|
|
LIKE TO VISIT
Sarah's journal
WFMU
Drawn!
The Comics Reporter
original art for sale
Fine art prints!
buy books!
cute stuff @ cafepress
Jump back 9 entries
see all old entries
|
|
We have some new listings up on eBay, art from various HOF projects, as well as some of Sarah's collectibles, and a near-complete run of the comics magazine Hogan's Alley.  The art includes more production pieces from the Eltingville pilot as well as storyboard sketches and character design material from several Super Martian Robot Girl segments from Yo Gabba Gabba!. Comics-wise we've listed a Milk and Cheese page, a Dork #11 gag page, the title page from the Superman/Batman strip I drew for Bizarro Comics, a batch of page layouts I did for the Thing: Night Falls on Yancy Street mini-series, and some pencil roughs and designs done for DC jobs (World's Funnest roughs and promo button designs, Mr. Mxyzptlk statue). The pages have starting bids well below what they were priced at on our website, the design and rough drawings are all pretty low-starters as well, imo. You can see the auctions here.  We'll likely have more items available soon. Which reminds me, duh, we've also put some new HOF art up for sale at our site, including a Northwest Comix Collective page and three Devil Puppet pages from the first Invisible College story. I haven't made anything available from those features before, so, maybe that's a big deal to someone out there. Maybe not. Probably not. We also have some of our remaining Murder Family pages up and there's a Bill and Ted #2 splash page and some Dork inside front covers and the like. Some of this stuff I really don't want to sell, but, what can you do, things have been stupid and we can't fix the garage doors with sheets of marked-up bristol board. So, yeah. Our art for sale page is here. As always, I thank you for your time and attention.  
|
|
|
|
|
|
 So, here's what's doing: I finally finished up the Milk and Cheese strip for Image's Liberty Comics annual, which will be out in October. Other contributors to the CBLDF benefit book include Jill Thompson (collaborating with her husband, Brian Azzarello), Paul Pope, Garth Ennis, Dave Gibbons, Frank Miller, Jeff Smith, and a bunch of other people I don't think I've ever hung out with, so who needs 'em? This is the first M&C strip done since the Furries piece that ran on the DHC Presents about two years ago. Time flies, even when you're not having fun. Sarah colored the strip, which is called "CBLDF-U", and, well, yeah, there you go. Next M&C strip due out in 2012, I guess. (The above image isn't from the new strip, btw. It's just another one of those drawings where Milk and Cheese are running and yelling something. Whee!)  Also due out in a month or two: The Treehouse of Horror #16, from the fine folks at Bongo Comics, featuring comics by Peter Kuper, Kelly Jones and Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead (Holy Ace of Spades! ). Our contribution has the too-long title of "I Screwed Up Big-Time and Unleashed the Glavin on an Unsuspecting World!", which is why Bongo solicited it simply as, "The Glavin". It's 15-pages of Springfield-stompin' stupidity, sloppily splashed and splattered with a surprising surplus of sanguine fluid. See men, women and children (and a monkey and a pig) in peril! See a few men, women and children escape peril! See most of the men, women and children (and the monkey and the pig) fail to escape peril and end up smeared on the tarmac as unfortunate examples of Toho-style roadkill! See Bart Simpson save what's left of Springfield! See Bart not save what's left of Springfield! Confused? Good! This sucker is scheduled for September 29th. Oh, and hey, Bongo finally has a website, and it's pretty damned nifty. I also have a few short strips or scripts done for the Bart Simpson title that should appear sometime in the near-future, and I'll be starting on the art for a 10-pager shortly. When my hand heals. And my arm. The Hellboy/Beasts of Burden comic is hopefully chugging along. It's 24 pages, btw, if I haven't mentioned it. 2 extra pages. Whee. I'm supposed to be drawing one of the covers for an upcoming Dark Horse mini-series. Not Beasts of Burden, no, I'm never drawing anything for that. I love that book, why would I ruin it? Speaking of Beasts of Burden, I know what the next story will be, if there is a next story (I'm pretty sure there will be, but you never know), and I have a pretty good idea of what the next mini-series arc will be. We shall see what we shall see. As far as I can tell, the well-received but marginally ordered Beasts of Burden HC collection continues to sell...okay. So, yeah. We'll see. I finished two new Broken Robot strips but I don't know how to use a computer well enough to slap logos on them and post them. I have a few other Fun strips underway, but I rarely get to fiddle with them, so, we'll see how that goes. When I have time to fiddle with a Fun strip I try to work on commissions I owe people. Which are getting done, so, don't kill me, if you're one of the folks I owe drawings to (there aren't many). Soon, I promise. I take this commercial moment to once again mention the secret script that is still out there waiting to be drawn. You will like it. You will. When it happens, you will like it.  Started work on the first of two 5-pg Super Martian Robot Girl comics Sarah and I are contributing to Oni's Yo Gabba Gabba! anthology, due out in October. Should be cool. Buy two copies, one for your kid to bite, one for you to keep. A lot, if not all, of the monsters and animals from the various cartoon segments will appear in one of the strips, which I'm excited about, as I enjoy drawing those guys. The dancing Cobra Man, Harry Haircut, the Yeti, et al. I might be promoting all this junk with a local signing or two in October. I will likely be doing a signing or two at the Dark Horse booth at NYCC in October, as well. I am probably going to be signing at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival in December. I could very well be living in a men's shelter by January, 2011. We should be putting some art up for auction on eBay soon, haven't done that since May because things have been so hectic. We have put a few new pages of art from Dork up for sale at our website (some Murder Family pages, a page from The Northwest Comix Collective strip and the first Devil Puppet pages ever made available). Some of the pages are on the spendy side, but that's because they're kind of worth it. We have cheaper pages, which are also kind of worth it. Except for one or two of them, but I'm not saying which ones those are (Hint: I drew them). Okay, that's about it, I think. If anyone's wondering why all the links I used go to the TFAW (Things From Another World) website, it's not because I get a cut of any traffic I send there, but because finding direct information on some comic book websites is a giant frickin' pain in the ass. Admittedly, I'm not one with Google, my search skills are not masterly, but even so, I should be able to find book info quickly and painlessly from a publisher's website without wanting to trash my computer and go on rampage in the streets or Berlin. I guess it's so gosh-darned easy to find comical books these days that publisher websites can afford to be byzantine clusterfucks of frustration. Anyway, I gave up and just started using the TFAW site for everything. Found what I needed with distinct links and images, zip, zip, zoom. All I'm saying. Time to go. Got lots to do to bring more comical book fun to the niche sub-sub-sub-sub-masses. Later! |
|
|
|
|
|
 Here's another one of those Silver Age Marvel Comics villains I have a great fondness for. If I remember correctly, the name of the idiot wearing one of the more awkward super-villain suits of the era is one Abner Jenkins, a perfect schmuck name for a schmendrick character. I may be wrong, my Eltingville brain isn't as keen as it was once, and I dislike looking things up on Google and pretending I know what I'm talking about. It stifles conversation, don't you think? Sometimes it's nice to discuss something like people used to, without looking everything up and coming off like one of those crazy people in the trivia contests at SDCC. Anyway, back to the idiot in the bug outfit whose name, I believe, is Abner Jenkins. You'll notice he's flying in that bug suit, even though the bug suit appears to weigh a few hundred pounds, at the very least. It's a metal bugsuit with two steel plates for wings and a heavy breastplate and a helmet. And oh, that helmet. The bucket head of the beetle is one of the best dopey-ass designs from this era of comics, I mean, the whole ensemble is marvelous, a bug armor over a baggy union suit, it looks like a child's fridge drawing come to life. "It's Bug Man, ma!" "Very nice, dear". But I dig that helmet, a can, a bucket, with two holes and antenna. Can't see to the left, can't see to the right, gonna fly in the air and fight, fight,fight. To make things a hundred thousand times better, Bug Man (designed by Kenny Edwards, age 5, from Rosedale Grade School, or, Steve Ditko, if you want to be all uptight and factual about it), has those great, great, great sucker tendrils for hands. They grab stuff, and stretch like crazy, they're pneumatic or something scientifical. I don't know. Just like I don't know how two steel doors from the Merrimac make for wings. Who cares? I sure as hell don't. He's the Beetle, fer chrissakes, he needs all this bug shit to fight Spider-Man! Stop laughing! Tell me you wouldn't totally play with those gloves of his for hours on end. Yeah, I'm talking to you, don't tell me you haven't tried on those stupid Hulk or Thing hands and jerked around in the Toys R Us aisle hitting things for a short burst of happiness. You'd totally go crazy with Abner Jenkins' little glovey wonders, admit it! Right? Yeah! So, give it up for him! He flies, he has stretchy sucker-tipped fingers, a baggy suit and he can't see very well. Look out, world. Or at least a few places around the NYC/tri-state area. Yes, look out everybody. Because Mr. Jenkins is another one of those power/money-mad idiots who spends a ton of time and cash on some gimmick that will help him launch a crime career. To get power and money. And revenge, sure, always with the revenge with these people. He obviously needs the money because he spent all his savings on the goddamned bugsuit. Like many of the scientifically-inclined morons in the Marvel and DC Universes, he never once thinks maybe he can sell his inventions and prototypes (advanced suction tips that can suction-tip things, whatever technological process it is that makes a man in a heavy bugsuit fly, bucket head that inhibits sight worse than a Batman movie mask) to the government or one of them there fancy industrial combines, maybe Stark Industries, if you hafta be a friggin' geek about it. Nope, he's just another putz. He spends all this money, thousands at least, maybe tens of thousands, in the1960's, mind you, to sucker-tip steal bags of tens and twenties from the local Dime Bank. That isn't smart business thinking. That's stupid time. That's like, how a cartoonist thinks. I'll do all this stuff and sweat it and go broke but it'll be cool because I'M MY OWN MAN and I AM HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIFE and MY ART IS EVERYTHING and I AM IN!. Well, shit, okay, I can see it now, maybe that's where the Beetle's coming from, he's an individual, this man in the Beetle suit, he has some kind of perverse, self-destructive personal vision, so I should cut him some slack. And rethink my career, while I'm at it. Most folks don't cut the Beetle any slack, not even an inch or three of slack. Most people kind of think he looks like a bit of a jerkoff. I think he looks awesome, but I'll agree he isn't what you'd call intimidating. See The Juggernaut, I guess, for an arguably better approach to wearing intimidating scary armor (and helmets that you can't see much out of). The Beetle didn't see too much action, I guess, and he was retooled in the 80's with a sleeker costume that was still pretty buggy and ridiculous. And really, kind of charmless. I dunno if he retained the sucker cups, I don't remember much from the era of my playing Champions and buying Marvel Universe handbook updates. Which is probably a good thing, a survival mechanism of some sort my brain has laid in during REM sleep. But I just love that there was a time when a guy would throw on his work clothes and a preposterous bug suit with suction gloves and go downtown to main event a Spider-Man comic. He could fly, somehow, and had fingers that went shplushk into walls and pulled them down ker-rumble on top of people and made wordy threats and vowed that no one could beat him and got beaten by hormonal teenage superheroes every ding-dong time. That's all he needed. That's all the readers needed. Do any of you older folks out there remember that Human Torch/Spider-Man team-up? That was what constituted a major event back then, I think it was all of 20 pages or so. Now you need thirty-five issues and seventy-two covers and five hundred of these idiots and four hundred and eight of them have to get their heads graphically ripped off so the other decades-old kid's characters can cry, cry,cry. Oh, well. Progress and all. We've lost the readers but we've gained cannibalism and explicit sex talk. And kept The Beetle for copyright purposes, I bet! Whoopee! Please don't tell me if he has been updated as an actual mutated beetle man who eats people's heads or whatever. I readily admit that I prefer the imbecile in the silly outfit to over-muscled guys eating Peter Parker''s eyeball in a Spider-Man book. Or spidey-spooge. Or Satan, Divorce Attorney At Law. To each, his own, as Nat King Cole sang. But let's not kvetch any more. Why spoil things? Let's just soak in the marvelousness that is The Beetle. And remember a magical time when stupid overweight men named Abner Jenkins could fly. |
|
|
|
|
|
 Inked version of the Absorbing Man drawing I posted a while back. |
|
|
|
|
|
 I forget what number I was up to, or even the name of the posts I used to write about things I've written or drawn for work purposes that went nowhere, or straight into the shitter. For all I know I've posted this sketch before, although I might be thinking of the General Zod designs I did for the Supergirl Animated one-shot Sarah and I wrote a ways back. Anyway, this is my take on Solomon Grundy for a pitch I was working up for the Superman Adventures book. Found it the other day while cleaning up some papers. I know. Maybe I posted the plot for the pitch, and that's the memory shard itching at my graying gray matter --? Cripes, if I knew how to use the computer/internet effectively I could just go and see what I wrote. Screw that. Anyway, Solomon Grundy would have been a zombie menace born from the Metropolis Swamp where Lexcorp was dumping toxins, as well as the bodies of snuffed enemies. Sol was Luthor's former bodyguard, Mercy Graves whacked him, on orders, to get his job, even though she and Solly were lovers. Sol didn't know that and his seemingly unstoppable revenge rampage ends when he finds out. Instead of killing her he trundles back to the swamp and walks into until he disappears. Superman vs Super Zombie was the main match on the card. The title was shitcanned before I could effectively pitch the storyline. Hoo-ha! Lovely seeing you all, wish I could stay and chat, but I have to get back to work. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 r
|
|
|
|
|
|
 This is the piece we contributed to the Simpsons/Futurama Crossover Crisis book published back in April by Abrams. A really nifty slipcase hardcover collection of the two crossover mini-series by writer Ian Boothby and penciler James Lloyd (and other folks), with lots of extras (pencils, notes, a large pin-up section, bonus comics and more). Only $16 and some change on Amazon, if anyone's interested. |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|