goin' to Minnesota with an achin' in my heart...

Gearing up for the long drive to Minneapolis, where I'm dragging my friend Chris to attend Minneapolis Indie Xpo and debut my book, "!".

Something else I'll have there are these handsome new prints based off of some artwork I did for Minneapolis natives (and really excellent band) Cloud Cult a few years back. Now newly colorized in three hand printed layers each.

These fancy show fliers, pictured above in their natural habitat, were exclusively printed for MIX (by agreement with the band), and are an extremely limited edition.

I'm planning on selling completely out of everything I bring to the show (that's how these cons work, right?) but If by some odd chance there are any of these left I hope to have permission to offer them for sale online, should anyone be interested. I'll keep you posted.

For now I'm off to Minneapolis. Wish me luck!

wait... does this spoil the ending?

Sorry about breaking your feed, here.

Announced today. Maybe you'd be interested to know that I've been awarded a grant from the Xeric Foundation to help me publish my comic strip, !
Pretty exciting news, for me. I join some good company in the current batch of recipients, as well as the former recipients (who include some of my favorite cartoonists)
I don't have many details just yet. I've got my printer lined up, and yes, it will be printed as one long strip (somewhere around 35 feet long) and look something like this:

(one of the mock ups I made as part of my Xeric application)

I'll have more details, of course, as I get closer to solicitation.

Anyway, I've taken down the archive I kept up as I was posting the rough draft here. It'll be back soon enough, but all re-drawn and stuff. Up top of this post is my original sketch of the story, which took about 45 minutes to draw and defined probably the next following two years of my comics making life.

Congrats to the other Xeric recipients. I'm looking forward to your books.
Special thanks to Alexander Danner who nudged me to apply for the grant in the first place.

And thank you guys for reading.

old comics

Remember me?

Haven't been real post-y of late, huh? Been pretty busy, but nothing I can show here yet.
I'm gonna try to get back in the swing of posting things, starting with some older stuff.
If you've been with me a while you may remember this one. A short story I drew, written by "Calamity" Jon Morris for one of his planned BOO! Halloween collections a couple years back. Jon's no longer displaying it at his webspace so I put it up over at my site. Thought I'd share it here too.

When Flies Were Big:

"Uncertainty" process post

So, another reason I don't post much sketchbook stuff is that it looks like that. This is me figuring a page layout for the upcoming Uncertainty in my 5 cent Walmart spiral-bound notebook. The lines are awful and nearly unreadable, but that's okay because they're really only for me anyway. Naturally, I chose to lead the post with this.

Some stuff looks more like this.

Starting to work my layouts into a real drawing, still messy and loose... figuring things out.

Then I go to pencils.

(Sorry about the crappy scan. I'm keeping my pencils pretty light on this one...)

Then Inks, which I have yet to do, and some "post-production" type stuff on this one...

I'm treating this work with a lot more of an illustration-vibe than some (all) of my previous comics, giving each panel quite a bit of individual attention. I was even drawing it one panel at a time on separate sheets of bristol, but man does that not look right when you put it all together. I'm back to composing whole pages at a time.
Here's a finished panel, drawn in the old way, which I've since rejected.


And, yeah... that's what I've been working on.

! - the end

Pages fifty-two and fifty-three finish this story off. I hope the finish does not disappoint.
For better or worse, it's all over!

For those of you who are interested, there is a print version of ! is in the works. It may take some time though. I have many, many revisions to make to the comic and have yet to work out the particulars of publication (I'd really like one long accordion fold if I can manage it). All of this has to take the backburner to my next project too. I've been leaving Alexander hanging for too long now.

It'll happen eventually, though. And at least now you can read the whole story.

Thanks for reading!

! - page fifty-one

The story so far.

! - page fifty

I had to sit and think about how to draw that stairwell there.
Sit.

And think...


That's ridiculous!

The story so far.

! - page forty-nine

If you've been with this blog a while, this should start to look kinda familiar.
Remember?

! - page forty-eight

(The story so far...)

! - page forty-seven

Okay, at this point I can say with relative certainty that there are only six more pages left to go.
(The story so far...)

! - page forty-six

New year, new page. Ho-hum...

(The story so far...)

! - page forty-five

Only hours left to go, one more page for 2008. This thing should finish up sometime in 2009.
Hope everybody out there has a great New Year!

(The stroy so far...)

! - page forty-four

Derik Badman had some kind words for this blog posted over this past holiday weekend (words specifically on the diary comics, which I have not posted as of late. Whatever...) so I drew him into this scene. That's what flattery'll get ya! See if you can spot him.

Christmas was a lot of work but I should be able to get back to finishing this story up now. Here's the whole thing so far...

! - page forty-three

The story so far...

! - page forty-two

As always,click here to see how we got to this point.

! - page forty-one

Here's page 41, and Here's pages one through forty-one.

! - page forty

Back to new comics stuff.

Recently, I told a friend who has some interest in my moving on from this story that I was going to ramp up my production to hurry up and finish it. Following that conversation I promptly stopped drawing anything at all. I am a bad friend.

I am going exclusive to ! on this blog until I get the damn thing done!
Here is the story so far.

mostly banal: sure, comics are fun. but doodling is funner right now.

mostly banal: white noise

mostly banal: who cares?