Comicsaurus

Christmas with Cameron Stewart

2009-12-30T13:23:00.000-08:00

Just got a hardback art book of Cameron Stewart art, "Work." Got a beautiful piece of original art in it which I am sharing with you now!

Lightbox Prismacolor Sketches

2009-11-12T20:51:00.000-08:00

I had a nightmare I was hired to be a monthly artist for The Flash, but of course I couldn't really draw. So I'm taking this year to teach myself that skill-- do drawings that communicate and hold up to actual professional drawers. Now, I've been trying to c ome up with a style that is related to the art aesthetic I use in my photography and music, which is pretty sparse and a bit unearthly. Markers are my current favorite way to render a drawing, with these 2 sketches being suitably minimalist. I am really holding on dearly to the late Alex Toth's creedo that you only use the bare minimum of lines to illustrate something.The last image was the first of my portrait photos I converted into a drawing. At the time I thought it looked cool but now (a month later) it seems quite over-rendered to me, though I thought It was worth posting anyways.

Unexplainable Strip

2009-11-10T22:23:00.000-08:00

You ever create something with absolutely no idea of where it came from, how it got there, or what posessed you to post it to your comics blog?

Afrodisiac

2009-10-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

Why have I never heard of this comic before? It's about as close to perfect as you can get...

The Incredible Endorser

2009-10-17T07:23:00.000-07:00

I want to endorse two fantastic hardcovers/ trades, coincidentally the last two I purchased; Neil Gaiman and John Romita Jr.'s Eternals miniseries and Christopher Moeller's JLA A League of One. Eternals follows a small collection of characters out of an immortal,
superpowered society who have lost their memory thanks to a sort of wicked Peter Pan, possibly annihalating the solar system simply so he doesn't have to be forever 11 years old. Knowing the plot doesn't take away from the frenzied page turning Gaiman's dialouge inspires. It feels so stripped down, instead of a hundred Eternals, hundreds of Deviants and scads of Celestials, you get a few of column A, 2 of column B (until the last bit), and 1 of column C. Somehow everything feels more important because of this. Romita Jr.'s art equally conveys a coffee shop encounter and a 2 pager of the Avengers meeting God, a dreaming Celestial who is so enormous he fills a sideways spread with Giant Hank Pym a tiny footnote in the corner.

JLA A League of One is a tale from the Big 7 Morrison days where a Greek oracle warns Wonder Woman the JLA will die battling a medieval dragon. She takes it on herself to put them out of commission and fight the dragon on her own. It's everything you could ask for in a JLA story-- high stakes, personal moments showing the relationships between all the characters, a unique and powerful villain, creative
use of the JLA's abilities (particularly Batman's expanding bat cape trick to escape Wonder Woman's lasso). It's also fully painted in a fairly realistic fashion, really bringing the characters to life. Moeller even makes the Dragon as realistic and they come, videotaping his dog running to use as art reference. I paid $5 on Amazon for this and feel it was a steal.

Dog Food Blues

2009-10-09T07:49:00.000-07:00

Spidey Vs. Vulture

2009-10-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

Some doodles from the sketchbook using Prismacolor's "Warm Grey" set. I love Prismacolors, and they must know this, because they are really damn expensive. So anywho, I've been enjoying the new Spider Man cartoon quite a bit, and the actual comic is pretty great these days as well, but I never cared much for his classic rogue's gallery as much as a lot of fans do. I grew up with the Hobgoblin, who was a great mystery threat that Spidey never definitively beat, and of course the Lizard is a cool tragic character, and Mysterio has a great look. But Electro, Doc Ock, and all the rest? Pfft. No one seemed more lame than one villain who was a flying old man, the ever-vulgar Vulture-- what a challenge for a young scientific genius with the proportional strength of a spider! What's next, a fat guy with extra arms? Anyways, I always thought it was a hoot that Peter Parker would get off kicking this old man's ass, so I drew it, making sure to include a forceful kick to the skull. Someone whould write a story where Spider Man causes a fatal heart attack in the Vulture and has to come to terms with the guilt.

Fabulous Five- World's Greatest Comic Illustrators!

2009-09-30T14:59:00.000-07:00

The fabulous 5 of comic artists! I like a lot of artists and as I
develop my own style it's hard to determine who is actually an
influence. This list doesn't reflect my all time faves as much as
artists I find myself looking at and trying to discern what they are
doing technically and conceptually.

1. Ryan Sook-a humble man with an incredible design sense. I first
saw him doing Arkham Asylum Living Hell, then next on Seven
Soldiers-Zatanna, doing truly mind bending work along the lines of the
design work done by J.H. Williams III.2. Joshua Middleton-not terribly dissimilar from Ryan Sook, but he really stands out in his economy of line. I love that the art can be minimalist, yet could be mistaken to be very expensive animation.3. Kyle Baker- so energetic it may even be called anarchic. I aim to go wild with my drawing and art choices and Kyle most definitely does this, changing his style bit by bit with each project.4. Adam Hughes-blending art noveau and cheesecake, Adam's work deliberately appeals to our basic belief in what looks good. I think his coloring style is somewhat similar to Sook and Middleton, but I have to say when I think of Adam's work, it's not his eyepopping covers that come to mind, but his hilarious and minimalist convention sketches you find all across the internet.
5. Bret Blevins-local AZ guy! His curvy, Jack Cole-inspired style is more prominent now than when he actually did comics like New Mutants and Sleepwalker. His drawings seem so effortless, the characters feel like they are always in mid-motion rather than static poses. I chose this image out of all his stuff because I had just written an Amazon woman on a pterodactyl in one of my own stories...

Kyle Baker's Tiny Tots Toon

2009-08-27T23:52:00.000-07:00

Kyle Baker is easily one of my favorite graphic artists, but I've never visited his site until now. Lots of cartoons on there that describe daily life with Patrick and Maggie better than I could ever put into words.
Watch Funny baby Video: Playpen in Family Videos | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
Watch The Bakers: GIANT STEP in Animation | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Grendel meets Mothman

2009-08-20T22:09:00.000-07:00

Two more mythical monsters that I am especially proud of-- Grendel and the West Virginia Mothman. My Grendel was quite obviously influenced by the recent Zemekis Beowulf film which I enjoyed very much. I did love the Beowulf story as a child from a book of myths and legends, basically the same concept I am working with now.Since making these composites I've done several linocut stamps of monsters that I'm pleased with and now I venture into more unfamiliar terrain-- computer coloring in Corel Painter. I've owned said program for over a year, alongside a Bamboo Wacom Tablet, and done very little with either, but the few attempts at Photoshop coloring with a mouse are really pathetic. I may even try hand painting these prints but I'm giving the computer a shot to "wow" me as I've never been much of a painter, and the only paintings I've ever done that I liked were painted with a knife.

Part of what is so exciting about my myth/ monster project is I'm trying techniques I've never done too much with (photomontage) or never done before this year (linocut and computer painting). I aim to show a start-to-finish creature next post...

Stranger Than Fiction 2: Beyond the Sound Barrier

2009-08-13T00:32:00.000-07:00

Finally finished another Fumetti. This was tough in large part because I was pretty limited on photos of my main character, and his vehicle, and also because I had a hard time coming up with what would be so special beyond the sound barrier. Now that it's over I feel it came out pretty cool with such great limitations in comparison to my previous Fumettis... next time I'll be using models and storyboards for sure though.

Sphinx

2009-08-08T00:37:00.000-07:00

All cylinders are firing on my mythological monsters project. I've been doing about 1 computer mock-up a day as the kids are put to bed and I catch up on Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica podcasts. Tonight was Echinda and this one, the Sphinx. I'm posting the color version simply because it really leapt off the screen at me, obviously this is just the mockup... The goal is to have all the mockups done in August, all the linocuts finished by the end of September, all the printing/ writing and computer coloring done by the end of October with the book ready by December.

Madame Harpy

2009-07-24T20:22:00.000-07:00

In this post I had showcased a Griffin and a Minotaur I threw together, amongst several legendary creatures I want to put together as a book. Those first two creatures are now linocut printed and computer colored. It's pretty clear how much the process completely changes the art into something more timeless and less thrown together. I may do a little more color work but this is essentially where I'm going with this project, with text descriptions beneath. Since these I've also done Behemoth, Harpy (digital mock-up seen below), Ouroborus, and Jackalope, each in various stages of the process.
Curious where the basis of my harpy came from?

Evil Genius Flyboy Vertigo

2009-07-24T16:12:00.000-07:00

Caveat: this page is simply a work in progress...

Had a hiatus from graphic arts work due to travel and a longer-than-usual illness than debilitated my muscles to the point I couldn't gripanything or manuever a goddamn mouse. That's all in the past, let us speak of it no more. We have here another Fumetti out of archival images, featuring a possible true story of breaking the sound barrier. This is page 2 of 4, so I'll get it all up soon enough, but I wanted to mention Blambot which is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in making comics. They have dozens of creative fots with great names like "Radioactive Granny," which should be a story all of its own, but even better perhaps 1/2 of them are free. The font for this story was "Evil Genius" with "Flyboy" used for the title page, which isn't posted yet. Sometimes I just like to look at fonts and let them inspire the stories...

I have been really into aviation adventures as of late-- movies like the Aviator and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, plane museums, that kind of thing. The only great comic I remember in this vein was Ken Steacy's Tempus Fugitive, where the protagonist ends up flying different planes in different eras. I met Steacy last year and we talked for a long time about different planes, enough that he gave me a good deal on a sketch. Great guy, great comic.

Comics-wise, I've been in a less superhero, more Vertigo mood. Mere minutes ago I completed Enigma by Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo, a classic slice of Vertigo with horrific violence, weird sex, and a twisting plot that doesn't really end-- just pulls the camera away at the climax to reveal a bigger picture. In its way it's more satisfying than having good guys beat bad guys or vice versa. Highly recommended.

We go from Vertigo at its best to Vertigo at its worst, which is both confusing to read and disappointing in its quality given its pedigree. Mike Carey and John Bolton did an OGN called God Save the Queen using some of the Sandman fairy characters in a metaphor for heroin addiction-- so far, so good-- but so much of the art is autographed splash pages depicting unneccesary plot elements that I have to think Bolton had random paintings lying around and he asked Carey to write a story around them. Quite a Liefeld move if you ask me. I'm keeping the book as it may be worth a second look, but mostly because all those hard covers look great on my shelf.

Monsters of Myth

2009-06-18T22:52:00.000-07:00

This is a project I've thought about since I was a little kid: representations of mythological beasts. I did the Griffin first, Minotaur second, and I think the Minotaur is a lot more interesting and representational of the story. I couldn't actually find a story to go with a Griffin. These aren't the final versions, I'm going to do linocut versions, perhaps some watercolor in the white areas.

Convention Sketches and Cyano Doop

2009-06-06T14:33:00.000-07:00

Real life heroes.

Thought I would take a mo' to post some of the sketches I've gotten over the last year. Not as much as I would like but perhaps more than I could afford. These come from Chris Giarusso, Kieron Dwyer, Chris Moreno, and Zatanna is by a local artist who has worked on Warhammer comics (can't recall the name/ not signed). Flash is by a Tucson artist.

New purchases have been a lot of Tim Sale. Absolutely love his artwork. However, his most frequent collaberator is Jeph Loeb, whose writing I find really cliche and pandering to the lowest common denominator. Why not get Rowdy Roddy Piper to write a comic? Anyways, in order to maximize my enjoyment, I've gone around the Loeb factor and picked up Sale's "Tales of the Batman" and "Superman: Kryptonite." Guys like him, Darwyn Cooke, Cameron Stewart, Kieron Dwyer, Bret Blevins, so on and so forth-- borrowing liberally from Will Eisner and Alex Toth and 50's and 60's graphic design, very curvy and simplified, I just eat that up. Recently I've been looking for things that have first and foremost eye-popping art, stuff I can share with my son. You can't go wrong with Alan Davis. He very well may be my all time favorite comic artist. So I got Fantastic Four: The End, something along the lines of an alternate future like his JLA: The Nail/ Another Nail. A story with a trillion characters jammed in that switches scenes every two pages yet somehow reads like a cohesive story.

Even as a teenager I thought if I was a wealthy man I'd buy up original art and animation cels... now as a parent of 2 young children it seems like the most irresponsible dream I could concieve. Which is perhaps why I do the occasional stamp or cyanotype version of comic art, just so I could have something original to hang up.

Stamped Baby

2009-05-30T14:29:00.000-07:00

Still experimenting with the linocut, this time using a photo for the source material, also fooling around with blending elements of the original photo in with the stamp. At this moment I like the purerer, non-hybrid versions better than the mixed one. It just looks too much like a photoshop effect.

Remix Comix

2009-05-23T23:36:00.000-07:00

The general comic book, comic strip, and graphic novel industries are going to be radically different within the year. Purportedly Apple is making a Kindle-type Ipod that has all the usual functions plus a color ebook reader capability. I download comics occasionally to see if something is any good, or in a few cases, to have a complete run of something classic that I already own but want in a digital form (and has never been collected-- things like John Ostrander's Suicide Squad, or his Spectre, or his Hawkworld... so on and so forth). These are okay for archival purposes but with the new Ipod my digital collection will actually be USEFUL.

One of the things that has changed with my personal switchover to mp3s and avis years ago was that I got into much older things, things that I would've avoided in the days of DVD and CD because maybe it wasn't packaged neatly enough, or "the movie was in black and white." I love watching black and white movies on my Creative Zen's tiny little screen. Novelty, I suppose. I think the same thing will happen to my taste in comics. Things that got by on the strength of their packaging from Marvel and DC will be revealed as the utter shite they always were on the Ipod whilst more esoteric material will shine.

I like how new technology changes how we view the past. It's more interesting to me than how new technology shapes new things. Take, for example, these Garfield remix strips. They've been floating around the net for years but it's still a great example of creative thinking mixed with new tech. One type of remix involves removing Garfield's though bubbles, painting Jon as a lonely maniac (even more extreme is Garfield Minus Garfield, removing the cat alltogether). Then you have a randomized assemblage of panels which tells a new story completely. This is an interactive, hilarious application that makes reading the goddamn cartoon enjoyable to me for the first time in however many years. It also makes me think that the way of all media in the future will emphasize interactivity and de-emphasize being simple spectators to whatever drama is presented, whether its comics or movies or sports. So, coming soon to a Comicsaurus blog near you, an interactive strip, utilizing all the tricks and traps I learned from Mad Libs and Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions and Choose Your Own Adventure and Scott McCloud.

Linocut comics

2009-05-15T14:42:00.000-07:00

I am working on a new style using a tool that I haven't done since maybe high school. or maybe never, I can't remember, called linocut. I was inspired by artists like Charles Burns and Peter Kuper who use non-traditional styles to make their cartooning. I also am in the mood to learn something new artistically. Anyways, the first image is from a book I'm working on about a kitten who survives a drowning and meets religious figures, and the third is an adaptation of a Black Canary sketch by Terry Dodson. Oftentimes when I'm working with a new style I use a sexy lady drawing by some famous artist to practice with; it's the 14 year old boy stuck inside a 31 year old man.

Flashbulb #5

2009-05-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

The Onion Strip

2009-04-29T21:48:00.000-07:00

I was asked if the goofiness of the dialouge is intentional and yes, of course it is. None of my drawings or photo montages have come across as serious so I don't see why dialouge should be. My tastes tend to run towards reading comic for pleasure rather than serious HBO-style drama anyways. Thinking of my favorite comics, and not just graphic novels per se, but strips and editorial cartoons, I would mention The Onion's Kelly (actually Ward Sutton) as my favorite cartoonist of the moment. It's one of the few things I laugh out loud at.

Flashbulb #4

2009-04-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

Meanwhile, back in "Flashbulb"...I love comics, but I only sorta like new comics. Comics, music and photography-- my three artistic love, in no particular order (though all my education and creative career has revolved around photography). There's been a development over the last 10 years in each that has seen the "production" side overtake the "intuitive" side of craftsmanship, completely due to the fact that it is very difficult to be "intuitive" with computers. I'm speaking in general terms here, not about specific artists, though you could easily name an artist in any genre who transforms from an earlier organic, free flowing style to something more stiff and locked in and dependent on technology. Now, specifically to comics, I was flipping through "Dark Avengers" with art by Mike Deodato and it's uncanny how many panels are repeated through the use of Photoshop. It has nothing to do with storytelling and everything to do with expediency. Furthermore, it just looks bad. That editors allow this tripe through says that not only does the artist not care, the rest of the creative team is cool with this. Around the same time I saw Dark Avengers I was reading an Al Williamson collection, with every panel hand drawn, not overly detailed but each panel packing in so much story between backgrounds, body language and design. I'm not trying to sound like a Luddite, and obviously there is a heavy dependancy on technology for my own work, I just feel the shortcuts used in modern comics take away from storytelling, which is the basis of the whole purpose of the comic art.

Hardcore hardcovers

2009-04-17T20:14:00.000-07:00

I am here to confess I have become a format snob. Nothing but hardcovers over the last few months-- Moore and Bolland's The Killing Joke, Azzarello and Bermejo's Joker GN, Joker's Greatest Stories, Fables 1000 Nights, recent Captain American hardcovers, Bizzaro World, Moore's ABC hardcovers, Johns and Franks' Action Comics arcs, all beautifully represented on my shelves with rock solid binding. Once you get hooked on a format, you find yourself buying stupid stuff over great comics because you like the way it looks in a bookcase. Kind of like high school crushes.

The most enjoyable purchase of the last few weeks was a collection called Marvel Westerns. It was an anthology miniseries from the likes of Dan Slott, Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers and others featuring Kid Colt, Arizona Girl, Two Gun Kid, Red Wolf, so on and so forth. You've got complete stories by respectable creators with fun characters and unburdened by the continuity demands of a shared universe-- sandwiched in a durable, possibly-bulletproof hardcover. I couldn't give a toss about the dour modern Marvel Universe, sponsored by Bendis and Millar and Loeb, but all these ancillary projects (including Marvel Monsters and Agents of Atlas) fly the flag of the freewheeling Marvel spirit of Lee and Kirby and Thomas and Gruenwald and others. Great stuff.

Gene Colan Tribute

2009-04-05T08:06:00.000-07:00

Somewhere, on Earth 2 perhaps, I would be living it up at the Emerald City Comicon in Seattle now. I have the ticket to prove it. Except I couldn't catch a standby flight there for some reason. Quite annoying. Instead, I'm being productive at home with the family. Very relaxing.

In 2004 I had a painting class where I found I really liked painting with a knife. I liked the thick real-world textures, which is one area a painting excels over a photo or a graphic design. My main problem with painting is that I don't know what to paint. I know what to photograph, and when I draw it's because I have some random doodle in my mind, but painting is something I have never really wrapped my head around. So, I present, an early attempt at finding inspiriation in a Gene Colan Howard the Duck cover...

Stranger Than Fiction #1

2009-03-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

So I'm trying my hand at a Fumetti that I don't actually photograph-- something involving history, something semi-factual, something using archival images. This is the first in what I hope will be many such strips of "Stranger Than Fiction!"

Flashbulb #3/ Fables

2009-03-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

Another installment of Flashbulb. Something completely different coming up later this week.

I've been reading a bunch of Bill Willingham's Fables trades. Generally solid, I wouldn't say "great" as I don't have the compulsion to do nothing but get lost in the Fables world. I actually find a lot of it repetitive, for example, the ongoing gag of how each Fable acts in the real world in contrast to their story. It's a bit like Piers Anthony's Xanth series, which I really enjoyed as a kid, but find it repetitive and full of stock gags. I actually feel that way about a lot of comics so perhaps it is the nature of the medium that creators have certain tics and in the case of Vertigo/ mature content titles, where they are encouraged to bludgeon what makes them unique into the ground. Brian K. Vaughn, who writes Ex Machina and Y the Last Man, is a superb example of this. Love the comics, can only take all the factoids and lectures and gags in small doses. I don't feel that way about all repetitive creators though. Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragones have been recycling the same jokes for over 25 years in Groo yet I can't get enough.

So yeah, Fables. It's better if you don't read any spoilers, which unfortunately, I've spoiled EVERYTHING before I cracked the second trade.

Flashbulb #2

2009-03-03T21:15:00.000-08:00

Flashbulb #1

2009-02-26T21:00:00.000-08:00

Started this in 2007, only recently got the time and gumption to get the series off the ground. Here's the first strip.

Pitch for a Wonder Woman series

2009-02-18T20:20:00.000-08:00

Green Lantern Fumetti

2009-02-12T21:01:00.000-08:00

My first Fumetti. Done as a sample project for my high school students. This was quite addictive. Looking forward to doing more of this kind of thing.

Discovery of the Comicsaurus

2009-02-06T10:12:00.000-08:00

February 7th, 2009, Chandler, AZ - Palentologists for the University of Whassamatta U are reporting discovery of a new breed of dinosaur, tentatively reported as a crudely drawn stick figure with a comical facial expression and the ability to consume large quantities of graphic arts, regardless of the quality of the material.

Said creature is also rumored to have some talents in the visual arts and may even have been responsible for some of the similarly-crude webcomics that have been lurking hither and tither. A journal was found near the excavation site, detailing what the creature read and its thoughts of the works.

Stay tuned for more webcomic postings/ graphic novel reviews in the upcoming weeks.