Mouse Guard Commission

Because of my contribution to Mouse Guard Legends #1, I have been asked to do a Mouse Guard style commission. It is always fun to do some lush pen work :)

Baba Yaga's House on Chicken Legs (pencils)

Claire Wendling "Daisies"

Claire Wendling is a wonderful artist who started in French comics and later on moved on to doing concept fork for films and other commercial illustration.

Last year, Stuart Ng Books published an very nice 40 page collection of Claire's sketches titled "Daisies". It seems that there is now a new edition with the same name published in France. The differences are that the French edition is hardbound AND is 61 pages.

I am very curious about this book and if anyone has any info I would very much appreciate it. At the moment, I am assuming that this is a totally different collection. The reason for my assumption is that Claire Wendling has a history os releasing books with the same name but different content. It is kind of funny, but up to date she has done 2 versions of "Drawers", "Iguana Bay", and "Desk". I find this fascinating because it seems that while everybody else is just repackaging the same material and renaming it to sell more copies, her strategy seems to be to release new material...under the same title.

Sandy Plunkett

I was very fortunate to meet Sandy Plunkett via internet a few years ago. It was wonderful to be able to express my appreciation for an artist whose work I admired for years. Now, there is a new sketchbook full of his sketches available for everyone to appreciate. You can find it here: "The World of a Wayward Comic Book Artist"

Another Alan Furst inspired drawing

WWII crime noir and Stalin

This is a concept drawing for a possible project:



I want to thank everyone who came by on Saturday to say "Hi". Very much enjoyed seeing some old friends and meeting new people...almost makes me think I should do more conventions :)

HIJINX Comics, June 12, noon-3 (Mouse Guard: Legends, Robotika, Sketchbook)

I will be signing and selling stuff at Hijinx Comics this Saturday. I will be joined by Mick Gray, the inker behind such books as Promethia, Joker, Zatanna...I'll be bringing books for him to sign :)

Vanya

Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard #1

All across the land, Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard #1 is in the stores....and I have a short story in it :)

David Petersen did a short Q&A with me about my contribution on his blog. You can click "here" to read it.

and some reviews:
"BorkenFrontier.com"
"IGN.com"
"Multiversitycomics.com"

Adam Brockbank and Mezolith

A few weeks ago I purchased a new graphic novel "Mezolith" by Ben Haggarty and Adam Brockbank. The cover caught my eye and I remember thinking: "I bet they got someone to do the great cover and the inside is nothing like it." I was shocked when I realized that the same artist did the interior pages AND it was a gorgeous book. I got it and read it right away. The story is a coming of age epic set in the Stone Age and told through a series of vignettes. Each short story having it's own point that fits into a larger overall theme. And it is, of course, beautifully drawn.



I have never encountered Mr. Brockbank's work before, so I searched the wed and found his "website". It turns out that he has done lots of concept and storyboard work for film and I was real curious as to how a "Hollywood guy" ended-up working on a comic book. So I contacted Mr. Brockbank and he was kind enough to answer a few of my questions that I am posting below.


1) Please say a few words about your “Adventures in Illustration”. Did you go to art school? Who would you site as an inspirational influence? Did you make a clear career choice of working as a concept/storyboard artist or is that something that developed organically by itself?

I grew up in a very Arty household. There was a studio where my Mum painted and my Dad used as a workshop, and my sister and I were encouraged to use it whenever we wanted to as well. Every home should have one! My first comics were the black and white reprints of classic Marvel strips we had in the UK. It was the physical energy that really captured my imagination then, and I copied them like mad, as well as creating my own strips. Later on ( mid - late 70's ) in my early teens I discovered the more mature comics, like' Eerie' and 'Creepy', or' Heavy Metal', and stuff published by 'Dragons dream' etc.

But gradually my infatuation with comics was eclipsed by a growing interest in Painting, and it was in this subject that I graduated, and then went on to do a Masters degree at the Royal College of Art in London in the late 80's. It's very hard to earn a decent living as a painter, so like most young painters I had to find other work to supplement my income, and it was a friend who suggested storyboards. I was quite unaware of what they were or how to get started, but once I tried I found that all that television and all those films I'd daydreamed in front of weren't a complete waste of time, because I had absorbed the language of the camera. I knew instinctively how to frame a scene, and quickly found work storyboarding commercials for production companies.

It was a few years before I found myself on a feature film ( does anybody remember ' The Adventures of Pinnochio' with Martin Landau? ) and not long before an over stretched Art department ( "Lost in Space" ) gave me the chance to try my hand at concepting. Once I'd made the leap from commercials to features, the time left for painting was all but gone.

2) You have done lots of concept illustration and storyboard layouts for motion pictures. You have also worked with panel-to-panel comic book storytelling. What are your thoughts on the differences between how you approach storyboards vs. comic books?

The approach I've taken to MeZolith is of course much influenced by my film work and working methods, which I hope bring a cinematic feel to the strip. Some comic book artists have an exceptionally cinematic technique. Look at Otomo's 'Akira'. Never mind the anime, that comic is SO saturated with the language and energy of cinema.

I would describe the Artistic style of MeZolith as clear line rather than fully painted, with a very naturalistic palette. With painted artwork, you've got to make sure it doesn't slow down the momentum of the story too much. You want to evoke more than describe, and clarity is all important, just as it is with storyboards. With a comic there are the additional disciplines of page composition and economy. By economy I mean you may only have 5 pages to tell a story. You can't go off on a flight of fancy. You need to find the essential framing. As regards page composition, there we have the balancing of frames, emphasis etc. These are factors unique to comics.



3) How did you get involved with “Mezolith”? Are there plans for a sequel? Are you working on any other projects?

MeZolith began the day David Fickling visited the Art department on 'Harry Potter' on a kind of talent scout for illustrators for his children's comic,' the DFC'. He made a great pitch and I knew it was a unique opportunity. I got in touch with my old and dear friend Ben Haggarty and explained the situation. We could offer them anything, so long as it appealed to the age group the comic was intended for, notably 8 -12 year olds. Ben is a world renowned oral storyteller ( with a secret love of comics! ) and right away we were looking for a framework in which we could embed some ancient folk tales, myths etc. We settled on the Mesolithic era, and the project began to take shape. Lucky for us they loved the concept and MeZolith was born.

There certainly are plans for a sequel, and MeZolith book 1 is going to be published in France too this summer.
I'm not working on other comic book projects actively, but behind the scenes Ben and I have a few ideas we are developing. Hopefully we can get MeZ 2 off the ground first!

For those who are interested and live in US, Mezolith can be ordered through amazon.com here: "Mezolith"

Thermopylae ... the last stand

Don Lawrence and the Trigan Empire

Along with Frank Bellamy I have been "discovering" the work of Don Lawrence who drew Trigan Empire for British publication. I was so impressed by his use of light and shadow, as well as his rendering of folds that I did some studies of the figures from the comic book that I got. It was fun and educational for me :)

Legend of Mouse Guard signing at HIJINX in San Jose

On June 12th HIJINX COMICS in San Jose is having their annual sidewalk sale with tons of 50 and 24 cent books for sale, as well as a great selection of graphic novels at excellent prices. I will be there as well, promoting Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard #1 (in which I have a short story), both volumes of Robotika, as well as my 2010 Sketchbook. So if you are in the neighborhood, stop by and say "hi".

As an interesting note, I want to add that my "relationship" with HIJINX goes w-a-a-a-y back. I used to buy comics there when it was called Mike's Coliseum and had one of my first signings there for "Moonstruck" and "Bloodlust". More recently, I have gotten to know Dan Shahin, who now runs the shop, and did a couple of Robotika appearances. Thanks to Dan, the shop has great atmosphere and it is always fun to hang out.

African Warriors...a tribute to Frank Bellamy

I recently picked-up a book of Thunderbird strips drawn by Frank Bellamy. One of the stories takes place in Africa. I just loved how he drew the backgrounds and the native warriors. These sketches were inspired by his work on that strip:

Blue Pencil: Warlock and Star Thief

My take on Warlock's fight with Star Thief:


Just playing around with Thanos...did not get him right, just not menacing enough:

One last Gelfling.....

Gelflings and thiings....Dark Crystal #3

Another shot at Dark Crystal...in ink

It seems to me that my progress through art is like playing "leap frog". I work hard to get to a certain level at something, and because I concentrate on that one thing (composition, storytelling, human anatomy, animal anatomy...), I get ahead in one area and not in other areas.

When I realize it, I stop and try to "pull up" the rest of my skills. Penciling and inking are perfect examples. I have been inking a lot last year and I started to feel like I could ink just about anything I could pencil and make it better than the original pencils. Once I realized that, I started focusing on my penciling...and if I compare this piece with the penciled drawing I posted just before, I can say that I now need to switch and try to sharpen up my inking again because I am penciling textures that I am just not being able to ink properly :)

Dark Crystal pin-up

Batman: Snow Angel

One of the studies for the below mentioned Batman story:

The Question by Alex Toth

With the complements of Matt Maxwell (my partner "in crime" at WonderCon) here is the first part of Alex Toth's story from Charlton Bullseye #5 (I think the splash page is terrific):

Garthem ... take two

I got some reference and figured-out that I had the creatures drawn WAY OFF. I used the blue pencil to sketch in the new creature shapes. I actually think the blue makes the picture better:

Dark Crystal : Skeksis and their crustacean Garthim.

I have been reading up on the Dark Crystal storyline and just for fun, coming-up with different compositions. I am pretty impressed with the "world creation" that was done for the movie.

BATMAN Body of Evidence

Frank Bellamy

The art of Frank Bellamy is fairly new to me. A long time ago, I have read the book called Masters of Comic Book Art that had a chapter on Frank Bellamy, but at the time I only cared about one artist in that book…Barry Windsor Smith. Years later I re-read the book because of the chapters on Wally Wood and Richard Corben, and just recently I revisited the book once again because of Frank Bellamy.

A big chunk of his work was done for British comics in the 1950-70’s and consisted of one page or two page spreads printed weekly for such stories as Dan Dare and Heros The Spartan. Wonderful sense of color and design are couple with great drawing ability and interesting storytelling ideas.

It is kind of hard to find his reprinted material here in US, but just this week I was able to purchase a new book from amazon.co.uk collecting some of his art-work depicting a re-telling of WWI. Samples of the pages can be viewed at Peter Richardson’s blog "HERE".

The book can be ordered here: "FRANK BELLAMY"
(Norm, I know you want one :))

Sketchbook video

Alex Toth : Red Circle Sorcery #8 (1974)

So why are there not more Alex Toth reprints? Pure Imagination is putting out books of his work, but they only print copyright free material from the 1950 and 1960. How come DC won't put out a Alex Toth reprint of all his short mystery, love, and war stories? I would not even care if it is just a black/white reprint. There is about 50 pages of Toth in the first House of Mystery volume and another 36 pages in the first volume of Secrets of Sinister House...but why not just a straight-up 300 page Toth reprint? Who can I write to?

Below is 1974 story from Red Circle Sorcery:

"Robotika: For A Few Rubles More" review

There has not been too many reviews of the new collection, I am not sure why...maybe it is harder to do a review of the sequel because the reviewer has to be familiar with the original series. However, here is one review (thanks to Frank): "Robotika 2".

The Three Fates

Steranko Archives Volume 1...got it!

Back in February I wrote about trying to purchase "Visual Theory: Steranko Archives Volume 1" from the Supergraphics website. It turned out that the website is indeed for real, but my order went into the Spam folder somehow. But that got taken care of and I have received my copy this week!

It is a great sketchbook showcasing Steranko's pencil work with different studies and some very finished drawings. In the back, Steranko writes a little blurb about each of the pages and that is very fun to read. For example, there is a Nick Fury pin-up that he did in the 90's when there was talk about him doing another Nick Fury book for Marvel. The reason why he drew it, was because Stan Lee wanted to know if Steranko could still draw...like I said it's a fun read (even if it's too short).

Featured over at The Marquis blog

A picture that I drew got featured over at Guy Davis' "THE MARQUIS".

Also, there is a new book out by Marc Michetz: "Kogaratsu #12".

WonderCon April (2-4) and Digital Lovecraft

If anyone can make it please stop by and visit me at WonderCon this weekend in San Francisco. I will be sharing a table with Matt Maxwell under the listing of "Highway 62" in the small publisher area. I'll have sketchbooks, "Robotika: For A Few Rubles More" collections, and whatever else I might think of to bring up :)

RPG Icons

These were done as icons for a role playing game:

One-a-Day, Volume 2, #1 ... Artesia.

I have started a new sketchbook. This will hopefully turn into "One-a-day, Volume 2"...but since the first sketchbook evolved into something completely different than what I expected it to be...who knows what this will become :)

My amazon pre-order list has grown huge...thankfully amazon does not charge until they ship the books. Here is what I have on order:

The Art of Neal Adams
The Art of Steranko
Both books will be published by Vanguard and they did a pretty good job with the Michael Golden book a few years back, so I have high hope for that.

Rip Kirby Volume 2 HC
I really liked the first volume (muddy reproductions and all :)). Truly a beautiful approach to comics and storytelling.

Tony Harris: Art and Skullduggery
I have always been a fan of Tony Harris' art, ever since his run on Starman. Recently I have not been as excited about his work, although he is more popular than ever with the ExMachina series, but I loved his "RoundEye" story from a few years back and since "RoundEye" is featured on the cover I hope to see more of that inside.

Wednesday Comics
The Wednesday comic series printed on nice paper in their original size. Ryan Sook, Brian Stelfreeze, Lee Bermejo....what's not to like?

Cover Run: The DC Comics Art of Adam Hughes (Adam Hughes Cover to Cover)
I could never afford to buy all of the comics with his individual covers, so here is my chance to buy a bunch :)

X-9: Secret Agent Corrigan Volume 1
I already mentioned that in an earlier post...I am really looking forward to this.

Also on my list are a few books that already came out, but I have not geared up to buy yet:
Sinister House of Secrets- contains a reprint of Alex Toth's 36 page story "Bride of the Falcon" from 1972
House of Mystery Volume 1- contains 5 short Alex Toth story reprints for a total of 54 pages of beautiful black and white art.

Markers and Amazon

A warning: this will not be pretty. I know of some artists whose lay-outs and sketches can be considred the work of art...not mine.

To answer an earlier question I wanted to post something that shows how I work out my storytelling for panel-to-panel pages.



Above are my 3 sketches for the last page of a short story "The Bronze Horseman" (those who have the published version, will note that the final version of the page is actually a bit different). The first 2 are simply me moving a pencil or a pen around trying to figure out what will be on the page. What I need to show to move the story along? Is is going to be a splash page? How to arrange panels to make it interesting? What angles to use in the panels?

Once I get to the point where I think the story is served, the compositions are interesting, the storytelling is clear, and there is something interesting to draw, I take out a marker and spot my blacks. This I do so that even though the lay-outs are very tiny, with the solid black shapes drawn I should be able to tell what is going on on the page. If after spotting the blacks the page looks like an unreadable mess...I start again.

That is my approach to it...if any other artists are reading this and would like to comment on their methods, I would love to hear it :)

Amazon this week....it turns out that there was some sort of pricing problem between Diamond and Amazon (something got lost in the process of transfering information from one to another) and all the books carried by Diamond got priced at $15 (even the books that should be going at $40). This was especially true of the "coming" items. Tons of people placed orders...and now there is a mess. Some orders will stand, some orders got canceled. You will note, now you can place an advanced order for Robotika, but you can be notified by e-mail when it arrives. This of course is a bit of a bummer and has regretfully happened a week before Robotika 2 arrives :(

Mouse Guard : Legends of the Guard Part II

David made a comment about the earlier post, reminding me that when I called to see if I can be part of the "Legends" project, he already had my name on the list of possible contributors, but the project was still in the early stages of development so it was too early to start calling people...but inspiration struck and I am very glad I called ahead because that gave me an opportunity to spend a little bit more time on my story, by working it in a "classic" one-step-at-a-time fashion and not worry about the deadline. This in it's own way is interesting, because I usually do not like to call, or otherwise bother, people about jobs. I am more comfortable just sitting in my room drawing and hoping that somehow the jobs will come in...I mostly make a fool out of myself when I talk to editors. But in this case, I felt very comfortable talking to David (and Julia) and I also felt that I was not bothering him in anyway, if he wanted to have me be part of the project he would tell me so, if not, he would be just as straight with me and tell me "no".

Anyway...my first step was to lay-out the story that I had in my head to figure out exactly how many pages I needed to tell it right. This is critical in an anthology situation because everybody needs to know how long each story is and then try to figure out how to compose each issue.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had a very clear idea what I wanted to do. This was actually kind of surprising, because (for the first time in my comic book adventures) I was writing about a universe not of my own creation. I believe there were a few reasons that contributed to this clear "vision". First of all, David and I talked a few times at conventions about stories and fairy tales and myths and how all the different lore relates to his ideas about Mouse Guard as a story. Secondly, I did read all of the Mouse Guard published material (a few times), so I felt that on the illustration side of things I had a pretty good idea of how I would handle the rendering. And lastly, I had a story that I have been wanting to do for over a year, but I just could not picture how to approach it...but putting it into the Mouse Guard universe made all sorts of sense and "bam" I had the panels dancing in front of my eyes.

So I sat down and did lay-out for the story. I drew a grid of 2x3 inch rectangles in my sketchbook (6 per page) and filled them up with stick figures scribbling notes and parts of dialogue either in the panels or on the borders. If things did not work right away, I would erase and keep penciling until I got the pages looking like I wanted them to. After I got the story down, I got a pen and spotted the blacks to make sure the storytelling flowed right.

When I was done I scanned the sketchbook pages and e-mailed the layouts to David. This was so early in the project that the editor has not been brought on board yet and David has agreed to act as my editor for the time being. Over the phone we went over the layouts and this is where things started getting fun. David totally understood what I was trying to do with the story and the storytelling. Based on that he suggested two scenes in which the certain angles did not work right. The first was an establishing shot that I laid out in a very confusing way (it looked fine when I was laying it out, but after talking to David I could see that it would not work), and the second that the panel on the last page and David suggested changing that in a way that would highlight the ending. I scribbled both changes into the questionable panels as we were talking and when I got off the phone I was even more excited about doing the story...here was something I could really sink my teeth into and because the story and storytelling were done, I just had to focus on the art. It's all about problem solving and this is the sweet spot that I love being in.

But it was going to get even better, because now I had to figure out how to design characters that lived in Mouse Guard Legends universe!

Next: Character design and pencils

P.S. Amazon just announced that they are taking pre-orders for a collection of reprints of Archie Goodwin/ Al Williamson's "Secret Agent X-9" Volume 1 (1967-1969). I am becoming a big Al Willaimson fan based on the work that has been recently reprinted (like the great Flash Gordon strips that he did) and I am very much looking forward to seeing this X-9 book.

"Robotika: For A Few Rubles More"

Today I have received a copy of the collection from the publisher. In a week or so, it will be at Amazon and in the comic book stores. It took much longer than expected to get the second series published and collected in this edition. The publisher went through a reorganization after the first issue got released and there was a real possibility that the book was never going to come out...but here it is :)

PayPal me baby!

I added a niffty PayPal button to make it easier to order the new sketchbook (just take a look at the upper right hand corner!), and here are a number of the sketchbook sketches that I recently done: