You want a fight, Colbert? ...BRING IT!!

Just made it over to Comixpedia.

It seems Welton Colbert has it in for me.

I would fight back... but my retainer you see...
I can't take the risk...

not that he'd lay a finger on me. Two hits, you know what i mean...

but my parents paid a lot of money...

otherwise I'd totally kick his ass...





i'm not afraid...

my new inking technique is unstoppable

Starting work on the new Tree City.

Some time ago the pen I was using to ink the Nick Stevens segments of Tree City just kind of putzed out on me. I've tried out various other pens but I couldn't get the variable line weight I wanted. I think I finally found something I can at least live with.

It's one of these here dealies:



I've tried inking with a brush from time to time but was never quite comfortable with it. This Micron brush/pen gives a similar effect as a brushstroke but can handle more like a pen (I know, hard to believe...). The nice thing is I can get the varied weights of a brush and it's a lot more portable.

So here's the first test shot of the new Tree City (in color - albeit limited):



We'll see how it goes.

Not cut out for the webcomics life?

So you've probably already heard about it.

Everybody else has.

here it is almost 7:00 and I still don't have a fully formed, well thought out and most importantly cogently expressed opinion on it.

Really, you people never cease to amaze me!



I'm never gonna make it in this world.

Salem Jack: the sky isn't falling - but nothing's holding it up...

More process. Actually been like this a little while but it's new to you, right?



Working back to front here. Sky's done, mid-ground's done, boat's next (lota detail work).

And, yeah, this is as far as I've gotten. Good thing Bill didn't set a deadline!

Salem Jack: UNDERPAINTING? Who does a #*%! underpainting for acrylics?

I do, that's who!

Underpainting is usually reserved for oils which are more easily transparent and the bottom layer might actually affect what's on top of it. Acrylics are more opaque (unless they're watered down which doesn't work very well) so an underpainting is usually not necessary.
But...
This is a pretty high profile job for me and my sketches were a little, well... sketchy, so I was a little nervous.
I blocked things out with and underpainting to give me a better idea of composition and value while I work.



All of this will be pretty much completely covered by the time it's done, and it will look very different.

How do i know this?
Because I've already done a bunch more work on it.

But you guys don't get to see it yet.

BWAH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!



(sorry)

Well, hello.

It's been a while!

So what have I been up to lately?
Well as you know from my previous entries, my wife and I had a baby a little over a month ago. Everyone is doing fine. We are all happy and healthy and she's such a smart little bugger. As you can imagine she keeps us pretty busy.

In addition to my baby responsibilities, my day-job has also been soaking up a lot of my time. It's good that we're busy in a time when a lot of factories are laying off or shutting down (at least in my area) but all the overtime eats away at my "leisure" activities, namely making comics.

Well, drawing comics, I should say. My work duties don't take an enormous amount of mental acuity, so I normally have a good five-to-six hours of good thinking-time a day. That and the accessibility of my notebooks and sketchbooks have allowed me to stock up on plenty of stories and ideas. I have a good backlog of 15-20 solid strips - some short and sweet, some more involved - that I need to find the free-time to draw.

For right now, I've started on the Salem Jack cover ('cause it pays). I'll post the process to that to here. After that, more Tree City (the first chapter - in eleven parts - is completely scripted and laid out, the remainder just needs fleshing out). The rest is kind of up in the air. I've got so many ideas to work with.

Anyway, here's a comic I did find time to draw. Nothing to write home about, really. I've scripted a number of these shorter ones which I'll release from time to time between major projects. I hope it brings you some momentary amusement or something.

Man! Are Babies Small, or What?

Thank you to all who sent well wishes in the past few weeks. This has been a very busy and exciting time for all of us.

And now, because one person demanded it...

MORE BABY PICTURES!!!


So small!!


OOOOH! Lookit the teeny-tiny little fingers!


The obligatory family foot portrait.

And just in case any of you forgot just how cute my baby really is:



All together now. One... two... three...


AWWWWWWWW!

A Different Kind of Baby

Markus Müller's "baby," Infinite Canvas, has a new release today (v1.3).
Somebody try it out willya?

I'm slowly working on new comics around the baby's schedule!

I'm a new father. Bear with me.

And because my daughter is perhaps the most beautiful baby in the world,

I present Miss Sophie Alexandra Godek:




(taken on June 27th. the date on the pictures is wrong. it's the stupid camera. it couldn't possibly be my fault)

And because somewhere and at some point I said I would,

Pictures of the nursery:




Gorgeous, gorgeous, all around!

I'm gonna try to keep a lid on all this picture posting before I annoy you all with my overwhelming dad-ness.

Everybody else can stop trying. We have had the world's most perfect baby.

It's a girl.
Born Monday evening at 7:09.

(no fancypants digital stills for you. straight-up, old-school Polaroid!)

Rachelle was amazing!
I've never been more proud of her than I am right now.

Mother and daughter are both healthy and doing well.

Father is tired. So tired...

The Past Still Haunts Me (or Bad German Comic)

The new comic brings up some old memories.

I was talking to Markus the other day about my high school German class and how I managed to pass it without actually learning a lick of the language.

I used to draw little comics for my teacher, painstakingly translated to really bad German (via looking up pretty much every word). Herr Caputo took a liking to me and to these really bad little renderings. Since we were a public school with virtually no accountability he could get away with just passing whoever he took a personal liking to, regardless of their actual knowledge.
So bad art and horrible language skills actually got me through my foreign language requirement and, therefore, my High school diploma.

Anyway, I still have some of these drawings laying around so I thought I'd post 'em up.

Backstory: This was done in to a short production of the Snow White story my German class was putting on.

In case you're wondering I played the mirror.


(click to enlarge)

It might be... It could be... IT IS!!!

I've posted a new Infinite Canvas comic up at my site. It's only been what.. four months?

It's a three-panel gag-strip type.

Or maybe it's not.



I like to think of it as a joke with two punchlines.

anyway, enjoy...


(Special thanks to Markus for helping with the translation...)

Salem Jack: narrative, oh narrative...

Bill liked the sketch but some things didn't make sense to him.

If the boat was passing by or leaving the dock (in other words moving at all) then the boys should have been paying more attention to it (this being the middle of the 1800s there wasn't much else as far as entertainment, I guess) but if the boys were looking at the boat their backs would be turned to the viewer.

I liked the boys casual glances at the steamer in the previous sketch but Bill says they would have been more interested than that. He thought maybe the boat should be docked and unloading cargo. This is a process that would take hours (and be pretty boring even by 1800s standards) giving the boys plenty of time to devote to other boyish passtimes (fishing and skipping stones, in this case). You can see the boys' faces and it makes more sense (with regards to narrative.

Anyway, you can't really make any of that out in the new sketch, done quick and loose for composition:


and, by the way, that's not the typeface he's going to use or anything. I just dropped that in for the basic idea.

You know, you're probably getting sick of seeing basically the same sketch over and over again so I think I'm not going to post any more process until it's further along...

It's Coming...

Rachelle had a doctor's appointment this morning.
She's one centimeter dialated.


My days are numbered...

Process: Salem Jack sketches

Since Bill basically likes the original design, I didn't have to do a whole lot of thumbnails for this. Basically, it's just adding the boat.
Which is pretty much what I did here:

Pretty boring.

So a few quick thumbs for monkeying with the layout...


and I settled on the design I should've had in the first place:


I angled the boat for a more dynamic design. I also altered the position of the boys, making them react to the steamboat a little and (hopefully) tie the composition together.

I'm not sure about the direction the boat's pointing. Ideally the boat's front should point to the right (forward moving direction), right? To tell you the truth I don't know which end is the front of the steamer. I may have got it backwards. I'l have to look into that.

All in all pretty happy with the design. I'll have to tighten it up, of course. We'll see if Bill likes it first though.

Pre-Process: Salem Jack Cover

Okay!

so, Bill says he likes the original cover design:



but he wants the steamboat Talisman added:





So the finished product should look about like this, right?:




...


Well that was easy.
Bring on the next project!

Sometimes people will even give you money to draw pictures...REAL MONEY!

Far from being a professional illustrator, I do sometimes trade what I like to refer to as my "skills" for some sort of compensation. A few years back, a guy from Chicago (actually my brother's boss) got in touch with me about illustrating the cover of a book he had written. It was a historical fiction set in early-to-mid 1800s and was a coming of age story of two young boys and their trip down river. Included among its admittedly Twain-like cast of characters was a young Abraham Lincoln, who provided a kind of spiritual center for the story.

The writer, Bill Harmening, was self publishing the book (a labor of love kind of thing - no idea what that's like) and couldn't afford a real illustrator. We worked out a trade: he got a book cover and I got to use my new status as published illustrator to impress girls at parties.

(this is the book)

Fast forward five or six years.

The new Lincoln Library opens in Springfield Illinois touching off a renewed interest in everything Lincoln related. Seeing how Honest Abe plays a part in Bill's book, the powers that be at the Library smell some money there. Bill's got an inside line and some interest in publishing a re-write is drummed up. With a new book comes a new cover, so who does Bill call? That's right, the guy he got the free artwork off of before.

Only this time he asks me for a price quote.

So seeing as I got this plum gig and seeing how I got this blog, I thought maybe I'd try one of them process thingies that Neal VonFlue is so fond of. That way you get to see my work-in-progress and I get to keep track of a piece in a way I've never done before. So everybody wins.

And I get paid.

Even Money's on Merlin

So somehow I got nominated for a Webcartoonist Choice Award for outstanding use of infinite canvas. I'm up against D. Merlin Goodbrey and Drew Weing so I'm not gonna go planning an acceptance speech or nothin'.

There are a lot of pretty good comics up this year, in fact.
Some from my list are:
Copper by Kazu Kibuishi
A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible by Dale Beran & David Hellman
Achewood by Chris Onstad
Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North
The Discovery of Spoons by Alexander Danner & John Barber
The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch
Its about Girls by William G

and a bunch of other comics that maybe I should be reading.

God Save the Kinks?

This morning in the space between my hitting the snooze button and the second alarm going off I dreamt an entire Sex Pistols concert.

I was in high school again and the show was apparently part of some school function. It was being held in an open-air venue, maybe the school's football field. There were tall bleachers leading to a plateau at the top of which I sat with Rachelle.

As the band broke into the first chords of God Save The Queen the people in the row beneath us all stood and ran, in tight formation, diagonally down the steps. The bottom row had also stood and ran opposite, towards us in an exact parallel course. This maneuver also took place through the crowd in the open expanse in front of the stage, front and back rows exchanging places. The audience, aside from this obviously rehearsed spectacle, had little reaction to the start of the show.

God Save The Queen had quickly melded into Anarchy In The UK. Looking on stage, John Lydon seemed in good shape, moving as if he were a young man. He moved well, in fact - in perfect unison with the back-up dancers. Everyone in the band was dancing, practiced choreography that appeared lifted from the Backstreet Boys. Upon closer inspection I saw that the bass player was not Glen Matlock nor Sid Vicious but was instead himself a former member of the Backstreet Boys (or maybe it was N'SYNC - who can tell the difference?). The band seemed to be enjoying themselves.

I was in the parking lot looking back. Before the first song ended the fans had begun moving toward their dirty cars to go home.

I woke up singing a Kinks song in my head.

Hooray for Mothers

So it seems most of the "to wife" Mother's Day cards are pretty stupid. Excessively mushy, in that treacly Hallmark sort of way, and ugly to boot.

The one I got my wife (she's not a mother yet, but will be very soon) isn't too bad. It's got a nice design and the cartoon wolf-things on it are kind of cute. I'm not too sure about the message it employs. Something like "Gee, honey. Even though we've been married a while and got kids now, I still love you I guess." Beyond the mush, it was either that or the "Gosh, I'm a total Fuck-up. It's hard to believe you still keep me around. Happy Mother's Day" cards (I just couldn't get behind that message, though it may be true). Not much to pick from, I'm afraid.
I think I made it work, though.

So, anyway, happy Mother's day to all the mom's out there. Especially Rachelle.
She's going to be a wonderful mother and I love her very much.

And I'm glad she still keeps me around.