cryptic preview

This is the first page of a story called Uncertainty which I 'm illustrating for Alexander Danner. The notebooks will be text panels eventually, and there's still some other stuff to add so this doesn't make a whole lot of sense just yet. I'm still playing with the design...

I'm usually pretty cagey about posting a work in progress like this but I hardly drew anything this week, and looking at this page with hardly any text except for the last panel struck me as kind of funny. Like a punchline without a set up. Maybe it's just me.

So, anyway...

Sommersault

This is a sketch for one in a series of sort of paintings I'm thinking about which may or may not have to do with a larger kind of project which might be a kind of story-thing maybe. (How's that for specificity?)

The series is a look at simple comics forms and phenomena, particularly examining the viewer's relationship to the action (or otherwise) depicted. This one focuses on a simply indicated motion expressed from several vantage points. Objective here refers to the pictoral object, subjective meaning the viewer, so on and so forth... I'm not sold on the terminology yet but, what the hey - it's a first draft.

Art Trade

Some time ago my friend Jeff and I worked out an art trade, piece for piece.
He being a painter of considerable skill offered up this, which I proudly display in my home right now:




I - part-time cartoon hack that I am - took a little longer to fulfill my end of the bargain. But my feeble effort is now finished, and I will share it with you as follows:




It was actually my second submission for trade as he respectfully rejected the first for being too creepy. I was trying out some text rendering techniques here (i.e. practicing hand lettering). Note the near lack of punctuation and attempt to more fully integrate the text with the illustration. If I were a smarter cartoonist I probably wouldn't have tried to cram so much into a 5" x 14" space. Oh well, live and learn...

All in all' I'm pretty happy with it. Seems a good way to kick off the ol' shift in blogging here.


---edit:---
I think Blogger is out to get me. It wouldn't let me preview this post before publishing. Assuming everything was hunky dory, I went with it - posting one of my older comics instead of Jeff's painting. All fixed now.

forces are converging against this blog

I never took my computer to the shop last week. I've had it all this time and just took the week off of posting.
I can't really say I missed it.

My frustration towards Mostly Banal comics has been increasing for months now, and the arrival of several more interesting (to me) opportunities has split my focus and decreased my interest in keeping up with a regularly scheduled blog/comic. I still think the underlying concept I had is sound, but right now I lack the focus to sufficiently implement my ideas. I'm scaling back the "journal comic" aspect of this blog again - in favor of a looser "sketch blog" - until I can work out whether I can realize my original concept in a more satisfying way (or whether it's even worth trying).

That being said, I am not leaving this blog to seed. I will continue to post artwork, cartoons and various little formal experiments (you know, like a sketchblog) as I focus on more finished comics work.

I don't expect vigorous posting (as if I have ever been accused of that) but I hope that those of you who have found something of interest here will stick around. As I said, I have several projects in the works that I am very excited about.

I may return to the original Mostly Banal concept, but not until I feel that I can do it right.

I appreciate everyone who has followed this blog through it's ups and downs and I do hope you'll hang on for what comes next.

out of order

My computer is going into the shop on Monday, so this seems a good time for Mostly Banal to take a break. I'll be back in a week or so.

How often do you see that?