! - page eight

This was the roughest week yet in a rough new year, I think. The kids aren't sleeping well (well... Sophie, mostly) so that means we aren't getting any sleep. Jamon picked up a cold (so it's kind of like sick all over again). And then of course we picked it up too. Pile that on everything else that needs to get done every day (but quite often doesn't). For most of the week I've been like a sick-sick zombie with too much to do and no energy to do it. I feel lucky to have squeezed this page out.

(Aw, quit yer griping Tim)

Anyway... !, page eight here. I'm noticing a lot of visual echoes between the threads from page to page. Not quite planned... but I like it. Go ahead, see what you can find.

! - page seven

Not much to say for this week. Been keeping extremely busy without having much of anything to show for it. Here's ! page seven.

! - page six

Page six - and, wow! Where the hell have I been?

This new year has not been kind to me so far. Times've been tough and they're getting tougher, so posting will slack down here for a while as life slowly grinds me into a fine pulp.
I'm shelving Squirrel before it even really gets started. It's far too time consuming a process and what little time I have at this point needs to be focused elsewhere (i.e. non-blog stuff).
I'll continue to post ! pages as they're finished. Maybe one a week? More if I'm lucky. It's probably hard to follow, trickling out like this. When it's done I'll collect it in some form and you can see the thing all at once.
Beyond that, maybe I'll post some sketches and doodles and stuff. I've got a couple of projects that I just don't feel comfortable posting on here, at least until they're done. A rewrite of Lost and Found (hope none of you were too attached to that one as it appeared here) and a long-delayed project with Alexander Danner. So much to do, so little time...

Real life is kicking my ass right now.

! - page five

Happy New Year ever'body. To celebrate I drew the next page of ! for you.

Go nuts.

A Boy and His Squirrel - Page Three

Finally!
Continued from here, as you'll remember...

! - page four

Told you this would pull ahead. Really, I am still working on A Boy and His Squirrel...

! - page three

Page three. Almost done with page three for squirrel too, so these stories are neck and neck right now. I imagine ! is gonna pull ahead though.

If this weren't just a little sketchbook comic I'd have soo many ideas to artsy it up. Don't want to keep redoing what's already done, though. Not even at this early point, not when I have so much else to do.

! - page one(again) and two

I redrew page one of ! cause that's what I do: redraw things. Tightened it up a little, compressed the narrative (i.e. added a panel) and left out the hatches.

and then I drew page two:


One and two are a two page spread so here they are side by side:


I'm having a bit of trouble with drawing A Boy and His Squirrel this week. I hope to have some up next week. I'm still working on it...

! - page one

So much for "obsessive need to post here..."

I bought a new pen over the weekend. Rather than jump back into A Boy and His Squirrel, I wanted to warm up/break in the pen. So here's page one of another story called !. It's meant to be my best bad Steinberg impression but with all the hatching I accidentally put in it's like a poor man's (bad) Gauld. I'll be using this as a warm up to Squirrel pages so I'll jump back and forth between the two, posting here.

You know, if all goes well...

The Pen Runneth Dry

Continuing the stellar launch of my latest project here at the ol' blog: two pages in and I've hit another stumbling block.
The pen I've been using to ink these pages has gone and dried up on me. At least dried up enough that I can't get the line I want out of it. It's taking me about four times as long as it should to ink each panel - retracing the lines to get a good mark. Very frustrating. I can only use the one kind of pen as every other I have bleeds way out on this cheap sketchbook paper. Rather than butchering the new pages (as in the exerpt above) I'm gonna wait to draw more until I can find me a suitable replacement. I don't know when I'll get the chance to - soon I hope.

So, some filler then...

I've got a few other projects in the works right now, as well as normal sketchbooky type stuff to post. This'll fuel my obsessive desire to update this page. A Boy and His Squirrel will be back as soon as I buy a new pen.

Sorry about the rough going, but I'd rather have something I like to post, rather than just something.

ehh... such is the life of a sketch blog...

A Boy and His Squirrel - New Page Two

Page two again.
That's right. That's how things are gonna go here.

I've thumbed out the next several pages and will continue to do so. Hopefully a little planning ahead will stave off any more difficulties like this page gave me. I think I'm revising my "schedule" (more like goal) from three to two pages a week too, though this week is only one page (again).

Anyway, in other news: Ira Marcks once again has an internet presence! I'm a big fan of his old Angel Interceptor works. Along with their return, he's also posted a lot of his newer printed work. This is good news to me and you as well. Thanks to Phil McAndrew for the tipoff.

A Boy and His Squirrel - Page Two

Page two. Missed posting this yesterday...
Not as satisfied with this page. Had to fight the urge to redraw it.

Thanksgiving was crazy busy, just as I thought. It was nice having the family together.
Of course something always goes wrong. My sister, in town from England, brought along some kind of mystery illness (maybe probably picked up in NYC, where she was on business). It may be chicken pox or it may be scabies but in either case I have a two year old and a four month old exposed to something. Oh boy! Something else to freak out about. Can't anything just be easy for once? It's a holiday for chrtistsake.

A Boy and His Squirrel - Page One

Here we go, page one is up...
and now time for a break.

With my usual spectacular knack for timing, I'm starting in on this one just before a holiday weekend. We're hosting my family for Thanksgiving this year, which means I'll be busy,busy,busy. So I probably won't have another page up until next week. Sorry about the lousy planning on my part. I may through up something for you to look at. No guarantees on any new pages.

So much for that schedule...

A Boy and His Squirrel - Title Page

This feels like kind of a cheat - posting a title page like this. But I wanted to get something posted today and this was quicker than a real page. I'm going to be taking a little more time with these, with an eye towards collecting them at some point. It'll still be write-as-you-go but I'm thinking in scenes rather than in pages this time. I'm shooting for three pages a week but will only post them when I like them, and realistically I probably won't stick to that schedule. Anyway, here we go...


And, uh, guys? I haven't been at the whole LiveJournal thing long, but I think I may have broken it. Andrew has been a pretty vocal supporter in the comments section there and I always appreciate his comments. He's an immensely talented cartoonist as well, I'll miss his posting stuff to LJ. It is sad to see his journal close but I wish him well In wherever he goes next.

First real page scheduled for Wednesday.

one last sketch

Or, can I say that? Technically, the actual comic will be sketches too. It's a sketchbook comic...

In any case, It'll get started next week.

sketches+links = lazy cartoonist?

Some more sketches for the new project. It occurs to me that I may be doing so much prep work this time only to avoid actually starting in on the comic. So... next week, no matter how comfortable I am with the "look." That gives me one week to either nail it down or not. Sink or swim.

So, on to people that can actually finish comics. Whole pages at a time, even!
----
If I had, like ten bucks (or any money) to spare I'd be buying me some Trains are... Mint. Seriously. This page alone? Brilliant! (link from Derik)

Also, my buddy Neal is in fine form, Illustrating for Sam Costello at Split Lip. By "fine form" I mean, really kind of creepy. Neal shows a real propensity toward the darker parts of old folk songs like the one they're adapting here. Then again, a lot of those songs are pretty dark.

(Vicious murder is a theme in these links, I guess.)

No murder (so far), but still kind of vicious, is Dash Shaw's new webcomic (yeah, that's right) BodyWorld, for which he has a full prelude posted (regular updates are promised starting in January).
I do so hope that Shaw doesn't get too aggressively distopian with this one. The generic trappings are sometimes an easy mark for reflecting contemporary wierdness. A lot of young cartoonists are leaning that way lately, but Shaw has shown an eye for a more naturalistic wierdness (if that makes sense) in his previous work that speaks to me a little more (that's what it's all about, right? Speaking to me personally?). Way to early to make a judgement though. At least he'll have me for the ride. (link also via Derik, who has good taste)

Peanuts fan?

That gag I mentioned on Monday? It's up now, here. Filler for William G and Sahsha Andrade's It's About Girls while the comic is on hiatus. The gag makes a little more sense if you know the characters, so by all means go and read the archives.

For the observant and curious, Mostly Banal is my once and future diary strip.

Note: Ill-conceived and irritating (though brief) rant depublished.

"A Boy and His Squirrel" sketchdump

In case you haven't heard, the next story I'm doing here at the blog is going to be called A Boy and His Squirrel.
I'm still trying to narrow down a look for the thing, kind of a flattened zero (linear) perspective deal.

At some point I'm just gonna have to start drawing this, but for now here're some sketches.

At the bottom, here, you can also see the beginnings of a gag that should surface later this week. I'll let you know.

The story is about a boy and a squirrel. That's really all I've got to go on right now.

"real" character designs (and a new comic, too)

All about the character designs here lately. This is for what'll be the next comic I serialize here. Doing a little more planning before I jump in this time (don't worry, not too much...)

Been a bit slow posting this week because of the deadline crunch for this, my entry into Calamity Jon Morris's collaborative comics project, "BOO! Halloween stories"
When Flies Were Big was written by Jon hisself and, um... embellished by yours truly.

Check out all the comics springing up at the OuCoPo site and remember, this is monthly and open for anyone to contribute. (Every month has a new theme. It's not year-round Halloween, as cool as that sounds)

Happy Halloween, everybody!

one hundred character some head and profile designs

The other day I read (via sirive's LiveJournal) about a character design exercise that Steve Bissette and James Kochalka give to their cartooning students. The assignment is to design one hundred recognizably different characters in one week. Seems like a good enough way to fill space here until I start something new.

Of course, mine number significantly less than a hundred, are more floating head designs than character designs, and only took me about fifteen minutes total.

Well... I've never been good at following directions.



Ahhh... another exciting Friday!