Newspaper Strips

Okay, I wrote a long rant about the state of the newspaper comic as I see it from the standpoint of a fan who picked up a paper for the first time in a few years (but I deleted it, and am putting a shortened version here). It was more or less an indictment,being upset at a lot of things - older franchise strips that have been rehashed so many times and have no good jokes in them anymore (one of which is examined below), and new strips which have virtually NO craftsmanship at all, being unfunny AND incredibly poorly drawn. Universal Press Syndicate seems to be putting out the worst ones. There are a few shining lights - Zits, Foxtrot, Baby Blues and Dilbert still retain their consistency of quality and humor (not easy to make clever jokes with extremely limited subject matter, but they do it, day after day); Lio is REALLY fun, charmingly whimsical, etc. Now, to the aforementioned franchise strip... Nancy!



One of my pet peeves is the attempt to insert topical jokes into franchise strips. Let's see what's wrong with this one:

1. Aunt Ritzi, who is drawn here in a hot late-twenties/early thirties age range, starts out the strip by ruminating on how she used to get her albums on 33 1/2 records. Aunt Ritzi is roughly my age in this strip, yet she goes through a couple of forms of media before even GETTING to cassette tapes. So unless she started buying her albums at like eight years, there's a pretty decent chance that she got her first one on CD. CD!!! Even cassette wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility - it's about a fifty/fifty shot, depending on the age she atarted buying her own albums and the prosperity level of her childhood home.

So that's a weird, creepy thing, insinuating that, despite appearances to the contrary, she's actually closer to fifty.

2. iTunes is not only put in quotation marks, like it's some sort of zany lingo heretofore unknown to the reader, but it's also hyphentated for some reason. Has anyone ever seen "iTunes" hyphenated?

3. Making a topical iTunes joke is about four or five years late. Even a bitTorrent joke would be old at this point. Also, if you have the CD IN YOUR HAND, as Aunt Ritzi does, why do you buy it on iTunes? I realize it's a strip, and I get the joke (at least there IS one in this strip, and not really a bad joke at that) but it's not thought out and poorly executed. These guys are making decent money - strips pay way better than comic books, at least in terms of pre-publication - and for the artists to not put forth the effort devoted to making their strips as good as they possibly can is as unforgivable as any other half-assery, like a mechanic not bothering to tighten the bolts back.

Even so, it's a lot better than most of franchise strips out there, and the joke (or observation) isn't bad - it's kind of fun, in that "hey, there's truth to that" sort of way that strips can provide.

I hear really good things about Cul-De-Sac, but haven't found it yet. Look forward to the book coming out.

Anyway, that's my rant. I make it because strips are the types of comics I love most, and they have such amazing potential... and with only needing an output of usually four panels a day, the artist has the chance to edit and work and reedit to perfection in a way that a lot of longer-form folks don't. Comic strips CAN be works of true art, which is why almost every canonically-acknowledged "master" of the comic form has been a strip artist instead of a book artist. It hurts me, as a cartoonist and as a big fan of the medium, to see second-rate junk like this pawned off on the public. No wonder people don't buy papers anymore.

New Crogan Family Tree

Cory at Oni is putting together the press release stuff for Crogan's, so I redid the family tree to hopefully better reflect the design sensibilities of the characters, as my drawing style has changed a lot in the past two years or so (actually, most of the family tree figures are more like three and a half years, old, before I ever really thought of doing them as comics). Anyway, here it is - click it for a bigger version.

Sketch Dump

What a week! No sooner did I get back from Heroes than Liz and I started packing up our things. We've been living smack dab in the middle of Atlanta, and it's been a headache - our apartment complex had gone downhill fast, with rent climbing, extremely loud and inconsiderate neighbors, and a general lack of maintenance - a shame, considering how great it was when we first moved there two years ago.

We found a great place - half of an older duplex - that we love. We like our neighbors, we like the landlord, it's a block from a train station, we have a yard, we've got an attic, all wood floors, an extra room for my studio, and it's in Decatur, just outside Atlanta proper, right near downtown. Decatur is an AMAZING little city, with all the charm of a small town but the economy of a bigger city able to support cool specialty shops and restaurants. We're about a mile from downtown Decatur on one side and a mile from the International Farmers Market - what Epcot would be were it a grocery store - on the other. Lots of shade and trees, people out walking their dogs, jogging, pushing strollers - it's idelic. Add to that that we're close to a lot of my cartoonist friends who live in the vicinity, and it's a place just made for us.

Anyway, we moved over the weekend and are still only about half unpacked, so if I'm slow in replying to e-mails, I apologize.

I did quite a few sketches just prior to moving, but didn't have a chance to scan and post them - here they are now. None of these are any characters in particular - just drawing/coloring practice, I guess.































And here's what Mourning Star cartoonist Kaz Strzepek would look like with a handlebar moustache:




Lastly, I've been watching old X-Files episodes because the fabulously talented Lucy Knisely got me all antsy with her great series of X-Files monster drawings. I did this one, a really creepy character named Eugene Tooms, who can stretch and get into places through tiny A/C vents and the like because he's a hundred year-old hibernating genetic mutant who steals people's livers. Ewwww.

Heroes Con '08

Man! HeroesCon was quite a show, lots of fun. I rode up with Shawn Crystal, Andrew Robinson, and Nolan Woodard on Thursday. I went downstairs in the convention center and set up my table, and then took a nap - I'd been awake the whole previous day, doing the final preparations for my lecture. At about 9:30, I started wandering the streets of Charlotte, took in the last half of the last act of Romeo and Juliet being performed in the park, and through fortuitous circumstance bumped into a group of friends leaving their hotel - Alec Longstreth, Aaron Renier, Laura Park, Julia Wertz, Nicholas Gurewitch, and David Malki. They had just gotten in via train, and we all went to go look for some dinner. It was just after 10, and most places were closed, but we found a pizza place open.

Alec took command of the table, as everyone was hungry, ordering three pies with the assurance of the manager that if we weren't full that he'd provide another, free of charge. We ate merrily and passed around a drawing started by Alec of an old conductor getting robbed. We DID finish up the pizzas, and the manager DID give us another one, which was just as good as the first three. It was great getting to meet Nicholas and Laura, who I hadn't met before, or if I had it had only been in passing.

The next morning, Friday, everyone set up and the show began in earnest. I had the good fortune to sit across from my friends at the Oni Press booth (my publishers). Cory Casoni is the new marketing and PR guy at Oni, and he does his job ten times better than any of us would have ever dreamed hope, and I'm confident that he'll do great things for Oni - this is, of course, in addition to him being loads of fun, and hilarious.

Next to them were Mike and Matt Chapman, the brothers behind Home Star Runner, which, for those who've lived under a cave for the last five years, is the most consistently funny web animation series out there. They were so nice and generous (they gave me the Strongbad e-mail dvd set), and it wasn't until we were all packing up that I found out that they were Atlanta folks, too, living only a couple of miles from where Liz and I are moving to this weekend.

In our table block was a bevy of cartoonists that I know from just about every local show there is, most (if not all) of them being based in the Southeast. Except maybe Pat Lewis, who I think is in Ohio or some such place. But everybody else is in this general neck of the continental woods, including Dean Trippe, Jason Hornswaggle, Rob Ullman, J. Chris Campbell and Duane from Wide Awake Press, Brad McGinty, Josh Latta (who according to the Heroes site, shares a website with Brad... is that right, guys? I'll correct it if it ain't), Hope Larson, Bryan Lee O'Malley, and the guys from the Dollar Bin Podcast.



Matt Kindt, creator of Superspy, borrowed a copy of Crogan's Vengeance and was really nice about it. He also traded me a drawing of pipe man, one of my favorite characters in his book, for a picture I had done of the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword (from Indiana Jones). Here's Matt's drawing, which is no end of beautiful:



I also did a trade with Hope, who did these characters from her new book, Chiggers:



Mal did a picture for me too (an intended gift for Liz, actually) of young Neil crying, her favorite part of the first book. But it's on his Flickr account, so I won't put it here... check his out! He did a lot of great sketches this weekend.


Hope, Evan the Intern, and Mal

On Friday night I had dinner with Brian Hurtt, Cullen Bunn and his wife, Randy, and Cory, after a LONG walk to find a place. It was great - delicious food, good drinks, nice atmosphere. Hurtt and I have a similar idea for an anthology series, one that I hope we can work on together. He's also been putting AMAZING sketchbook stuff on his blog, so check him out.

Saturday Morning I did a few sketches...



And then went upstairs to give my lecture on Character Design. It went really well - I've been planning it for weeks, so I felt ready for it - and there was a really good-sized, responsive crowd there. There's a bit about it on Kevin Burkhalter's journal comic, if you want cartoon audience response.



Kazimir Strzepek was kind enough to man my table while I was gone. I did my best to send people to buy his book, which I think was one of the best available at the show.

I bought AdHouse's Project Superior #3, which had a cover by that grand English gentleman Roger Langdridge...



with stories by HeroesCon organizer Dusty Harbin and Laura Park. I drew a picture of Dusty:



And another of Laura, which I colored at home:



I also picked up the new issue of Papercutter, published by Greg Means... it was, as usual, amazing. Here's Greg with Alec, and you can see Indie Spinner Rack's Charlito in the background:



Saturday evening it poured down rain, and me and Doug Dabbs, Cara McGee, Jackie Lewis/, a couple of Jackie's friends from her days at Emory (one of whom was apparently in "Into the Wild"), maybe Brent Morris, I'm not sure, but he was around a lot with this crowd so I'm guessing yes, Rachel, and another guy from SCAD-Atlanta's illustration grad program. We had Tex-Mex, and me and Doug were daring and got the buffet. Mmmm!

That night was hopping! Everybody and their brother and sister was at the Westin lobby bar (we stayed at the Westin, by the way, and it is posh, with beds you never want to get out of), and it was just a good time all around. I spent a lot of time talking about (among other things) the difference in distillation between American Gin and English Gin with an English expatriot writer named Ben (whose last name I don't know, but he's engaged to Heidi MacDonald). He pretty much carried the evening for all in attendance.

Sunday was mostly spent doing sketches, like this one of Iron Man:



And this one of Short Round, which is of terrible photo quality, I apologize. It was for a "Sidekicks" sketchbook.



I also got to see Jeff Parker quite a few times. We read a lot of his Marvel Adventures stuff on the way back to Atlanta, and if there is any doubt that Superhero monthlies can still be really, really good and loads of fun to read, then these books will asway it.
Here's Parker on the right, talking to brand new dad Dean Trippe:



That night we all went over to the Heroes Aren't Hard to Find store for the dead dog party, were we had disappointingly rationed amounts of AMAZING barbecue and copious amounts of delicious pizza. It was a great wrap-up, and I bought a few things at the store, including Wimbledon Green (which I've read a dozen times) and a cool little statue. I also, over the course of the weekend, picked up Ben Towle's Midnight Sun, which I've been dying to read, and Chris Wright's Inkweed. I got lots of trades and minis and whatnot, too, and came back with luggage about twenty pounds heavier. After the store party, we went back to the hotel, where we briefly went up to Darwin Cooke's room and watched a guy paint. Afterwards we went to our respective rooms and crashed, knowing we had but a few precious hours of sleep until the morning.

On Monday morning, a bunch of us went to breakfast at a big fancy pancake place - it was me, Shawn, Nolan, Andrew, Cory, Randy, Jason Latour, Jeremy Haun, and one of my favorite guys to see at these shows, Chris Brunner. I ordered prospector flapjacks, but Randy ordered a REALLY delicious looking eggs benedict with hollandaise sauce and it looked so good that bI ate my flapjacks with the syrup of unpalatable envy.

We headed back that afternoon. I read the Parker comics, lots of them out loud for the benefit of the others, and we got in around 4:30ish.

That's it! I'll have some new drawings up soon, but I hope that everyone had as good a time as I did.

Usagi Yojimbo + Postcard

I figured out what to do with the squid pic... I made it into a postcard, complete with place on the back for writing and stamps and the like. I'll have 'em at Heroes.
They're slightly bigger than a regular sized postcard, but not by much:



And here's a pic of Usagi I did, for funsies. Anyone not reading Usagi Yojimbo should be. It's easily one of the best comics of all times.



That's it. Also, Lucy Knisely's X-Files drawing series has got me fondly remembering the early episodes, so I just rangled season 1 to rewatch... maybe I'll contribute to the challenge once I remind myself of some of the good characters.

Merchant Captain vs. a Squid (or sea monster of some sort)

Woo-eee! It was a record-breaking ninety-eight degrees this week here in Atlanta, where I've spent the last couple of days trying to reclaim our new yard from the hundreds of roots and vines that crisscross the thing. Liz has been fixin' up the insides, and twixt the two of us we'll likely have it in good shape come move-in day. Her family's coming down from Kentucky on Thursday to help paint.

Still trying to fill the new stuff void that a year of working on Crogan's Vengeance has created in time for HeroesCon in a couple of weeks. The smokers print is done and printed, but the numerous comments turned me on to the fact that there are STILL quite a few quality characters that I inadvertantly left out, and so I'm strongly considering adding them to the mix. I'm also thinking about doing some prints using some pulp archetype characters I've been playing with. Whether anything comes of them aside from the illustrations, I can't say, but that's how the pirate characters started out - seven archetypal characters, all of which made it into the book (though only five were major characters).

Anyway, too much blabbing... I had an idea for the Merchant Marine-style captain character that you see in TinTin, King Kong, Corto Maltese, Adventures of the Scarlet Queen, etc, fending off a Big Squid or something. Here are the thumbnails:





And, after settling on one, I did the final drawing:




I left the upper section mostly open, in the pulp tradition of leaving space for a title. You never know...

Tomorrow I'll be trying to finally get down to business and finish editing the FLUKE coverage for Indie Spinner Rack. My apologies to everyone for taking so long to get it over to those guys.

Smokers of the Marvel Universe

Well! Sorry to be so heavy on the cape-and-tights stuff lately, but the drawings I did last week got me excited about doing that Smokers-of-the-Marvel-Universe print I've been kicking around. Also, I don't know how to do the "doink" thing where everyone has a link to a longer post, so here's the thing in its entirety. For those on Livejournal with me on your friends page, I do apologize for causing you to scroll so much to reach the next post.

Also, I've had the last class of my MFA program! Still have to finish my thesis, but for all intents I'm done.

Anyway, without further ado:

SMOKERS of the MARVEL UNIVERSE!









































Much thanks to Ryan Dunlavey, Andrew Wales, Pat Lewis, and YodaJones and SpanoMano from the ISR forum for helping me compile a list of Marvel Smokers.

Avengers, Assemble!

I did a drawing of Thor for this week's Temple of Cartoon Mojo sketch challenge and liked it, so I drew the rest of the early Avengers line up. Here they be! (You may need to click 'em to see the full thing, this blog tends to crop at 400 px)

"Crogan's Vengeance" Preview

I went to the Temple of Cartoon Mojo yesterday, and it's crazy how many folks were there! Twenty-something. I got out of the habit of going this last quarter, 'cause I was finishing the book, but man alive, it's grown!

Catching Up - The Book is Done!

Okay. I need to apologize for not updating more. My excuse is that... well... it had been a long time since I'd updated. It's like when I kept a journal. I kept it every day for a year or so, and then had a one-month stretch where I didn't write, and I never picked it up again. Too much time passed, too much to fill in!

So here's the short rundown version of the last month or so:

• The Book
Crogan's Vengeance is DONE. It clocked in at 177 pages, and I finished on the 10th. The book itself will be 189, and is coming out at SPX this year. It'll be hitting shelves nationwide on October 7th, I think.

• James comes to town
James Lucas Jones, my editor (Oni Press's editor-in-chief) came to Atlanta, and I passed off a finished draft to him. He's been pricing the books, and it sounds like they're going to be REALLY cool, in that classic kid's library edition aesthetic. Hardcover, with a gold leaf/foil title. Samples:


• The Barbecue
Shawn Crystal hosted a dinner for James and his minions - Atlanta folk who work for/with Oni (Hunter Clark, who's doing the art for the much-hyped Return of King Doug; Justin Wagner, who's doing the art for CBLDF director Greg Thompson's Lonesome Town; Me; Doug Dabbs, who's doing the art for some Resurrection specials coming up; and our spouses, Liz and Nicole), with SCAD honcho Pat Quinn and his wife Pilar there as well. We had chicken sausage (delicious) and strips of some sort of bourbon-marinated steak. I'm either not a steak man at all OR I'm the biggest steak snob in the world - I've had three steaks in the past ten years that I thought were good, and I LOVED those, but everything else was just hefty meat. The stuff at the barbecue was one of those three, and topped with a homemade guacamole. Mmmm!

• Free Comic Book Day
Shawn and I drove up to Charlotte, North Carolina where we were honored to be a part of the FCBD celebrations at Heroes Aren't Hard to Find. I did about thirty to forty sketches, for folks of all different age ranges.

I did a lot of Iron Man, quite a few Narutos, and more than one Batman... here's one of 'em!


• The Interview
Adam from The Dollar Bin interviewed me about Crogan's Vengeance and working with Oni as FCBD was wrapping up. Listen to it HERE.

• Editor's Day
We went down to Savannah for SCAD's annual Editor's Day. Me, Shawn, James, and Cara McGee made the trek, talking about Oni and Scad and the state of the industry and whatnot. And editor's day went really well - I always love seeing the Savannah folk, plus those editors with whom I'm already aquainted. And the whole thing really climaxed with...

• Karaoke!
I sang a duet of the Queen/David Bowie classic "Under Pressure" with Kevin Burkhalter, and it was, without question, the best Karaoke moment of my life. I did the Freddy Mercury part! Subsequently, I made into not one, but TWO Burkhalter Journal Comics this week! Liz reads Kevin's comics, so anytime I'm in them she treats me like a star.


• Ummmm...
That's it, for the most part. I think. I'm a week away from finishing the last class of my MFA program, and am starting to buckle down on my thesis...

Almost Done

I've been out of touch for a while, with no blogs or emails or the like, so I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm around - I've been holed up, trying to knock out the last 26 pages (writing, thumbnailing, pencilling, and inking) of the book in six days. Nearly there - I've got five more to ink before I hit the hay, and then ten more before Monday.

So close! I've been working on it for a year, and am so darn close...

Sketchin' at the Zoo

We're doing an animal anatomy class this quarter, so a whole slew of us went down to the Zoo yesterday. Allen came by before for coffee and Liz and he and I took off for the school, where we picked up Cara and David and made our way zoowards.



Olu, Me, and Pat Bolin:


Here's a drawing:

Here's Doug, sharpening his pencil outside the Bongo enclosure:


More drawings!





Shawn Crystal's family was there, and his daughter Zoe, who at five is already quite an artist, drew a lot as well. Here's a pic of her, climbing around with a sketchpad.

Around noon, we met up to go over our drawings, while Shawn gave us feedback.


Directed to capture more action, I did these last drawings before we were rained out:







That's it for the Zoo drawings! I'm still pumping away on Crogan's Vengeance, and at the time of writing this have tightly thumbnailed out the next fifteen pages. I'm going for eighteen by the time I go to bed, and start on the pages themselves tomorrow.

Rain scene!

The first in a series of drawings that I may be using for something, though what exactly it's going to me I'm not sure), featuring smokers of the Marvel Universe. I'm going to color it with watercolor, but figured that I'd scan it in first. It's big - much bigger than I usually draw (the board size is letter), drawn with a big old brush, probably a size ten or twelve.

J. Jonah Jameson!


Other Marvel Smokers I've identified (much thanks to those who helped me compile this list) are (pipes) Mr. Fantastic, Bruce Banner, (cigarettes) Bullseye, Gambit, Black Widow, Mentallo, Dollar Bill, Banshee, Red Skull, Ben Urich, (cigars) Wolverine, the Thing, Grey Hulk, Nick Fury, Howard the Duck, Kingpin, Puck... and General Thunderbolt Ross smokes something, but I'm not sure if it's a cigar or a cigarette.

Well, I finished the storm scene! It's fourteen pages long, and was harder to draw than anything else. I have subsequently discovered that the tons of rain that I did with small pens and white ink are not reproducing at ALL. If I tweak the scan levels to show the white, the black rain disappears, and vice versa. It's the first time EVER that I'm doing anything but extremely clean line for comics, and it's biting me on the butt. I'm going to tweak the levels to try and make the regular line art as good as possible, and go in on the Cintiqs at school and REDO whatever rain effects are lost. Grrr!

An untweaked panel:


Here's a tweaked-as-well-as-I-can panel.


A page. To set it up, the topsail is still open and is pulling the ship over on its side.


Captain Cane:


I have 36 more pirate story pages before the book is done, and I have 35 days to do them. I was freaked out, but I sat down and figured out what has to be on each page (something I usually don't do, having an open-ended page count, more or less) and now I have a great starting point from which to delve in.

Help! What's this song from?

Still crankin' away on Crogan's, but I'm consistently irritated by a song that's been bouncing around my head for a while now.

Film scores tend to stick in my head something fierce, sometimes movies that I haven't seen since I was ten. Usually I'll figure it out - it may take me a few days, but I'll usually be able to place in within the context of a scene, and that'll do it - the opening song on the Miyazaki-scripted Aladdin movie was one tough one, the song from where the little boy is stretching robin williams' face in Hook is another - usually it takes a little while, but eventually it comes to me.

This song, though - months! Or at least a month. I cannot for the life of me place it, so I'm hoping that you can. I did a quick vocal version in garageband, in the hopes that someone will recognize it. It may sound a little more Baroque than I meant for it too, but this is the tune, as I remember it:

Mystery Song mp3

I think it's from when I was in middle school or earlier. I don't think it's Hook, or Forrest Gump, or Homeward Bound, or Home Alone, but I don't know. Could it be part of a score from a Disney animation? Arrrrrrrg! It's driving me crazy.

Any ideas, suggestions, assistance, etc, would be EXTREMELY welcomed.