ve put up here get a fair amount of hits prob­a­bly does­n’t hurt either. 🙂

The Forgotten Ones: Bee-29, the Bombardier

Bee-29There’s prob­a­bly a lot of ground I should cov­er to explain this one, so I’ll get right to it.

In doing research for a recent project (which you’ll find out about at a lat­er date), I was point­ed towards a web­site fea­tur­ing com­ic book char­ac­ters that are now report­ed­ly in the pub­lic domain. While going through all those char­ac­ters, it struck me that there was mate­r­i­al there which might be worth min­ing for future blog posts. As a result, this will be the first of a series of posts on “For­got­ten Ones,” which I may do from time to time.

For this inau­gur­al out­ing, I chose Bee-29, the Bom­bardier. Bee-29 is unique because so far as I know, he’s the only bee super­hero! He only made a few appear­ances back in 1945, but one of them was in a com­ic named for him. In the inter­ests of sav­ing col­umn space, if you’d like to read the entry for Bee-29 on the Pub­lic Domain Super Heroes site, you can check it out here.

If you’ve vis­it­ed this site much, you’ve prob­a­bly picked up on the fact I often like to try to find an angle to approach a char­ac­ter like this, some kind of a dif­fer­ent spin I can put on it instead of just repro­duc­ing some­thing ver­ba­tim. So I thought, “What if in some alter­nate world, Han­na-Bar­bera had picked up the rights to this char­ac­ter?” Going down that path lead to my attempt at an HB ver­sion of Bee-29 on the faux Gold Key cov­er you see here, since Gold Key han­dled most of the car­toon-based comics back in the day.

Let me go on record here and say that I am def­i­nite­ly a fan of the clas­sic Han­na-Bar­bera look. Yes, I grew up watch­ing those shows, but it’s more than that. Years ago when Han­na-Bar­bera was locat­ed on the 14th floor of the Impe­r­i­al Bank Build­ing in Sher­man Oaks, mul­ti­ple times a day I would walk by these great framed cels from shows like The Flint­stones and The Jet­sons, hang­ing on the walls in the hall­way. I saw how well-designed all those char­ac­ters were, and how strong­ly sil­hou­ette-ori­ent­ed they were. The HB design­ers took the restric­tions of lim­it­ed ani­ma­tion and small TV screens, and actu­al­ly turned them into strengths.

I’ve not had a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ty to attempt that clas­sic HB look, so this was a chance to ven­ture onto that play­ground a lit­tle bit. And I’d be remiss if I did­n’t tip my hat here and say thanks to my good friend Mark Chris­tiansen, who is tru­ly a clas­sic HB master.

The Mighty…Motor Scooter??

Thor on Pink ScooterNot long ago, I received an email from my friend and men­tor, Lar­ry Hous­ton. He’d stum­bled across the exis­tence of this toy motor scoot­er from the ’60s that had a fig­ure of Thor rid­ing it. Marx Toys had appar­ent­ly licensed the rights from Mar­vel Comics to man­u­fac­ture and sell these.

Oh, and I should­n’t for­get to men­tion that they made the motor scoot­er pink. Why Thor would even need to be tool­ing around on a motor scoot­er in the first place is one ques­tion. But why some­one at the toy com­pa­ny made the con­scious deci­sion that Thor’s scoot­er ought to be pink is one of those big ques­tions in life that I just don’t think we’ll ever have an answer to.

I had been aware of the exis­tence of this toy pre­vi­ous­ly, but had kind of for­got­ten about it until Lar­ry’s email remind­ed me. In response, I was able to show him evi­dence that not only had they done this with Thor, they’d sold toys of Cap­tain Amer­i­ca and Spi­der-Man on motor scoot­ers too. Spi­der-Man’s was also pink, but for some rea­son they allowed Cap to have a yel­low scoot­er. You can see all three toys here, if you’re curious.

Any­way, the men­tal image of Mar­vel’s god of thun­der on a pink motor scoot­er stuck with me. Some­times these things just have to come out, so there you go! Per­haps this could even start an inter­net meme, of peo­ple draw­ing Mar­vel super­heroes on pink motor scoot­ers! I mean, why not?

Captain Marvel is #1!

Captain Marvel #1 FakeOkay, I real­ize I’ve done a lot of Mar­vel Fam­i­ly-cen­tric posts here late­ly. I hon­est­ly intend­ed that I was going to move away from that this time. But I could­n’t help myself!

My orig­i­nal plan here was to do a straight recreation/reinterpretation of the cov­er of  Cap­tain Mar­vel #1, pub­lished by Mar­vel Comics in 1968 and fea­tur­ing their alien ver­sion of Cap­tain Mar­vel (Kree, to be spe­cif­ic). It was to have been kind of a lit­tle joke, that it would be a Cap­tain Mar­vel, but not the same Cap­tain Mar­vel I usu­al­ly draw. Plus, I’ve always kind of liked the Kree Cap­tain Mar­vel’s orig­i­nal green and white out­fit for some reason.

But then, as I was look­ing at the cov­er, I remem­bered a con­ver­sa­tion I’d had with FCA Edi­tor P.C. Hamer­linck. For those of us with an inter­est in comics his­to­ry (who did what, who pub­lished what, and when), some­times it’s fun to play a game of “What If?” You take events as they hap­pened, then pro­pose a change. It’s like throw­ing a stone into a stream, and see­ing what rip­ples it makes. In this case, P.C. and I once had a con­ver­sa­tion where he threw out the idea, “What if instead of DC pick­ing up the rights to Faw­cett’s Cap­tain Mar­vel, it had been Mar­vel Comics that had made that call?”

That con­ver­sa­tion sud­den­ly came to mind as I looked at the orig­i­nal ver­sion of this cov­er, and real­ized that the pose of the Kree Cap­tain would­n’t take much to rework it slight­ly and make it work just as well for the orig­i­nal Cap­tain Mar­vel. So I got hooked on the idea. This was the result.

Please bear with me for a lit­tle fan­boy indul­gence here: who do I think would’ve been the like­ly can­di­dates to do this book, if Mar­vel had bought the rights back then? Every­one’s obvi­ous first thought would like­ly be Jack Kir­by. How­ev­er, at that point in time, Kir­by’s con­tri­bu­tions to Mar­vel were mov­ing towards being most­ly just between the cov­ers of Fan­tas­tic Four and Thor. I believe it’s more like­ly that some­one from the sec­ond wave of Mar­vel cre­ators com­ing in at that time would’ve been giv­en this assign­ment. Art­wise, at the moment, I’m think­ing per­haps Bill Everett might’ve been the best choice. He had some of that Mar­vel ener­gy going for him, yet he also still had a cer­tain “car­toony-ness” to his work that I think Cap­tain Mar­vel needs.

The writ­ing side of the equa­tion is a no-brain­er. I’m sure Roy Thomas would’ve argued a very strong case for his being the one to get this assign­ment. And I’m think­ing Stan Lee most like­ly would’ve giv­en in and hand­ed the book to him.

Zita’s Back!

If you’ve checked in on my site from time to time, you may have seen my post­ing about the graph­ic nov­el Zita the Space­girl last year. My last com­ment on the sub­ject then (direct­ed at author Ben Hatke) was “…I hope you have plans for more Zita in the future.” Thank­ful­ly, the future is now!

I’m a lit­tle late men­tion­ing it, but Leg­ends of Zita the Space­girl (book #2 in the series now) came out last month. Based on the first book, Ben set my expec­ta­tions pret­ty high for this new one. And he did not dis­ap­point! Pret­ty much all the things I said last time hold true of this new book too. I don’t want to just repeat myself, but I would like to make some fur­ther obser­va­tions about Ben’s work here. The book also spurred some thoughts about comics in gen­er­al, which fit this discussion.

I’d men­tioned before how much charm Ben Hatke’s art­work has. There’s a nice, organ­ic loose­ness to his approach. He is unapolo­get­i­cal­ly a car­toon­ist (and I don’t under­stand why in some fan quar­ters, “car­toony” is a pejo­ra­tive. Per­son­al­ly, I’ve always grav­i­tat­ed towards artists who are strong styl­ists). I had­n’t made this asso­ci­a­tion pre­vi­ous­ly, but this time out I real­ized his work was remind­ing me a lit­tle bit of the com­ic Mars by Hempel and Wheat­ley, pub­lished back in the ’80s. While I can’t go so far as to pro­claim Hempel and Wheat­ley’s Mars was an influ­ence on Ben, it seems like visu­al­ly he’s com­ing from a sim­i­lar place. Or per­haps they have some influ­ences in com­mon. Whether there’s any con­nec­tion or not, in both cas­es, the visu­al approach allows for a much wider and more imag­i­na­tive range of char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions than per­haps a more real­is­tic take would allow.

And the uni­verse Ben has cre­at­ed for Zita is quite imag­i­na­tive! Lots of strange crea­tures and wild con­cepts going on in this book. With­out giv­ing any­thing away, there are a cou­ple of ideas in there that I think would even do Jack Kir­by proud.

Anoth­er thing I was more con­scious of this time is the fact that Ben is not afraid to do whole sequences with­out any dia­logue or cap­tions. He’s will­ing to let his art­work car­ry the whole bur­den of telling the sto­ry at points, through the action, facial expres­sions and pos­es. I think that’s great, and real­ly kind of brave. Doing a book like this (even as writer/artist), I imag­ine there’s a temp­ta­tion to fall back more on the words to car­ry the weight of your sto­ry. While it might be more of a chal­lenge, it can be much more sat­is­fy­ing in some ways if you can get as much as pos­si­ble of the sto­ry across using just your visu­als. The bot­tom line is that comics is a visu­al medi­um. It is quite pos­si­ble to do a com­ic with no words (in fact, it’s been done sev­er­al times over the years). But it’s not pos­si­ble to do a com­ic with­out pictures.

There’s been a lot of debate in recent years about there not being enough comics that are appro­pri­ate for kids. Often the way peo­ple attempt to address that is to do spe­cif­ic “kids’ comics.” In my opin­ion, that’s a risky way to go. The poten­tial pit­fall in that approach is that there can be a temp­ta­tion dumb things down, and talk down to the kids. Kids aren’t stu­pid. If you think back to when you were a kid, you knew it when peo­ple were talk­ing down to you, and I’ll bet you did­n’t like it any more then than you do now. Per­son­al­ly, I believe the bet­ter approach is to attempt to do “all-ages” comics that work on mul­ti­ple lev­els at once. Bring­ing this back on-top­ic, the Zita books are a good exam­ple of that. A younger read­er will appre­ci­ate them on one lev­el, while old­er read­ers will find themes and aspects that res­onate with them on a whole oth­er lev­el. Much like the best chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture has always done.

I guess I should talk a lit­tle about the illustration(s) I did to accom­pa­ny this arti­cle (since this site’s sup­posed to be about me draw­ing!). This image is kind of riff­ing off some visu­als and sit­u­a­tions in the book. I don’t want to say too much about the plot and spoil any­thing. But I thought it would be fun to take the poster idea from the book and real­ly do it up, like a full-blown silkscreened poster (inspired by the work of Strongstuff, AKA Tom Whalen).

Any­way, if you like real­ly good all-ages comics, I rec­om­mend you get your hands on this one. If you haven’t already picked up the first vol­ume, Zita the Space­girl, get ’em both!

It’s the Fourth of July!

It’s Inde­pen­dence Day today in the U.S. of A.! That usu­al­ly means time off, doing fun things like pic­nics or bar­be­cues with friends, pos­si­bly tak­ing in a fire­works show (depend­ing on where you live), and maybe hope­ful­ly even giv­ing a thought to some of the free­doms we’re priv­i­leged to enjoy in this coun­try, which we can some­times take for granted.

This post is most­ly moti­vat­ed by the fact that real­iz­ing the hol­i­day was com­ing up, I had an image pop into my mind appro­pri­ate for the day, so I thought I’d go for it! As not­ed there, the char­ac­ter is Miss Fire­crack­er from Big Bang Comics, though she’s depict­ed here in a dif­fer­ent style from how she ever appeared in Big Bang.

This is a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to talk about Big Bang Comics a lit­tle bit. Some peo­ple read­ing this may know that I was a con­trib­u­tor to Big Bang through its most active years. Though I can’t claim to have been there from the absolute very begin­ning, I did get in pret­ty ear­ly on. The char­ac­ter I had the most involve­ment in shap­ing would’ve been the Badge. But thanks to Big Bang hon­chos Gary Carl­son and Chris Eck­er, I got the chance to get my hands into a whole lot more than that.

Not only did I get to draw a num­ber of oth­er Big Bang char­ac­ters (par­tic­u­lar­ly on fake com­ic cov­ers as seen in “The Big Bang His­to­ry of Comics” issues of Big Bang Comics), I got to design sev­er­al oth­er char­ac­ters, cre­ate logos, even kib­itz on some sto­ry­lines, ink and col­or. The way I looked at Big Bang, it was sort of  “comics his­to­ry through a fun­house mir­ror.” You got to cre­ate things that felt famil­iar, yet new at the same time. It was a real­ly fun ride, guys! Thanks much!

I’ve got anoth­er post already in the pipeline that I hope to be able to pull the trig­ger on soon, but that’s it for this one. Have a great 4th, everyone!

The 50th

This is not exact­ly some­thing brand new, but done a few years back for the invites to my Mom and Dad’s 50th Anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion. I thought maybe a few more peo­ple than just those who saw it back then might enjoy it.

I don’t nor­mal­ly do a lot of car­i­ca­ture. So I fig­ured as long as I was going to attempt it, I might take my cues from one of the best: Al Hirschfeld. It was def­i­nite­ly a chal­lenge to work this way, but I was hap­py with the result. Oh; don’t strain your eyes look­ing for “Ninas,” because there aren’t any!

Not much more to say about this right now, except; Mom, Dad, I love you very much.

The Ultimate Comic Strip

I see this mon­th’s zip­ping by, and as busy as I am, I’m just not at a point where I can post any­thing cur­rent and new yet. So instead of that, here’s some­thing old that might be of interest.

This was done while I attend­ed Art Cen­ter in Pasade­na, back in the ear­ly ’90s. Some of the specifics are lost to time now, but I had an illus­tra­tion class at the time, and for our final, we were to do a self-por­trait. The para­me­ters of the assign­ment and how you could inter­pret it were wide open.

I was­n’t sure what to do, how to approach it, and was wrack­ing my brains. Until one of my friends in the class made the off­hand com­ment, “Oh, you’ll just do yours as a com­ic, right?” It was one of those fore­head-slap­ping moments. I was too close to it to see the solu­tion myself, though it was the obvi­ous way to go in the eyes of my friends in the class who knew my inter­est in comics.

And this was the result. Though I think I draw a bit bet­ter now (I did this twen­ty years ago now?! Yeesh!), I still kind of like this. I think most artists can relate, at some point or anoth­er. Any­way, enjoy! I hope to have some new cur­rent work to post next time.

The Man from Planet X

A con­fes­sion: I like a lot of old movies. And I have a bit of a soft spot for many of the old sci-fi or mon­ster movies. Recent­ly, I had the chance to watch The Man from Plan­et X (cour­tesy of TCM and my DVR), which I’d nev­er seen before. I had only ever run across men­tions of it as a kid from time to time in library books on sci-fi films. Turned out the film was decent, but noth­ing real­ly all that special…except for one thing: the title char­ac­ter. There was some­thing real­ly strik­ing about the alien design for this film.

When you boil it down, I sup­pose there’s not all that much to it. It’s just a nice bit of sculp­tur­al design for the head and hel­met assem­bly. The thing that prob­a­bly sells the alien and makes him mem­o­rable is the built-in up-light­ing they includ­ed in his hel­met, so he car­ried “dra­ma” with him wher­ev­er he went. Oth­ers’ mileage may vary, but the visu­al was strik­ing enough to lodge in my head at least. It’s a good exam­ple of mak­ing very effec­tive use of what was prob­a­bly a lim­it­ed pro­duc­tion budget.

So here’s my shot at the Man from Plan­et X. I saw it as a chance to play around with some dra­mat­ic light­ing and black-spot­ting. It’s a bit of an exper­i­ment, in that I tried to ink it the way Mil­ton Can­iff and Noel Sick­les used to do: bang­ing in all my blacks first with a brush (scary!), then going back in with pen where it still need­ed it. I do like the whole “lost edges” effect that work­ing this way helps to achieve.

This scene did­n’t exact­ly hap­pen this way in the movie, but so what? It’s my blog, and I can draw what I want! And any­way, it seems a rea­son­ably appro­pri­ate image for Halloween.

One last thing here, a bit of triv­ia: the female lead in the film was Mar­garet Field, the moth­er of Sal­ly Field. I don’t know if any­thing like that would ever come up in a game of Triv­ial Pur­suit or not, but if so, don’t say I nev­er did any­thing for you!

UPDATE: FCA Edi­tor P.C. Hamer­linck made me aware of the fact Faw­cett had actu­al­ly pub­lished a com­ic adapt­ing this movie, with art by Kurt Schaf­fen­berg­er, and that you can check out a b/w UK reprint of it here. Inter­est­ing to see Schaf­fen­berg­er take his art in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion from what we’re used to see­ing him do, and to note that there are places in the com­ic where they diverged from the movie! Thanks Paul!

Obey the Bear!

Okay, I prob­a­bly need to explain about this one. To do that, I need to get into a lit­tle of the “behind the scenes” work­ings of WordPress.

A few months back, I decid­ed it would be a good thing to have some kind of a hit counter for my site, run­ning in the back­ground. The beau­ty of Word­Press is that there’s like­ly a Plu­g­in you can install for just about any pur­pose. I want­ed a Plu­g­in that would give me an idea of how many hits my site was get­ting, where peo­ple were com­ing from, what they were look­ing at, etc. It’s been fas­ci­nat­ing to watch this info accu­mu­late as time goes by. In some cas­es, it’s been sur­pris­ing to see what posts and images get more hits than oth­ers. And one thing that’s turned up is that the Care Bears images on my site have been pret­ty popular.

So, I’m no dum­my; it made sense to per­haps gen­er­ate one more. I revis­it­ed a Post-it draw­ing I did as a goof back when I was work­ing on “Care Bears,” pol­ish­ing it up in Adobe Illus­tra­tor. Some of you will rec­og­nize this as a play on Shep­ard Fairey’s OBEY Giant image, fea­tur­ing the late wrestler André the Giant done up pro­pa­gan­da poster style. Per­haps it’s a bit of an oblique gag to play off that icon­ic imagery with a Care Bear, but have you ever had one of those visu­al ideas that get stuck in your head and won’t go away unless you get them out on paper? You oth­er artists out there know what I’m talk­ing about.

So here you are, for what­ev­er it’s worth. And for those who won­der which Bear this is, I fig­ure it’s prob­a­bly Grumpy. Because he’s cool like that.

Missile Mouse

I men­tioned ear­li­er that from time to time, I intend to do posts of “inspi­ra­tional stuff.” Basi­cal­ly, we’re talk­ing comics I’ve come across that I think are real­ly good, and kind of inspire you to draw. So here’s another.

If you’ve ever checked out the list of artists over in my side­bar, per­haps you’ve looked at the work of Jake Park­er. He’s one of those artists that seem to strad­dle mul­ti­ple media, includ­ing comics and ani­ma­tion. His stuff is very imag­i­na­tive, appeal­ing and a lot of fun to look at.

One of Jake’s cre­ations, Mis­sile Mouse, has now been fea­tured in two books: The Star Crush­er and Res­cue on Tanki­um 3 (Actu­al­ly, Mis­sile Mouse has appeared in three books, if you want to count Flight Explor­er Vol. 1) . You can buy them here. Mis­sile Mouse is a tough lit­tle char­ac­ter who usu­al­ly has to face down char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions that are much big­ger than him, but he nev­er backs down. He always does what he has to do.

In my opin­ion, one of the best aspects of these books is the way every­thing’s so clear­ly been thought out in great detail. Jake is a “world-builder.” He plain­ly puts a lot of thought into design­ing even the tini­est prop. In the back of Res­cue on Tanki­um 3 is a sec­tion where among oth­er things, he goes into great detail about all of Mis­sile Mouse’s gear, how it’s assem­bled, what prin­ci­ples it works on. The lev­el of back detail and thought put into these books makes for a fun and rich read­ing expe­ri­ence. They’re good all-ages reads, and worth check­ing out.

Since it’s my art­blog, of course I’ve got to put up some art. So up top is my Mis­sile Mouse fan art piece. As usu­al, my ani­ma­tion train­ing seems to have com­pelled me to try to get as close to on-mod­el as I can.  I did some exper­i­ment­ing with the col­or meth­ods, because if I can’t do that here, where can I? It struck me that most­ly we’ve seen Mis­sile Mouse inter­act­ing with beings who are a good deal big­ger than he is (play­ing the “David and Goliath” card very well), so I thought it might be fun to see him inter­act with some­thing much small­er than himself.

Mis­sile Mouse is ™ and © Jake Parker.

UPDATE: If you look in the Com­ments below, you’ll see that Jake has seen this post. He appar­ent­ly liked my draw­ing well enough to post it on his own site here. I’m very flat­tered! Thanks, Jake!

Rasputin

Cour­tesy of Turn­er Clas­sic Movies and my DVR (what a great inven­tion!), I had the chance not long ago to check out a cou­ple of old movies I’d nev­er seen before, both deal­ing with the infa­mous Rasputin. TCM played both films back to back when they aired. First on the agen­da was Rasputin and the Empress from 1932, with Lionel Bar­ry­more play­ing Rasputin (and doing a good and creepy job of it, too!). They fol­lowed that up with Christo­pher Lee play­ing the role in the 1966 Ham­mer Stu­dios film Rasputin: The Mad Monk. Lee, as usu­al, did a great job. He’s always a lot of fun to watch.

I don’t pre­tend to be any kind of an expert on the his­tor­i­cal Rasputin, so I can’t com­ment on the accu­ra­cy of either of these films. But they were fas­ci­nat­ing to watch. And obvi­ous­ly I’m not the only one who finds the char­ac­ter intrigu­ing; look­ing on IMDB, the first time some­one played Rasputin on film was back in 1917, only one year after his death. And he keeps crop­ping up as a char­ac­ter in films, to this day!

With­out try­ing for a like­ness of either Bar­ry­more or Lee (or the real Rasputin), I thought it might be fun to take a shot at a char­ac­ter draw­ing. I only meant to do one draw­ing, but then I was­n’t entire­ly sure about how it was com­ing out, so I kept going, envi­sion­ing dif­fer­ent approach­es. There’s a whole bunch of exper­i­men­ta­tion going on here, with styles, tools, col­or­ing etc. Instead of mak­ing myself crazy try­ing to decide which way to go, I thought I’d just go ahead and run them all up the flag­pole, let the chips fall where they may. And that’s prob­a­bly more than enough Rasputin for any­body in one dose!

I was a one-man meme!

Tunes!

Okay, I know this is sup­posed to be my portfolio/artblog. But here’s the thing: any­one who knows me knows that I also love music. If you come up to my desk while I’m work­ing at some stu­dio, odds are I’ve got tunes play­ing in the back­ground. My iTunes is loaded with almost 70 GB of music. In addi­tion to my art, it’s anoth­er big part of who I am.

So to that end, I thought I’d add some music links over in the side­bar. These are far from being the only bands and artists I like! They’re only a small hand­ful of musi­cians who would leave a notice­able absence for me if they were removed from my iTunes and CD libraries. If you haven’t heard some of these per­form­ers, do your­self a favor and put some­thing new in your ears! Maybe I’ll add to the list from time to time.

And of course, since this is sup­posed to be an art­blog, I ough­ta post some art to go with this announce­ment, right? The illus­tra­tion up top was part of an assign­ment I did for one of my class­es back when I was attend­ing Art Cen­ter, to illus­trate and design a CD pack­age. I had no Pho­to­shop skills back then, so it’s all pen & ink with water­col­ors. Today, I’d prob­a­bly still draw some­thing like this con­ven­tion­al­ly, but I’d use Pho­to­shop for the color.

Animation Insider

“Pon­tif­i­ca­tion”

I did an inter­view with the site Ani­ma­tion Insider.com, which they just post­ed. You can check it out here, if you like. The site has inter­views with a num­ber of us who toil in the ani­ma­tion trench­es, if you have any curios­i­ty about what that’s like, what dif­fer­ent kinds of things we all do, or how we got there. We’re a pret­ty var­ied bunch.

And, of course, I got­ta post some art to go with this announce­ment. I had an idea of an image, and thought it might work to do it in Illus­tra­tor as an exper­i­ment. Guess the “no con­tain­ment lines” look of the project I teased in my pre­vi­ous post was still in the back of my mind. And that’s all for this one, before I get accused of liv­ing up to this illustration!

Bloobee blee blah!

How to Care for Your Monster

Here’s anoth­er “inspi­ra­tional stuff” post for you. It isn’t about a com­ic this time, but a book. One that I’m not even sure is in print any­more. But if not, it should be.

I came across this book called How to Care for Your Mon­ster when I was about 9 or 10 years old. As a kid, there are often cool things which cross your path and cap­ture your atten­tion for a while. Every so often though, you get your hands on some­thing and real­ize that not only do you think it’s cool now, you know for a fact that you will still think it’s cool even when you’re an adult. And How to Care for Your Mon­ster was one of those things for me.

The book was writ­ten and drawn by Nel­son Brid­well (the same guy respon­si­ble for Clif­ford the Big Red Dog, I believe). The con­cept was pret­ty clever; talk­ing about var­i­ous types of clas­sic mon­sters as if they were pets, serv­ing as a guide to the do’s and don’ts of car­ing for them. The humor is even mild­ly bent at points, in a way that I’m not sure a mod­ern kids’ book could get away with. I thought this book was great then, and I still think so now!

The draw­ing above is my attempt (I put the empha­sis on the word “attempt”) at try­ing to cap­ture the style and feel of the illus­tra­tions in the book. “Fan art,” kin­da. I prob­a­bly should’ve just drawn this in my own style, but my ani­ma­tion train­ing com­pelled me to attempt to put it on-mod­el. Still, it was an inter­est­ing experiment.

Any­way, it’s a real­ly fun book. If you ever come across a used copy at a rea­son­able price, give it a look! As a pub­lic ser­vice, I’m post­ing a scan at right of the cov­er of my very own much-loved copy that I’ve hung onto for all these years, so you’ll know what you’re look­ing for. Don’t say I nev­er did any­thing for you!

How to Care for Your Mon­ster is ©1970 Nor­man Bridwell.

 

Zita the Spacegirl

Before talk­ing about the illus­tra­tion at right, I need to set the stage and explain what I’m doing here. Please bear with me.

It will come as no sur­prise (if you know me, or have looked around my site) that I’m a long-time fan of comics. It’s a top­ic I can go on at length about (and have, at times!). Now there are a lot of things I real­ly have no use for in mod­ern comics. But it’s way too easy to talk about those. It strikes me it’d be a waste of time and space for me to go rant­i­ng on my blog about what I don’t like in comics.

Instead, I thought it might be more worth­while to take a pos­i­tive tack and point out comics (or oth­er books and things) I’ve come across that I like, and have found inspir­ing. So from time to time, I’ll do posts about inspi­ra­tional stuff I’ve come across. It may be new, or some­thing old. But these are the kinds of things that remind me why I fell in love with comics (and car­toons and sto­ry­telling) in the first place. Maybe you’ll like them too.

For my first install­ment along those lines, here’s a bit of “fan art” I gen­er­at­ed of Zita the Space­girl. Cre­at­ed by artist/author Ben Hatke, I picked this book up a few weeks back. I’d pre-ordered it on a whim, based pure­ly on the cov­er art and the sto­ry descrip­tion. I was not dis­ap­point­ed. In full col­or and clock­ing in at over 180+ pages, it def­i­nite­ly qual­i­fies as a graph­ic nov­el. Hatke’s art is loaded with charm, and he’s craft­ed a sol­id all-ages book. Zita faces some chal­lenges and some hard choic­es that kids will under­stand, but per­haps adult read­ers will find addi­tion­al res­o­nance with (much like Pixar movies). I thor­ough­ly enjoyed the book. It’s the kind of thing that gives you hope for the future of comics.

Zita the Space­girl is ™ and © Ben Hatke.

UPDATE: You might notice in the Com­ments that Ben some­how dis­cov­ered my post here, and asked if he could re-post my Zita draw­ing over on his own blog. Which he did, along with a cou­ple oth­er cool Zita draw­ings. Thanks, Ben!

By Popular Demand

Okay, “pop­u­lar demand” may be stretch­ing things, but I’ve had two or three peo­ple ask­ing me about this late­ly. I actu­al­ly was­n’t plan­ning on post­ing this one. I was begin­ning to feel like maybe I was post­ing too much old stuff, and should stick to more new work. But when you’ve got mul­ti­ple peo­ple sep­a­rate­ly ask­ing about one spe­cif­ic draw­ing they remem­ber that you did awhile back, it seems like maybe that’s some­thing to pay atten­tion to.

This is a draw­ing I’d done back when I was work­ing on “The Real Adven­tures of Jon­ny Quest” at Han­na-Bar­bera. Noth­ing to do with the show at all; this was just one of those goofy ideas that pop into your head while you’re work­ing on a series, and it won’t let go until you get it out on paper. I can’t explain where it came from, but hey; would­n’t it be cool to see a female ver­sion of Race Ban­non run­ning around kick­ing butt? I mean, it total­ly worked for Star­buck in the new “Bat­tlestar Galactica.”

Pre-Pho­to­shop days for me, this was col­ored with mark­ers. There was anoth­er Jon­ny Quest draw­ing I did around this time that I post­ed in my Gallery. You can check that out here if you like.

I’ll try to have some new stuff for next time.

Is There an Echo in Here?

Just mov­ing in to the new place here, fig­ur­ing out where to put stuff. Hope­ful­ly, it won’t take me too long. Bear with me while I try to get this sort­ed out.

Why the image? Well, it’s just a cou­ple days after Hal­loween, and I think this would look too bor­ing with­out a lit­tle visu­al inter­est. Plus it gives me an oppor­tu­ni­ty to try to learn how to work all the var­i­ous han­dles, noz­zles and gear shifts around here.