Mary’s Dad

FCA Marc Swayze Tribute CoverNow that it’s a new month, I’ve got clear­ance to reveal the last two of those images I teased you with pre­vi­ous­ly. These will both be appear­ing in the FCA por­tion of the upcom­ing August cov­er-dat­ed issue of Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego (avail­able start­ing in July, so you don’t have to wait all that long!).

First up is my FCA cov­er, done as a trib­ute to Gold­en Age artist Marc Swayze. While the orig­i­nal order to give Bil­ly Batson/Captain Mar­vel a sis­ter may have come down from the Faw­cett front office, the job fell to Mr. Swayze to bring her to life. He designed Mary and drew at least her first cou­ple of appear­ances, before being moved on to oth­er jobs. So I think it could be argued that Marc Swayze deserves the title of Mary Mar­vel’s hon­orary father.

This FCA issue is appear­ing in the month which would’ve been Mr. Swayze’s 100th birth­day. Though he did­n’t quite make that mile­stone, it’s still a worth­while moment to pause and give trib­ute. FCA read­ers know Mr. Swayze had a long-run­ning col­umn there, enti­tled “We Did­n’t Know…It Was the Gold­en Age!” Writ­ten in a very appeal­ing­ly gra­cious and hum­ble style, the read­er got the priv­i­lege of look­ing in on snap­shots of rem­i­nis­cence tak­en at dif­fer­ent moments in Mr. Swayze’s life. It was­n’t all about the comics; this man lived a very full and rich life. Hence my inscrip­tion. He and his con­tri­bu­tions to FCA will be missed.

I was huge­ly hon­ored to be asked to do this trib­ute cov­er, and want­ed to be sure to do right by Mr. Swayze. FCA Edi­tor P.C. Hamer­linck and I bat­ted a num­ber of ideas back and forth before we set­tled on a con­cept we both liked and felt was fit­ting. My first incli­na­tion of course was to try to just flat-out mim­ic Mr. Swayze’s style, make it look like maybe he drew it him­self. But P.C. made it clear that was­n’t what he want­ed. He was after my ver­sion of Mr. Swayze’s Mary. I hope I’ve done them both justice.

Binder Column HeaderThe sec­ond image (at left) is a head­er for a new reg­u­lar col­umn debut­ing in FCA the same month. You can see the title there in the art. This col­umn will fea­ture the writ­ing and rem­i­nis­cences of writer Otto Binder, a cre­ative dynamo who had an enor­mous hand in shap­ing not only Cap­tain Mar­vel and the Mar­vel Fam­i­ly for Faw­cett, but he lat­er made huge con­tri­bu­tions to Super­man’s mythol­o­gy as well! And that’s real­ly just the tip of the ice­berg. I’m look­ing for­ward to read­ing these columns and find­ing out what he has to say.

Of Mad Scientists and Big Red Cheeses

FCA Colón/RubinsteinLooks like I missed post­ing last month, due to still being pret­ty busy. Again, that’s a good thing! How­ev­er, now that it’s a new month, I’ve got clear­ance to reveal in full one of the three items I teased back in Feb­ru­ary. This is a cov­er for anoth­er issue of FCA, appear­ing in the upcom­ing July issue of Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego mag­a­zine (actu­al­ly on stands in June, so you don’t have to wait that long!).

Right up front, I need to make it clear that I did not pen­cil or ink this cov­er. It was drawn by Ernie Colón, and inked by Joe Rubin­stein. If you’re famil­iar with those gen­tle­men and their work, that may sound like an unusu­al pair­ing to you at first. I know it did to me, but I’m told that they are col­lab­o­rat­ing quite a bit in recent times. (And if you’re not famil­iar with them, let your fin­gers get to googling!)

So why did I post this on my site if I did­n’t draw it? It’s because I col­ored it. FCA Edi­tor P.C. Hamer­linck con­tact­ed me to ask if I’d be will­ing to, and I said “yes.” Some­thing about the way this was put togeth­er remind­ed me a bit of those clas­sic old illus­trat­ed mag­a­zine cov­ers (for exam­ple, The Sat­ur­day Evening Post). So I tried to give the col­ors on this a lit­tle more of a painter­ly feel than I’ve attempt­ed before, though that might not be entire­ly vis­i­ble at this res­o­lu­tion. I hope Mr. Colón and Mr. Rubin­stein feel I did jus­tice to their work.

Again with the Teasing!

FCA Teaser 3BDue to “busy-ness” here late­ly (a good thing), I’m falling back on the ol’ reli­able tease once again.

The images you’re see­ing here are details from a few illus­tra­tions that have crossed my desk this month which I had a hand in gen­er­at­ing, in one capac­i­ty or anoth­er. These were all done for the FCA sec­tion of Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego mag­a­zine, pub­lished by Twom­or­rows. Full images will appear on my site even­tu­al­ly, once I’ve been giv­en the “all clear” to do so. Mean­time, hope­ful­ly there’s enough here to whet your appetite to see more at a lat­er date.

FCA Teaser 3AI hope the New Year is being good to you all thus far.

FCA Teaser 3C

Clutch Escargot!

Clutch Escargot CoverIt’s a new year, and I’ve got some­thing new to post. Well, tech­ni­cal­ly it’s not real­ly new, but it will be new to you readers.

Meet Clutch Escar­got and his team, all set for hi-octane adven­ture! Com­ing to you straight from the fevered mind of my friend, the love­ly and tal­ent­ed Jim Sten­strum. If you are a long­time comics fan, you may know Jim best as a writer (he wrote a lot of mem­o­rable clas­sic com­ic sto­ries pub­lished by War­ren). But Jim has also had a sec­ond career in ani­ma­tion, where he is known as quite a tal­ent­ed artist and char­ac­ter design­er. Which makes him a dou­ble threat. And we won’t even get into the years in-between those two careers, where he devel­oped quite a rep­u­ta­tion as a two-fist­ed globe-trot­ting mer­ce­nary. No, real­ly; it’s best we don’t talk about that.

The art you see here was pen­ciled by Jim. He asked me to do the hon­ors of ink­ing and col­or­ing it, so that’s what my con­tri­bu­tion was. I’ve worked with Jim many, many times over the years on var­i­ous ani­ma­tion projects, and it’s no exag­ger­a­tion to say I’ve most like­ly inked a thou­sand of his char­ac­ter designs. It’s always a blast. So say­ing “yes” when he invit­ed me to help him out with this was a no-brain­er. I think the end result is fun. I’d buy this comic.

That’s kind of my ver­sion of what this is and how it came to be. But make sure you don’t miss out on read­ing Jim’s ver­sion over here.

Let’s make sure to do the offi­cial stuff too: Clutch Escar­got is ™ and © 2011 Jim Stenstrum.

Hap­py New Year, y’all! Here’s to a great 2013.

“Sorry,…What Was Your Name Again?”

Hm. Where to begin to explain this one?

This orig­i­nal­ly start­ed out intend­ed to be just a sketch, done for John Pierce. But as these things some­times hap­pen with me, it sort of took on a whole life of its own. John is a friend, an email cor­re­spon­dent, a long­time comics fan and writer. You may have seen his work in some mag­a­zines about comics like Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego/FCA (the Faw­cett Col­lec­tors of America).

Any­way, John has a char­ac­ter he cre­at­ed called Jon­ni Star. Her sto­ries have appeared in a few small press comics here and there, usu­al­ly illus­trat­ed by Brazil­ian artist Emir Ribeiro. (I even took a crack at draw­ing Jon­ni myself once, and you can see the result here in my Gallery). John had an idea for a com­ic book char­ac­ter that John­na (Jon­ni’s civil­ian iden­ti­ty) liked to read about, called Mara­cana, the Invin­ci­ble Eagle. Which I guess makes Mara­cana a com­ic with­in a comic.

Most comics fans will like­ly be able to sort out for them­selves which char­ac­ter arche­type Mara­cana’s descend­ed from. But John has some inter­est­ing twists in there too, like hav­ing her root­ed in a more Celtic-influ­enced cul­ture instead of the Gre­co-Roman type one might tend to usu­al­ly expect with a char­ac­ter like this. Like I say, this start­ed out intend­ed to be just a sketch, but I guess I got car­ried away and could­n’t help myself. I thought the end result was fun. Seemed like I might just as well go ahead and post it here, while I’m at it.

Mara­cana the Invin­ci­ble Eagle is ™ and © John Pierce.

Frankenstein and Dracula

What? These weren’t the guys you were expecting? 🙂

Appar­ent­ly back in the mid/late-’60s, some­one at Dell Comics thought it would be a good idea to take some of the clas­sic mon­sters and re-imag­ine them as super­heroes. There had been a sort of resur­gence of inter­est in the old Uni­ver­sal Mon­sters, due to their expo­sure to a new gen­er­a­tion on TV. You cou­ple that with a burst of inter­est around that time in super­heroes from a pop/camp per­spec­tive (thanks to the Bat­man TV show), and you can see the reasoning.

I’ve nev­er actu­al­ly come across one of these books to be able check them out for myself. My aware­ness of them is very lim­it­ed, gleaned only from their occa­sion­al men­tions in places like Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego mag­a­zine, or on var­i­ous blogs or comics sites.

Then why am I draw­ing these char­ac­ters? I guess there’s a fun sense of wonk­i­ness to the whole thing that kind of appeals to me. Sort of like watch­ing Plan 9 from Out­er Space. I thought it would be a kick to just take a crack at these guys and see what it might wind up look­ing like.

Hap­py Halloween!

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!

“…The Cool Exec with a Heart of Steel.”

This time out, it’s the invin­ci­ble Iron Man! Thanks to the recent movies, now even more peo­ple know Tony Stark’s alter ego. Obvi­ous­ly I’m not doing the movie ver­sion here. Instead, this is the out­fit that first comes to mind for me when some­one says the phrase “clas­sic Iron Man armor” (though I real­ize oth­ers may think of dif­fer­ent suits).

I can’t claim to have fol­lowed Iron Man reg­u­lar­ly as a kid, but there were still some very cool images and sto­ry­lines I caught back then that stayed with me (such as his epic bat­tle with the giant Tita­ni­um Man!). And as far as wish-ful­fill­ment goes, Iron Man’s a pret­ty cool idea: hav­ing the smarts and mon­ey to invent an armored suit which enables you to fly, gives you great strength as well as many oth­er kinds of cool abil­i­ties and weapons. And he even made his first suit out of spare parts, right under the noses of his cap­tors while being held hostage!

This draw­ing was a big exper­i­ment for me. I elect­ed to make myself do it 100% dig­i­tal­ly, final­ly give myself a project to do using my Man­ga Stu­dio EX soft­ware. It just seemed the appro­pri­ate thing to do, with such a high-tech character.

Work­ing all-dig­i­tal­ly is a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. While I’m very com­fort­able with most oth­er aspects of gen­er­at­ing my art using my com­put­er, the ini­tial draw­ing is a dif­fer­ent mat­ter. It feels very weird to start a draw­ing with­out first pick­ing up a pen­cil and a piece of paper. Almost like I can’t quite ful­ly think or visu­al­ize clear­ly with­out those items. The feel­ing’s a bit like those old dreams where you’d go to school and have this nag­ging sen­sa­tion you for­got some­thing, only to look down and see you left your pants at home! This will take fur­ther work. But regard­less, I don’t think I’ll ever want to entire­ly give up my pen­cil and paper!

This one’s for Frank, A.K.A. Iron Man Fan #1. Hope I did jus­tice to your favorite!

“Doc Bruce Banner, Belted by Gamma Rays…”

I was talk­ing with a good friend recent­ly, and he raised a ques­tion. “How come you aren’t draw­ing more of those clas­sic Mar­vel or DC char­ac­ters for your site? You real­ly should be doing more of that stuff.” I had to think about that. There’s real­ly no good rea­son why I haven’t, because I do love that mate­r­i­al. Maybe it’s just one of those things where you’re so close to it, you can’t see it. Or maybe it’s because there are just so many oth­er things I also want to do. Any­way, this post is an attempt to start rec­ti­fy­ing the situation.

It seemed like it might be fun to take a shot at the Hulk. Sur­pris­ing­ly, I haven’t real­ly drawn him all that often. Hulk’s been around awhile. He’s achieved that rar­efied stra­ta of comics char­ac­ters where even many non-comics-read­ers know who he is (thanks to the recent movies, the TV show, and even the Hulk episodes of the “Mar­vel Super Heroes” car­toons back in the ’60s).

There’ve been a num­ber of takes on the Hulk over the years, but if you’ve vis­it­ed my site much, it prob­a­bly won’t sur­prise you to find out that I grav­i­tate towards the ear­ly ver­sion of the char­ac­ter, as visu­al­ized by Jack Kir­by. There’s just some­thing very fun and pri­mal about that Hulk. He felt more like a wild card, unpre­dictable and mon­strous (appro­pri­ate, giv­en all the mon­ster comics Mar­vel was pub­lish­ing not too long before). I thought I’d try to cap­ture some of that ear­ly wild­ness, with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly com­plete­ly aping Kir­by. While it can be a lot of fun to do that, it seemed like a good idea to try to keep a lit­tle more of myself in there this time.

A big thanks to my friend Mark for sug­gest­ing I expand my horizons!

“We’ve Got You Covered!”

Per­haps some of you read­ing this might be famil­iar with the Cov­ered Blog. If not, it’s a site where artists are chal­lenged to take an exist­ing, pub­lished com­ic book cov­er and rein­ter­pret it. The results can be inter­est­ing, and I thought it might be fun to take a shot at doing one.

I chose to rework the cov­er of Dell Comics’ Dick Tra­cy Month­ly #13, cov­er-dat­ed Jan­u­ary 1949 (If you’re curi­ous to com­pare, you can view the orig­i­nal side-by-side with mine over on Cov­ered here). But I did­n’t do it in one of my usu­al styles. Instead, I real­ized that Chester Gould’s style on Dick Tra­cy was pret­ty 2D and graph­ic to begin with, and that it might be fun to push it just a lit­tle fur­ther into look­ing some­thing like a Flash ani­ma­tion style.

I worked on a Flash-ani­mat­ed direct-to-video fea­ture, Hydee and the Hy Tops, and enjoyed it very much. The look of Flash is fun, and I would wel­come the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work on anoth­er project in that vein. I have a lot of respect for artists like Craig McCrack­en and Lau­ren Faust who do that kind of work very well. So it seemed like this would be a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to stretch some artis­tic mus­cles and try some­thing new.

The BG por­tion of this cov­er was done using Pho­to­shop, but the rest of it was done in Adobe Illus­tra­tor. If you’ve vis­it­ed my site before, you know I’ve used Illus­tra­tor for a num­ber of dif­fer­ent projects. But this project required car­ry­ing out the final image in a dif­fer­ent way from how I’d done before.

As far as why I chose to rein­ter­pret a Dick Tra­cy cov­er in the first place, I think it might be because I’ve been fol­low­ing the reg­u­lar Dick Tra­cy strip these last sev­er­al months, so Tra­cy was in the back of my mind. The strip’s been reju­ve­nat­ed by Joe Sta­ton and Mike Cur­tis, and I’ve been hav­ing a blast fol­low­ing it. If you get the chance, give it a look!

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!

Before “Before Watchmen”

The image I’m post­ing this time is not a new one (it’s already over in the Gal­leries side of my site), but I’ve had some friends make the case that with DC Comics doing all their “Before Watch­men” books right now, it’s a good time to call atten­tion to it anew here on the front page.

There’s a sto­ry behind this piece. A friend of mine in the ani­ma­tion field, Lance Falk, has these sketch­books he pass­es around. They have art by some amaz­ing artists. Chances are if you can think of some big name artist, Lance very like­ly has art by him or her in one of his books. Way back when we were work­ing on “The Real Adven­tures of Jon­ny Quest” togeth­er, Lance asked if I’d be will­ing to do a sketch for his then-cur­rent book. It’s both huge­ly flat­ter­ing and daunt­ing, once you see the lev­el of work oth­ers have done.

Lance sug­gest­ed he might like to see the Watch­men done as if Kir­by had drawn them. I wound up mak­ing a whole cov­er pro­duc­tion out of it, as if it were done in the mid-’60s. Lance was very hap­py with the end result, and I was huge­ly relieved that it was well-received.

Fast for­ward some months lat­er (maybe even a year), and I find out that this sketch­book had been cir­cu­lat­ing fur­ther. It had crossed orig­i­nal Watch­men artist and co-cre­ator Dave Gib­bons’ path in Lon­don. When I first heard he’d seen the book with my draw­ing in it, I must admit I was tak­en aback. But Lance assured me that Mr. Gib­bons actu­al­ly got a big kick out of what I’d done. Once again, I was huge­ly relieved.

Fast for­ward to more recent times, and the pub­li­ca­tion of Mr. Gib­bons’ book, Watch­ing the Watch­men, which com­piled all kinds of back­ground mate­r­i­al on that piv­otal work. He appar­ent­ly liked this Kir­by Watch­men cov­er well enough, he asked me if I’d mind his includ­ing it in the book. What do you think I said? 🙂

Thanks much, Lance and Mr. Gibbons!

The Original Black Cat

This time out, for no spe­cial rea­son, here is the orig­i­nal Black Cat. I’ve kind of had a soft spot for Har­vey Comics’ ver­sion of the Black Cat from the gold­en age for a while now.

If you’re not famil­iar with the char­ac­ter, behind the Black Cat’s mask in the comics was actress Lin­da Turn­er. She’d start­ed out her career orig­i­nal­ly as a stunt­woman, but had suc­cess­ful­ly tran­si­tioned into becom­ing a lead actress. The var­i­ous skills she’d picked up dur­ing her stunt­woman career enabled her to fight crimes and solve mys­ter­ies incog­ni­to as the Black Cat. The ’40s Hol­ly­wood milieu gave her sto­ries a lit­tle dif­fer­ent feel from oth­er, more typ­i­cal­ly NYC-fla­vored super­hero comics.

Sev­er­al artists drew her sto­ries, but the artist most asso­ci­at­ed with the char­ac­ter would have to be Lee Elias. Elias was clear­ly a Can­iff dis­ci­ple, and he did that style very well. He gave his hero­ine (and the strip in gen­er­al) a real charm and appeal.

Obvi­ous­ly I did­n’t both­er try­ing to mim­ic Elias’ work here. For some rea­son, I envi­sioned this from the begin­ning as using a vec­tor-based Adobe Illus­tra­tor approach. Yet anoth­er exper­i­ment. The beau­ty of this being my site, I can exper­i­ment with all kinds of approaches.

If you’re curi­ous to see some Black Cat comics for your­self, I’m not sure where you could buy them now (with­out pay­ing the usu­al prices for gold­en age comics). I picked up a set of reprints some years back now via Bud Plant (and thanks once again to my bud­dy Eric Wight for alert­ing me to those back then!). Unfor­tu­nate­ly though, I don’t think those are in stock any­more. But, the good news is, you can view just about every issue of Black Cat online, cour­tesy of The Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um (What a great resource!).

And that’s a wrap for this one!

With One Magic Word…

Final­ly I get to show off the last of those two items I teased back in Decem­ber. I gave a fur­ther peek at it here. It’s anoth­er cov­er done for FCA, which appears in the back of Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego mag­a­zine. This one was obvi­ous­ly done up to look like one of those issues of Secret Ori­gins that DC Comics pub­lished in the ear­ly ’70s. I loved those as a kid, because back then they were one of the rare venues where you had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to see any of that gold­en age com­ic material.

I’ve talked in pre­vi­ous posts about how much I liked the gold­en age Super­man and Bat­man. But with­out a doubt, my favorite gold­en age char­ac­ter would have to be Cap­tain Mar­vel. When DC brought him back from pub­lish­ing lim­bo in the ear­ly ’70s, I was already primed for it. I’d read about the “Big Red Cheese” in our local library’s copy of All in Col­or for a Dime, as well as in The Ster­anko His­to­ry of Comics. Some­thing about the visu­al and the idea of the char­ac­ter hooked me, even with­out ever hav­ing seen a sin­gle Cap­tain Mar­vel sto­ry yet.

Not to dis­miss the sto­ries, but a huge part of the appeal of those gold­en age Cap­tain Mar­vel comics for me is the art. As the char­ac­ter’s design­er and main artist, C.C. Beck set the tone there. Most gold­en age com­ic book artists doing super­heroes looked to the news­pa­per adven­ture strips for their inspi­ra­tion. They most­ly tend­ed to fall into one of two schools: it was either the illus­tra­tive real­ism of Fos­ter and Ray­mond, or the more impres­sion­is­tic approach of Sick­les and Can­iff. Instead, Beck looked to the “fun­ny” por­tion of the fun­ny pages for his inspi­ra­tion (like Jack Cole did with Plas­tic Man). The result was a strip that had a look and feel like no oth­er. And of course, the writ­ing played a role in mak­ing that pos­si­ble too.

While the high­er-ups at Faw­cett may have want­ed Bill Park­er and C.C. Beck to just give them a knock­off of Super­man, that was not what they got. They got some­thing bet­ter. Many read­ers back then must have thought so too; at the peak of the char­ac­ter’s pop­u­lar­i­ty, they were pub­lish­ing Cap­tain Mar­vel Adven­tures bi-week­ly and sell­ing 1.3 mil­lion copies of each issue!

I know some­times mod­ern fans have trou­ble with Mr. Tawky Tawny and some of the more whim­si­cal aspects of the strip, but for me, the clas­sic Cap­tain Mar­vel mate­r­i­al is inspi­ra­tional stuff. I wish I could tell you of a rel­a­tive­ly cheap and easy way to lay hands on that work if you haven’t seen it, but it seems hard­er to come by these days.

Doc (“Don’t Call Me ‘Doctor!‘”) Strange

Now that it’s fin­ished, I can show you one of the two items I teased back in Decem­ber. It’s a pin-up of the old Nedor Comics hero Doc Strange, as he might have appeared on the cov­er of an issue of Thrilling Comics in 1965, had Nedor still been pub­lish­ing at that point.

If you’re not famil­iar with the com­pa­ny, Nedor pub­lished (under sev­er­al names) dur­ing the gold­en age. They actu­al­ly had a fair­ly siz­able group of heroes, includ­ing Doc Strange. Nedor ceased pub­lish­ing comics at the end of the gold­en age. Since then, many peo­ple have tak­en a shot at doing some­thing with their old char­ac­ters. AC Comics has made use of them over the years, and so did Alan Moore and Peter Hogan more recent­ly in the Tom Strong spin­off minis­eries, Ter­ra Obscura.

Doc was a scientist/adventurer who invent­ed a serum he named Alo­sun, dis­tilled from “sun atoms.” This serum gave him super­hu­man strength, flight and invul­ner­a­bil­i­ty when he used it.

Enough of the his­to­ry les­son. So why did I do this pin-up/­cov­er? Easy; because I was asked. The one and only Will Meugniot is cur­rent­ly doing a new cre­ator-owned series (in the back of AC Comics’ Fem­Force) that picks up the threads of the Nedor books with the descen­dants of some of the char­ac­ters. It’s called “Agents of N.E.D.O.R.,” and is intend­ed as a peri­od piece tak­ing place in 1965. Will invit­ed sev­er­al artists to con­tribute pin-ups of the orig­i­nal Nedor char­ac­ters, and I was very flat­tered to be asked if I’d like to do so too.

As is typ­i­cal for me, instead of mak­ing things sim­ple on myself, I had to make a whole cov­er out of it. Since Will’s sto­ry takes place in 1965, I thought this should be a cov­er for Thrilling Comics (which starred Doc) also from ’65, as if Nedor had kept on pub­lish­ing all that time. I even did some math to work out the issue num­ber. How’s that for obsessive?

Doc Strange most often went on his adven­tures accom­pa­nied by his young side­kick Mike (who wore an iden­ti­cal out­fit, only with the addi­tion of a green cape for some rea­son). I thought it would be more fun though to show Doc with his girl­friend, Vir­ginia Thomp­son, as she would also some­times take part in his adven­tures. Of course, I updat­ed her look here for the times.

This will appear in b/w line art form in Fem­Force #159, since the book has b/w inte­ri­ors. But for my blog here, I want­ed to go full col­or. Because it’s how I saw this in my head from the start. I get asked to do a b/w pin-up and I envi­sion some­thing in col­or; go figure!

Thanks, Will. This was a lot of fun!

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.

Yet More Teasing

Things are real­ly busy here. I fin­ished one of the projects I teased last month, but I still can’t show off the whole thing quite just yet. How­ev­er, rather than let the month pass with­out post­ing any­thing, I thought I’d at least show a por­tion of the final art. It’s anoth­er faux com­ic cov­er (some­thing I’ve done a lot of). This one I’m quite hap­py with (So is the client, which is always a good thing when you can man­age it), and I look for­ward to when the whole thing can be shown!

Once Again, a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Well, I find myself in a strange posi­tion at the moment: buried under a num­ber of var­i­ous side projects. It’s unusu­al for me to get hit all at once like this, so I’m not quite sure what to make of it. They’re all the kinds of inter­est­ing and chal­leng­ing assign­ments that are hard to say “no” to, and should be a lot of fun to see through. Got­ta keep them all mov­ing though. If you can imag­ine me fran­ti­cal­ly jug­gling to the musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment of the “Sabre Dance,” you’ll get the idea.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, though I’ve got all these projects going, they’re all just works-in-progress at the moment. None of them are done and ready to post. Even if they were, some of the peo­ple I’m doing them for might not be ready for me to put them up quite yet. And with the hol­i­days so close, I don’t think I’m going to have time to do any­thing else spe­cial for my site right now. So in lieu of that, I hope maybe some sneak peeks at a cou­ple of the works in progress will suf­fice for the moment. It’s either that, or let this month go by with­out post­ing anything.

One brand new item I can point out: I am pleased to announce that I am now being rep­re­sent­ed by Ellen Ann Mersereau, who works with a ros­ter of some of the most tal­ent­ed cre­ators in the busi­ness. You can find her con­tact info over to your right in the sidebar.

Wher­ev­er you are, what­ev­er your cur­rent cir­cum­stances, I hope the hol­i­days are good to you; that you have a good Christ­mas, and an excel­lent New Year!

Looking Back

This will be one of those schizo posts I’ve done from time to time, where the illus­tra­tion part does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly relate to the bulk of the text. And “bulk” is prob­a­bly the right word; this post will be length­i­er than usu­al, so I apol­o­gize for that in advance.

Let me explain about the illus­tra­tion first. My younger broth­er is writ­ing a book, and asked me to do the cov­er illus­tra­tion. Over the years, we’ve col­lab­o­rat­ed on a num­ber of projects (includ­ing our band, back in the ’80s). And it’s always an inter­est­ing and chal­leng­ing expe­ri­ence (in the best sens­es of those words), because I have a lot of free­dom to try things that I prob­a­bly could­n’t for oth­er clients. Usu­al­ly, I wind up head­ing into new and unfa­mil­iar ter­ri­to­ry that I might not have explored on my own. This piece is a case in point: we wound up with Michelan­gelo’s The Cre­ation of Adam as rein­ter­pret­ed through a kind of “street art” lens. Def­i­nite­ly not a direc­tion I would’ve imag­ined myself going, but I’m pleased with the end prod­uct. Though don’t expect to go out late at night and find me throw­ing it up on the side of some build­ing in the wilds of down­town Los Angeles!

Now on to my main sub­ject: I’ve real­ized that this month marks the one year anniver­sary of my site. It seemed like this might be a good point to take a look back, and give some­thing of a peek behind the cur­tain. When I first began to weigh the idea of putting up my own site, I was very reluc­tant to both­er, to be hon­est. The only rea­son I did it was because it has become absolute­ly essen­tial as an artist (par­tic­u­lar­ly in ani­ma­tion) to have a web­site. Most stu­dios now don’t want to han­dle phys­i­cal port­fo­lios any­more; they’d rather just have a link they can click on to view your work. So this was a case of “like it or not, you’ve got to do the research and get your own site up.”

But I’ve found a real­ly good thing that has come out of hav­ing the site. As a kid, I used to love to draw. I’d spend hours at the kitchen table doing it. But fast-for­ward to adult­hood, and an unfor­tu­nate side effect some­times of turn­ing the thing you loved doing as a kid into the work you do for a liv­ing as an adult, is that you can lose that love. When you spend all day being told what you’re sup­posed to draw and how to draw it, that can sap your moti­va­tion to draw any­thing for your­self when you’re off work. The last thing you feel like doing some­times at the end of the day is to pick up a pen­cil again for your­self. But the thing is, it’s impor­tant to keep at least a por­tion of your art as an out­let for your own expres­sion. Mak­ing time to draw for your­self is impor­tant. Hang­ing onto that love for draw­ing you once had as a kid is important.

And hav­ing my own site, where I can draw what­ev­er I want, and in what­ev­er style I want, has gone a ways toward help­ing me to regain that love. Though it’s a lame sim­i­le, it’s almost like my site’s become the inter­net equiv­a­lent of hav­ing a giant refrig­er­a­tor that I can tack my art to, for peo­ple to see when they come by.

One oth­er thing I decid­ed, ear­ly on, (and I guess you can file this under “state­ment of pur­pose”) is that I want­ed to stay on the pos­i­tive side in any­thing I write here. It’s very easy to go neg­a­tive. As my friends can tell you, I have my opin­ions about the things I don’t like in movies, car­toons, comics, etc., just like any­one else. But there are plen­ty of places on the inter­net where peo­ple can (and do) vent at length about things like that. I’d pre­fer to be a pos­i­tive voice. Rather than waste time talk­ing about what I don’t like (why give those things any fur­ther expo­sure?), why not spend my time talk­ing about the things that I like? Why not give those things the spot­light? So that’s what I’ve tried to do thus far, and what I intend to keep doing. That, and show­ing off new work on my big inter­net refrig­er­a­tor when I feel like it. 🙂

And that’s prob­a­bly more than enough ver­bosi­ty for one post! If you’ve actu­al­ly made it through to this point, I wish all read­ing this a Hap­py Thanksgiving!

Hydee Hits the Funny Pages

I’ve just been giv­en the go-ahead to final­ly spill the beans about a project I worked on ear­li­er this year. It’s what I was talk­ing about in this post. I got to help with the art for a short Hydee and the Hy Tops com­ic, which is to be pro­duced as a give­away. You get to see it all above, for the first time any­where, probably.

Once again, I was giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to col­lab­o­rate with the love­ly and tal­ent­ed Jim Sten­strum (who is try­ing to get togeth­er a site of his own. When that hap­pens, it will be in my blogroll). Jim pen­cilled these pages, while I did all the col­or­ing and let­ter­ing. There were no pen­cils harmed in the mak­ing of this com­ic, as there was no ink­ing in the usu­al sense. The art style has no con­tain­ment lines; just flat areas of col­or, with occa­sion­al bits of col­ored linework only where need­ed. The look of the com­ic was based on what we’d done for the flash-ani­mat­ed Hydee fea­ture, which I don’t think has been released just yet (Though you can see some of the work I did for that here in my Gal­leries).

I enjoyed work­ing with the Hydee char­ac­ters, both in the com­ic and on the fea­ture. The sce­nario was kind of “Josie and the Pussy­cats by way of the Go-Gos, but if they were being formed now for the Dis­ney Chan­nel,” if that descrip­tion makes any sense. And the client was a dream to work with (which, as any­one in ani­ma­tion can tell you, is not some­thing you can expect to hap­pen all that often). I wish all clients were that good to work with! If the oppor­tu­ni­ty pre­sent­ed itself to work with the prop­er­ty again, under the same kind of cir­cum­stances, I would not hes­i­tate to do it. It was fun.

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!

She’s a Sensation!

Though DC’s big reboot has already been sprung on us, I had one more image in that poster style that I had to try. Might as well com­plete the tri­fec­ta, right?

So this time out, it’s Won­der Woman. If you’ve read my pre­vi­ous posts on these gold­en age char­ac­ters, I real­ized I kind of uncon­scious­ly set up a pro­gres­sion; I men­tioned that I liked Super­man, but lat­er con­fessed I liked Bat­man a lit­tle more. So you might be expect­ing me this time out to say I liked Won­der Woman the best. But you’d be wrong.

Sor­ry to say, I real­ly was­n’t all that into Won­der Woman as a kid. I appre­ci­ate the strip much more now as an adult than I did back then, for its his­toric sig­nif­i­cance as well as some of the aspects that are unique to it (the fan­ta­sy ele­ments, the mytho­log­i­cal, etc.). Per­haps the gold­en age art (by H.G. Peter) looked a lit­tle heavy-hand­ed and crude to me in some ways as a kid. Look­ing at it now, I have more of an appre­ci­a­tion for it (It feels at times like a sort of car­toon ver­sion of an Albrecht Dür­er engraving).

Won­der Woman is an inter­est­ing con­cept that seems to be a tough one for writ­ers and artists to get a han­dle on. And even if they man­age, it seems hard to get a han­dle on it such that it will engage peo­ple and get them to buy the book (Which is prob­a­bly the more impor­tant point). Many approach­es have been tried with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess, and some don’t get tried at all. But Marston and Peter must’ve had a han­dle on some­thing when they cre­at­ed her. She’s sur­vived this long and man­aged to become part of our col­lec­tive pop cul­ture men­tal land­scape, rec­og­niz­able even to non-comics read­ers. I think that’s worth a lit­tle salute here.

A con­fes­sion: this poster is a loose homage (which I acknowl­edged in how I signed it) to an orig­i­nal poster by Lud­wig Hohlwein. In study­ing his work online, I stum­bled across one poster that just seemed a nat­ur­al to adapt for a Won­der Woman image. It all but cried out for it. So that is what I did!

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.

“I Shall Become a BAT!”

The clock is count­ing down to DC Comics’ big reboot, and it’s still got me think­ing back on the orig­i­nals. I thought I should get at least one more post in here, before it hap­pens. Super­man was look­ing a lit­tle lonely.

Like I said in my pre­vi­ous post, I’ve always had an attrac­tion to the ear­ly gold­en age ver­sions of some of these char­ac­ters, despite the occa­sion­al rugged­ness in exe­cu­tion. There was a pri­mal kind of ener­gy there that per­haps got lost a lit­tle bit along the way, as the artists and writ­ers got bet­ter at their craft, and began to for­mu­late the rules for how you were sup­posed to do this sort of thing.

Last time, I copped to hav­ing an affec­tion for the gold­en age Super­man. But if pushed, I’d have to admit that I prob­a­bly liked the gold­en age Bat­man just a lit­tle bit more. Those ear­ly strips just dripped with mood: dark shad­ows, misty nights with almost always an enor­mous full moon, and plen­ty of strange char­ac­ters for the Bat­man to go up against. When I first began to encounter this stuff in those DC 100-Page Super-Spec­tac­u­lars as a kid, I had no prob­lem at all under­stand­ing why kids encoun­ter­ing these sto­ries for the first time on news­stands back in the gold­en age were attract­ed to it. This stuff cap­tured your imagination.

In the same vein as the Super­man poster, here’s one fea­tur­ing Bat­man in that ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Poster Style. This time out, I did my ver­sion of a clas­sic pose that Kane used a num­ber of times in those ear­ly issues. A very big “Thank You” to Bill Fin­ger, Bob Kane, Jer­ry Robin­son, George Rous­sos, and all the rest of Kane’s “ghosts” over the years who made Bat­man what he was!

“Look! Up in the Sky!”

If you fol­low comics news at all, you’ve prob­a­bly heard there’s this big reboot that DC Comics is doing in Sep­tem­ber. They’re start­ing all their books over from #1, redesign­ing all the char­ac­ters and redo­ing their ori­gins. You can’t assume now that you know any­thing for sure about who they are, their moti­va­tions or the over­all scenario.

I’m not going to get into com­men­tary on that here (there’s been plen­ty of that already in oth­er places online). But I’ll admit the idea of the retire­ment of the orig­i­nal char­ac­ters has me think­ing back on them a bit wist­ful­ly. Though tech­ni­cal­ly a child of comics’ sil­ver and bronze ages, I’ve always had a fas­ci­na­tion with the gold­en age era too. Despite the fact that work was often a bit crude in com­par­i­son to what came lat­er, there was a cer­tain life and raw ener­gy to those ear­ly incar­na­tions of the characters.

It’s a lot eas­i­er to lay hands on gold­en age comics sto­ries now. Back when I was a kid, most­ly you just got to read about them (in books like Ster­anko’s His­to­ry of Comics, or All in Col­or for a Dime). If you could lay hands on one of DC’s 100-Page Super-Spec­tac­u­lars though, you knew you were in for a rare treat.

Like I say, I’ve long had a soft spot for these ear­ly, pri­mal ver­sions of char­ac­ters like Super­man (the proof is at left; a scan of a fake gold­en age cov­er I did when I was about 12 or 13). And with the DC reboot com­ing, I thought I’d revis­it the orig­i­nal Super­man once again. The new image up top could’ve gone in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent direc­tions, but what I wound up hon­ing in on is a Shus­ter-esque ver­sion, posed more for­mal­ly. It’s been tak­en in the direc­tion of vin­tage poster art from an even ear­li­er era. Because that seemed like a fun idea at the time.

Just my salute to the gold­en age in gen­er­al, and the orig­i­nal Super­man in par­tic­u­lar. Thanks very much, Mr. Siegel and Mr. Shuster!

UPDATE: I recent­ly dis­cov­ered online these neat Super­man pages, drawn by Stew­art Immo­nen some years back. Done in the style of Win­sor McCay’s “Lit­tle Nemo,” they’re not entire­ly unre­lat­ed to what I’m try­ing to do here with this poster. I thought these were real­ly neat, and worth shar­ing. It’s fun­ny how well Super­man works in a style like this!

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!

Five Color Comics

So my local com­ic shop, House of Secrets (Hi Paul, Erik and Amy!) also occa­sion­al­ly pub­lish­es spe­cial projects of their own, under the name Art of Fic­tion. One of them is a title they call Five Col­or Comics. The inter­est­ing thing about it is that they have each pan­el of the sto­ries drawn by a dif­fer­ent artist. Bit of an exer­cise in herd­ing cats for them some­times, I’m sure, but the results are interesting.

I con­tributed to vol­ume one, and they recent­ly pub­lished vol­ume two. Which I was also invit­ed to con­tribute to. You can see my pan­el con­tri­bu­tion here, sans cap­tions. No “Pho­to­shop­pery” going on; it was done the old-school way, direct­ly on paper with pen, ink and col­ored pen­cils. In con­text with the oth­er pan­els, it’s inter­est­ing to see how there still man­ages to be a cer­tain over­all cohe­sive­ness to the sto­ry, despite the fact we all have such dif­fer­ent styles.

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!

Just Another Tease

So I haven’t post­ed in awhile. The last few weeks have been crazy busy with col­or­ing and let­ter­ing a com­ic book project. I can’t give details or post the pages just yet, but will in a few months, once I get the clear­ance to do so. In the mean­time, the image at right is non-spe­cif­ic enough to work as a tease for what the thing looks like.

Pen­cils for this project were by the love­ly and tal­ent­ed Jim Sten­strum. Jim is best known in comics as a writer, but in ani­ma­tion he’s bet­ter known as a char­ac­ter design­er. I’ve worked with Jim on many projects over the years, and it is always a pleasure.

More Randomness

Like I said last time, I feel the need to occa­sion­al­ly post some things to at least remind peo­ple of the fact that sto­ry­board revi­sion is one of the jobs I do. Even if all I have to show for it are some ran­dom, scat­tered pan­els that I hap­pened to have kept copies of.

Here’s anoth­er one from a Care Bears board. The over­all sto­ry is for­got­ten now, but in this scene, Cheer Bear (in the fore­ground, speak­ing) was in an awk­ward sit­u­a­tion where she felt she had to fib to Har­mo­ny Bear (in the back­ground). I kind of liked the way Cheer’s facial expres­sion worked out, which is why I hung onto a copy of this panel.

A Random Storyboard Panel

It’s occurred to me that I have absolute­ly noth­ing on my site to rep­re­sent the fact that one of the jobs I do is sto­ry­board revi­sion. Main­ly it’s because it’s a dif­fi­cult thing to show in a port­fo­lio. At the request of the direc­tor, you’re draw­ing ran­dom scat­tered pan­els here and there through­out anoth­er artist’s fin­ished board. If even that; some­times you might just be redraw­ing a por­tion of a pan­el or fig­ure. Ran­dom pan­els out of con­text don’t real­ly show much in the way of nar­ra­tive skills, which is what board­ing is all about.

Nonethe­less, it seems to me I should still have some things up here to rep­re­sent that side of what I do. And occa­sion­al­ly in doing that job, I’ll gen­er­ate a ran­dom, scat­tered pan­el that I espe­cial­ly like for some rea­son, and have hung onto a copy of it. So I fig­ure maybe I should post some of those here from time to time. Why not? It lets peo­ple know that it’s part of what I do.

So here’s “ran­dom, scat­tered pan­el” #1: from Care Bears, it’s their arch-ene­my Griz­zle. I enjoyed doing a pan­el with a lit­tle atti­tude, and it’s not often that there’s a call to do light­ing effects on a board. Dra­mat­ic up-light­ing is fun!

There will be more ran­dom board pan­el posts in the future, from time to time.

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!

Nat Gertler to the Rescue!

This post will be a lit­tle out­side my ordi­nary, but I think it’s war­rant­ed in order to give cred­it where cred­it’s due.

Since launch­ing this site, I’d been telling peo­ple that it was 90–95% of the way there to what I want­ed it to be. There were a few items where I just could­n’t quite fig­ure out how to tweak them into what I need­ed. But as of late yes­ter­day, that has final­ly changed!

This is cour­tesy of an old friend, writer and expert/dabbler in many things, Nat Gertler. I approached him to see if per­haps he might be able to tweak those inter­web thin­gies that need­ed tweak­ing, and he agreed to give it a shot. And he did it bril­liant­ly! It’s a huge relief to have my site final­ly work­ing just the way I always want­ed it to work. So, a very big “Thanks!” goes out to Nat.

So what’s with the bear? Well, I thought it would be bor­ing to have a post with no images. These pan­els come from a sto­ry I drew fea­tur­ing Nat’s Licens­able Bear™. LB™ and Mis­ter U.S. are prob­a­bly the main things that Nat and I have had the plea­sure of col­lab­o­rat­ing on. You can see sam­ples of my Mis­ter U.S. work on the site here, here and here.

Mis­ter U.S. is ™ and © Nat Gertler and Mark Lewis, Licens­able Bear™ is ™ and © Nat Gertler.

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.

Now It Can Be Told!

Some may recall there was a mys­te­ri­ous “teas­er” post I put up back before Christ­mas. I’d been asked to hold off on putting the full art­work for it on my site…until now. So here it is, final­ly: a copy of Amaz­ing Faw­cett Fan­ta­sy #15.

Nev­er seen one before? That’s because it does­n’t exist. It was done as the cov­er for FCA #159, which will be appear­ing in the upcom­ing land­mark 100th issue of Alter Ego. You can see it in con­text with the FCA logo and every­thing else over in my Gal­leries.

You’re prob­a­bly say­ing, “Wait, you goofed up! That does­n’t look any­thing like Spi­der-man!” Ah, but it seems that before the Spi­der-man we’re all famil­iar with came to be, there were sev­er­al vil­lain “spi­der men” char­ac­ters who cropped up in var­i­ous Faw­cett strips. Includ­ing the fel­low on this cov­er here, who went up against Cap­tain Marvel.

This assign­ment was sev­er­al lev­els of fun: get­ting to do my best C.C. Beck impres­sion, try­ing to fig­ure out just what a Faw­cett com­ic might have looked like had they still been pub­lish­ing into the ear­ly 60’s, and work­ing out how to use Pho­to­shop to make it look like a real, well-read comic.

Many thanks to both P.C. Hamer­linck and Roy Thomas for invit­ing me to be part of this mile­stone issue!

Yowza, Yowza, Yowza!

As I men­tion on my “About” page, I was in a band back in the 80’s. (I know: “Who was­n’t in a band in the 80’s?”) We were called the Contact.

Since I was the artist/graphic design­er in the band, I wound up doing all our fly­ers. It was a blast, because I could pret­ty much do just about any­thing I want­ed. You can see a few sam­ples of my Con­tact fly­ers over in the Gal­leries here.

Here’s anoth­er one (which may even­tu­al­ly make its way over into the Gal­leries too). A lot of the time, band fly­ers tend to draw from the same sources over and over. For this one, it occurred to me it might be fun to bor­row visu­al influ­ences of an ear­li­er age for once. And it was! I had fun dig­ging up all the ref­er­ence in the library (pre-inter­net days, y’all), then pulling all those influ­ences togeth­er to make a 30’s style band fly­er. I think I did a pret­ty good job of car­toon­ing all of us too (though I’ve nev­er played a stand-up bass in my life). It was fun to get to do some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, and I was hap­py with how this exper­i­ment worked out.

Por­tions of the fly­er are cen­sored here, sim­ply because I don’t think our gen­er­ous hosts back then would appre­ci­ate their home address being post­ed on the internet.

Something Old, Something New…?

So I was post­ing a lot of old­er mate­r­i­al I did for the Lab my last sev­er­al posts. It struck me it was time for some­thing new. And though this looks real­ly old, like some­thing I pored through 60-year-old books of clip art to dig up and scan, it actu­al­ly is some­thing new. It’s an illus­tra­tion done very recent­ly for a pre­sen­ta­tion. It was fun to try to cap­ture that “retro” look, and I was hap­py with the end result. So…I’m post­ing it here!

PC News, Part V

This is prob­a­bly the last of my PC News posts. Time to move out of the 80’s!

The first cov­er here was for an issue announc­ing that PC News was going the Desk­top Pub­lish­ing route. Things weren’t entire­ly dig­i­tal yet in those days; for exam­ple, we still had to paste up all the type the Mac was going to be burst­ing through here. Pho­to­shop did­n’t yet exist, so we did the mag­a­zine using Aldus Page­mak­er, Adobe Illus­tra­tor, Mac­Draw and Mac­Draft! Any non-dig­i­tal­ly-cre­at­ed art like this still had to be pho­to­stat­ted, then run through a smelly device called a wax­er (I don’t know if those things even exist any­more), so it could then be bur­nished by hand down onto the page.

The sec­ond cov­er was for a fea­tured arti­cle in a fol­lowup edi­tion, “The Pin­na­cles and Pit­falls of Desk­top Pub­lish­ing.” Because of course, since it was still ear­ly days with these machines, there were prob­lems you’d encounter. I remem­ber get­ting that screen with the bomb logo a num­ber of times! It was fun to come up with all the lurk­ing bugs here for this illustration.

And that’s it for now, from the Lab in 1985!

PC News, Part IV

And here’s yet anoth­er PC News cov­er flashback.

Once again, I’m not real­ly sure what’s going on here. Too much water under the bridge since then. There’s a tick­le of a thought in the back of my mind that this might be rel­a­tive to some pro­gram called “Jazz,” though I’m not sure.

What­ev­er it is, I kind of liked how the illus­tra­tion came out for its own sake. Jazz musi­cians with old school Mac­in­tosh­es for heads? Works for me!

I think there’ll be one more of these cov­er posts to come.

PC News, Part III

Still more PC News cov­er “flash­back-ing” in public.

This cov­er dealt with an astound­ing new con­cept: the idea of two com­put­ers being able to com­mu­ni­cate with each other…over phone lines! Isn’t mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy amaz­ing?

What?? Well, I did say in my first post on these that it was weird look­ing back at all these con­cepts that we take for grant­ed now. Don’t for­get: this was done around 1984/1985.

Still more to come.

PC News, Part II

Here’s anoth­er PC News cov­er flash­back from my LLNL days, cir­ca ’84/’85.

Umm, what to say about this one? I don’t know that I can ful­ly explain what’s going on here any­more. Too many years removed. I think what’s going on is that this was for an arti­cle talk­ing about how they were able to give PC’s ver­bal instruc­tions and have them trans­lat­ed into prop­er com­put­er lan­guage, but then you can prob­a­bly pick up that much from it on your own.

And for rea­sons I don’t recall, I was play­ing around with a qua­si-Chester Gould “Dick Tra­cy” look. Though I no longer ful­ly under­stand what I was try­ing to do here, I still think it was kind of a fun piece.

The “flash­back-ery” will continue.

PC News, Part I

Often to start off a New Year, peo­ple will spend a lit­tle time look­ing back. I’m going to look way back to the mid-80’s for a few posts or so here. Hope­ful­ly it’ll be of interest.

At that point in time, I was work­ing at LLNL, Lawrence Liv­er­more Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry, doing graph­ic design and illus­tra­tion. Most of the graph­ics we did were tech­ni­cal type things, as you’d imag­ine. One of my more fun reg­u­lar jobs though was to illus­trate the cov­ers of The PC News, an in-house newsletter/magazine.

Most of this stuff has nev­er been seen out­side the Lab. And it’s fun­ny to look at some of the con­cepts these illus­tra­tions address now, some 25+ years (yikes!) removed. A lot of this stuff we take for grant­ed now, the per­son­al com­put­er’s become so imbed­ded in our culture.

This first cov­er I’m post­ing was for an issue index­ing some of the more impor­tant or “pop­u­lar” sto­ries that had appeared over the pre­vi­ous year. At this late date, I don’t recall why I drew a punk, or why they would even let me do that in the first place. One thing I do recall; they made me get rid of the ray gun for pub­li­ca­tion, replac­ing it with a light­pen. So this is the first time any­one (out­side of the PC News edi­tors) has seen this in its orig­i­nal form. The small­er draw­ing was just a spot illo for the inside front cover.

There will be more PC News flash­backs to come.

The Galleries are Up! Happy New Year!

I was­n’t sure if I would get to it or not, but it appears I was suc­cess­ful in putting up my gal­leries. Though there are still a few minor bugs to iron out around here, things are func­tion­al. You can access them via the “Gal­leries” link up top.

And just so I’m not only giv­ing you bor­ing text to read, by pop­u­lar request (do three requests by one per­son count?), I’m post­ing an old pin-up I drew fea­tur­ing Chesty Sanchez and Mis­ter U.S.

I had a lot of fun with this! It start­ed with a gag idea sug­gest­ed by writer Nat Gertler, whom Chesty Sanchez cre­ator Steve Ross had ini­tial­ly con­tact­ed to request a pin-up. For some rea­son, though I knew the book was only going to be print­ed in black and white, I always want­ed to see this in col­or. Maybe one day I’ll do it, just for fun. This appeared in the 96 page “Chesty Sanchez Super Spe­cial” some years back, pub­lished by Antarc­tic Press.

Look­ing back over the com­ic, a Chesty Sanchez movie could be a lot of fun. The time is right, with all the oth­er com­ic book movies out there. Steve? you should get right on that and make it happen! 😉

Chesty Sanchez is ™ and © Steve Ross, Mis­ter U.S. is ™ and © Nat Gertler and Mark Lewis.

Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays to You All Out There

I’m not sure whether I’ll man­age to get my gal­leries up before the hol­i­days or not, but I thought I’d at least get one more post in before the end of the year. That project I allud­ed to in my pre­vi­ous post last month? This is a teaser/portion of that illus­tra­tion. Down the road at some point when I’ve been giv­en clear­ance, I’ll post the full image. This was a fun one to do, as I got to try out some things in Pho­to­shop I’d nev­er done before.

And in case I don’t wind up post­ing any­thing else before then: hope you all have a good hol­i­day sea­son, wher­ev­er you go, what­ev­er you do.

Happy Thanksgiving: Now Go Out and Hunt Down Your Own Turkey!

I still haven’t had time to get back to fig­ur­ing out how to install the gallery plu­g­in (due to anoth­er project which will prob­a­bly make its way on here even­tu­al­ly), but I want­ed to keep the site active. So by request of my friend Lyle, I’ve post­ed the draw­ing on the left. It’s a fake com­ic cov­er fea­tur­ing a jun­gle girl char­ac­ter named Zhantika.

She’s the blonde at left. Zhan­ti­ka was a char­ac­ter cre­at­ed by Lyle and myself. Around that time, I’d got­ten my hands on the Ger­ber Pho­to-Jour­nal Guide to Com­ic Books. Look­ing through them, we both real­ized sep­a­rate­ly that the “jun­gle girl” com­ic was a real pop­u­lar genre of its own at one point that sort of van­ished. That sparked an idea. Lyle came up with the basic con­cept, and the visu­al was mine.

We actu­al­ly pub­lished a Zhan­ti­ka sto­ry in Big Bang #17, much thanks to Gary Carl­son. I also have to thank inker David Zim­mer­mann, who brought a real­ly nice pol­ish to my pen­cils with his brush­work. The above image is not from that sto­ry though; it was done as a faux gold­en age cov­er for one of “The Big Bang His­to­ry of Comics” issues (#27, if any­one cares to look). It was part of a whole fic­ti­tious his­to­ry of comics that did­n’t real­ly exist, but it was lots of fun to pretend.

Maybe even­tu­al­ly one day I’ll col­or this cov­er, just for fun. And just to make this a lit­tle longer: Zhan­ti­ka is ™ and © Lyle Dodd and Mark Lewis.

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.