Tokyo Comic 1

A page from my sketchbook, that is from a short story I am adapting into a minicomic. I am sort of working slowly and in fragments, it seems.

I'm Back To the Blog

After a year of neglect I am back to my sketchblog. Apologies to my seven fans! It has been a crazy year, with most of it on Robopocalypse. I also spent a month living in the hospital while my daughter endured two surgeries (everything is fine now).
Lately I have started doing some comics in my sketchbook, just for fun. After doing these two I am now working on improving my lettering. Hopefully that'll be in the next post. These two are fairly somber, so I'm hoping to cook up something funnier for next time, although I am pretty darn slow at comics!

Ghetto Celeb comics

I illustrated part of a book back in 2002. here it is on Amazon. My lettering still sucked at the time, so my wife did the whole thing! Even this last page that badly needed to be edited down.

Ghetto Celeb color tests

Just before the deadline, the client said they had expected color comics (they neglected to tell me that up front!, so I did this test (which I still like)...



...I then proceeded to color the first page. I sort of stiffened up on this one, and didn't like my limited color skills. It looked like Sunday funnies coloring, and Ididn't want to color eight pages of originals in one day, so we settled on black & white. Looking back, I should have compromised and done a single color wash maybe.

More Old Stuff

I did this (mid 90's?) to illustrate the concept of a commercial artist's lifelong deadline. The halftone was that cheap old zip stuff you had to rub to adhere the dots to the paper. I think you can still buy stuff like this because of the popularity of Manga. It gives a sort of imperfect-but-mechanical look. Thank God I found Wally Wood at a young age!

This was the splash page for my self published comicbook, Junkyard Enforcer, #1. I'm glad I did it, but there is no money in comics like this, so I had to go back to work. But it was fun. This was Prismacolor pencil on some slick pen paper. Then I switched to very smooth bristol, I think.

Even though the newspaper business is imploding, I still think there is a market for a daily newspaper strip about the day to day drama of firefighters. A few years back I wrote six weeks of dailies and Sundays, but realized I like freelancing, and don't want that kind of commitment. Here is me fooling around with the strip - even some old school duo-shade!

Cannery Row minicomic

This was a mini comic I wrote, drew and xeroxed in 12 hours, once when I was stuck in a hotel room on a job in Richmond, Virginia. I didn't really plan the story much, as you can see, but finally decided on only including pages 1 through 6. This was back in 2002. I have to make some time for more comics work!