Roast Mutton

Percy & Grimm in 8 bit games?

2011-10-16T21:18:00.000-07:00

2011-09-18T20:18:00.001-07:00

2011-09-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

Cave Story Physician

2011-06-19T09:15:00.001-07:00

2011-06-12T18:14:00.000-07:00

2011-05-08T20:05:00.000-07:00

Slime Love!

2011-02-27T09:22:00.000-08:00

What Percy & Grimm Want

2011-02-20T22:46:00.000-08:00

Just having a bit of fun with the Faber-Castell PITT artist pens that my friend Barabara gave me. I thought, "what would Percy and Grimm want the most?" This is what I came up with...

2011-02-19T00:40:00.000-08:00

Beastiary!

2011-02-18T11:55:00.000-08:00

Hey all, I'm just running some test for my Beastiary Page on http://www.mischiefcomics.com/. Here's my first stab at it. HAH HAH HAH.

Marvelous Valentine

2011-02-14T07:21:00.000-08:00

Hey all! It's been a great long time since I've posted on this blog. I've been busy trying to maintain my newer site, www.mischiefcomics.com, as well as working on some other side projects. One of which is editing the Mega Manthology (a comics anthology fanzine about Mega Man) and playing around with a new character, Wesley Wilkinson, for a story titled Calculation Error, which should be due out this fall in a new book I'm working on with my friend and confidant, Caitlin McGurk!
Below is a small comic I made on morning all in good fun. Don't sue me Marvel, I love super hero stuff, if I didn't do you think I could draw Spider-Man's suit so accurately?

And here is a sweet valentine I made this year. It pictures my characters from Percy & Grimm. Happy V-Day, y'all, hope it's romantic!

2011-01-24T09:19:00.000-08:00

A Couple Days in the Life

2010-11-13T12:51:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple more diary comics. It's the little things that make life worth living, don't you agree? Most of the strips, like the one above, are done about something that I find humorous. I tend to find the "f" word extremely humorous.

This last one is just...well...it just happened. In the third panel the skinny kid is supposed to be slapping his knee, but it looks like he's slapping the mustachioed dude's weener, which is even more funny. Unintentional hilarity ensues. Ha ha hah.

More Diary Strips

2010-11-10T11:13:00.000-08:00

Here's a couple more diary comics. The best thing about diary comics is that you don't really have to write anything, you just have to remember what happened. If you tell the story to about 3 of your friends and they don't give you that look that's like, "And...?", it's probably good for a diary comic. Below is a meeting with an old friend.
Like I said above, I just tried to remember what my friend said word for word. It was a fun strip to draw. Corn, who gives a shit?

This last one is sooo true. I've been trying to squeeze in comics the last month, but also trying to beat all the old 8-bit games I couldn't master as a child. Games like Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, and Metroid (all beaten). I did have a Metroid picture I drew that I was going to put on the screen in the panel above, but I just had to use a Goomba from Super Mario Bros that I'd drawn earlier in the week.

When I was a kid my good friend, Jay Cyr, and I would play Super Mario Brothers on the NES. I remember him comparing the Goombas to dirtbags. I think we got killed by those dirtbags a lot. One day Jay yelled, "JUMP YOU DIRTBAG!!" and it's stayed in my memory ever since. I thought it was the funniest thing, and still do all these years later. I try to sneak it in my comics whenever I can.

Another couple of funny angry video game quotes are these: "GODDAMN IT, PERCY!" by Jay's father, Moe, when playing Princess Tomato and Percy dropped the water bucket that we needed to water the dehydrated melon in the field. And, a personal favorite, my father died while playing The Adventure of Link, the game over screen came up with Ganon laughing at you, and my father sprang up to the television, hit the screen rapidly (but not hard) with his middle finger and yelled, "YOU POTHOLE!" I'd like to have heard what he would've yelled if his small children weren't in the room. But, "pothole" was a great new insult that I added to my arsenal after that gaming session.

Jen Vaughn Topless!!!

2010-10-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

This is an actual dream that I had about the great Jen Vaughn. Apparently she's been creeping into people's dreams as of late and trying to rub them down. If any of you know Jen, then you know that she posts a million pictures on flickr. You can check them out at www.flickr.com/photos/thejenya. I ran this comic by Jen before posting it, to make sure it wasn't too racy. She loved it and gave me the go ahead. Actually, she loved it so much that she wanted to reenact it, take photos of it, and post them on flickr.

Percy & Grimm starts this Sunday!

2010-10-19T23:24:00.000-07:00

Here's a promotional poster I did for my new webcomic, Percy & Grimm. It's a humorous fantasy comic revolving around two friends who can't seem to do anything right. I'll be updating it a page a week, on Mondays, at www.mischiefcomics.com .

Comic Diaries are Back!

2010-10-12T09:25:00.000-07:00

....at least for a little while. Check it out. All this stuff actually happened, this week no less. I had kept a comic book diary for almost over three years, but it dwindled when I was struggling to keep up with class projects at CCS. As you can tell, I was very inspired by James Kolchalka, the inventor of Comic Diaries, and also the inventor of singing into two microphones, coinicidentally.

I stopped doing them because I felt like I was being way too self important to...myself. I didn't want to be such an egomaniac, and plus everybody was doing diary comics. What makes me so special? I thought to myself, that people want to read ultra personal shit about my life? So I dropped it like it was hot. I read one of my diary book diaries the other day and realized that I'm actually pretty self-depricating to myself, which is definitly the opposite of being self important. So I decided to take another stab at it, but only giving myself about ten to twenty minutes per strip, and only then to use them as a warm up for when I'm working on my larger works. So I'll stick with it and if there are any worth posting I'll post them.

I do a lot of observational pieces like the one above. They are more like poetry if I had to tack it down, but I don't so it just is.

Sorry to leave off with such a weak strip, but that was what that day was like. Okay, back to the drawing board.

Cheers,

Matt

Archie Comics Snags Mega Man!

2010-10-10T11:51:00.000-07:00

It's finally happening...again! The rights to Mega Man are being whored out to the highest bidder, this time it's Archie Comics: home of the most successful (or at least the longest) run of video game to comic book series in North America, Sonic the Hedgehog. Here's a look at the first cover:

The first issue is slated to be drawn by Patrick Spaziante and written by Ian Flynn. Both are veterans at Archie Comics, working mostly on the aformentioned Sonic the Hedgehog series. Sorces say that the story line will be following the original Mega Man series, so we're talking the old 8-bit Mega Man (released in 1987) up to the most current installment, Mega Man 10 (released in 2010). Rumors are bubbling already that if this title is a success then future titles maybe be in the works: Mega Man X, Mega Man Legends, and maybe even Mega Man Battle Network. Let's hope that Flynn remembers what made these games so endearing in the first place: great character design and a massive amount of sweet bad guys all with the last name MAN! This seems fairly obvious to anybody whose ever played a Mega Man game before, but you'd be surprized. Below is a preview page of the first issue, so far it looks like Spaz and Flynn know what they're doing.
There has been attempted Mega Man comics before in North America, that missed the mark by so far that it seemed like they were shooting at a different frickin' target. That's right, remember these guys...?

DreamWave comics, an aspiring company out of Cananda that went belly up after about a year or two of production (2003-2004). This company had rights to some of the most successful franchises of the late 80s and early 90s: Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, as well as some popluar gaming titles: Mega Man, Metroid, Kill Zone and Devil May Cry, not to mention a handful of original titles. It's a wonder why they went bankrupt, with such a steller -take-your-money-out-of-your-wallet-and-give-it-to-me line up, but I'm not here to speculate on the mishaps that happened at DreamWave in the early 2000's, I'm here to tell you about how bad they fucked up their Mega Man comic.

Yep, here it is. All four issues, they even collected it in a pocket size so that you could carry it around with you every where to read a poorly plotted out story where Dr. Light decides that Rocky (Mega Man) has to go to school as a civilian child to learn just what it is to be a human. The first three issues deal with Rocky having a crush on a human girl, trying to deal with his feelings on that, and the whole while being bullied by three bullies who just so happen to be Dr. Wily's nephews. I mean, come ON! We're talking about Mega Man here, the Blue Bomber! He has a frickin' arm cannon instead of a hand! He's not gonna take any shit from three snot nosed bullies at a middle school in Japan. He'd blow their frickin' heads off with his P-Buster, just like in the games. Was there ever anything in any Mega Man game that you didn't blast into oblivion once it made its way on the screen? Nope, never.

The fault seems to lie with writer for this series Brian Augustyn. It seemed like he'd never played a Mega Man game in his life, and if he did, he couldn't put his pen on what made it so great. Don't let these covers fool you, this is mostly like reading a bad episode of Saved By The Bell, with a do-gooder whiny-assed robot playing the lead of Zak Morse. They spend more time in this series in the teen drama romance than they do having Mega Man fight bad robots. And when he does fight bad robots, they aren't any from the game. In fact, the designs are so different from any Mega Man game, it might as well have been in a totally different universe, where robots go to high school and date human chicks. They could have called it Saved By the Robot, or Zak Man. I would have scanned in some images of these great comic sequences, but I've locked all four issues in a box that says "Do not open ever. Seriously." and mailed it to the restricted section in the library at Hogwarts.

To top it all off, the last issue totally disreguards any previous story in the first three issues (thank GAWD) and ends rather abruptly with Mega Man X swooping in (from the future, mind you) to gather up Rocky to help him fight a giant Robot War in the future...hey wait a minute, when is Rocky gonna kiss Chelsea? And spend time studying with his buddy Alan when schools out, and teach those good for nothing Wily bullies what for?

As you can tell from that ranting, this series wasn't what most Mega Man fans were expecting. The reason I dwell on it so much, is that Patrick "Spaz" Spaziante, the very same penciler who is drawing the first issue in the new Archie Comics Mega Man line, drew the fourth and final issue in the DreamWave series. Though that entire series, the DreamWave one, sucked, there is still hope. The last issue, was Spazzified, if you will, with meticulous details in the backgrounds. He added in Robot Masters from the games where ever he could and even many little baddies to boot. It was great to see his effort, and each panel looked as though it were official Capcom licensed artwork. Spaz, from what we've seen so far, looks like a mega choice for this series. If only Flynn will learn from the mistakes Augustyn made and not just rewrite his favorite 90210 episodes with Mega Man as Brendan and Rush as Steve, we'll be okay. Udon Press has recently been bringing Mega Man comics to North America that have been printed ages ago in Japan. They've been drawing about Mega Man over there forever and not fucking it up with delusions of teen romance. Hitoshi Ariga is the author of the MegaMix title. You can tell by reading this book that Ariga has totally submerged himself in the Mega Man world. He probably has played these games so much that he could beat them without dying once. This dedication is instantly picked up on by the reader. The first volume is mostly action sequences of frickin' robots fighting each other, with small, fun, plot lines tying the events together. There's a lot of heart in these stories, but they never get preachy or self indulgent. An author who respects the enjoys the source material. Imagine that. Not once does Mega Man sit down for a soda and hamburgers at the Peach Pit, he's too busy saving the world from evil frickin' robots!

The first two volumes are out now, and the third should be released sometime early in 2011. If you need a Mega Man comic fix before Spring in 2011, these should tide you over nicely. This also might be a nice time to plug my own comic endeavor of Mega Man. I'm getting together a nice assortment of dedicated cartoonist to have their hand in the Mega Man universe. The book is called Mega Manthology and is due out in early Spring 2011. It's a fanzine (please don't sue Capcom) with all profits being donated to a charity as of yet unchosen. You can find out the details here: http://www.megamanthology.blogspot.com/ if you're interested.

I'll leave you off with some more sketches from the Spaz. I'll say these are looking really great. Until next time: Fight on, True Believers, for everlasting peace!

New Profile Pic!

2010-10-08T11:42:00.000-07:00

Yeah, that's right, I draw these characters and they jump off the board and bother me.

Tut tut. Looks like rain.

2010-10-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

I drew this yesterday while I was in the eye doctor's office. It was raining cats and dogs, as the saying goes, all day. My puggle, Owen, doesn't always like to do his "business" in a timely fashion. He likes to sniff around for about twenty minutes, lift his leg in five different spots then change his mind, eat some grass, sniff for another five to ten minutes before emptying his bladder. As you can imagine, it gets a bit annoying after the first three minutes.

Percy and Grimm's Secret Stash

2010-09-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

Above is a sneak peak at the chapter intro to our heroes' very first quest: The Gumdrop King! What are they looking at? Is it a bright green caterpillar? Is it some kind of weird hamburger? Is it indeed Grimace, from famed McDonald's commercials? And why is Grimm drooling? And, for that matter, what is Percy holding in his hand? It appears to be some kind of wooden wood. All these questions and more will be answered once Percy & Grimm, the webcomic is launched October 24, 2010!

WHA HAH HAH!

Percy and Grimm Unveiled!

2010-09-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting for quite sometime now, that's because I have been working on a secret project which I unvelied to the comics community at MICE (Massachusettes Independent Comics Expo) this past weekend. Here's a four panel strip of the main characters:
Percy and Grimm will be an on going series on my new website, www.mischiefcomics.com . However, it's application is harder to use than blogger, so I won't be posting until October 24, 2010, hopefully I'll be used to the program by then.

Percy and Grimm is a hilarious comedy set in a fantasy world. Percy and Grimm travel from town to town looking for quests to make money and gain experience. Percy, the tall one with hair, is training to become a warrior. He is 35-years-old, and is still carrying around a wooden sword because that is where his skill set is at the moment.

Grimm, the portly fellow with a bandana, stives to become the world's greatest theif. He has little dexterity due to his stubby fingers, but that doesn't stop him. Also, eating is Grimm's favorite thing to do. Ever.

Percy and Grimm will be told in small, self-contained chapters. Each chapter builds off the previous one, but they can stand alone as well. Chapters probably won't be more than 32 pages. I plan on updating a page a week. And this comic will be kid friendly. Hope to see you on their first quest, I'll send out e-mails when www.mischiefcomics.com is ready to roll.

I used a brush and technical pen for this comic. It's something I've been playing around with. I might switch to that full time, but the first chapter of Percy and Grimm, The Gumdrop King, is done entirely in techinical pens. I'm trying to settle into the right style for this series. But instead of taking months on deciding I jumped right in and hope to feel out the right style as my chapters progress.

Perils of Picorna Review

2010-09-19T23:35:00.000-07:00

I just purchased Perils of Picorna at MICE this weekend. I was really drawn in by the cover, a cute, well drawn, girl who looked like a reluctant hero. I flipped through it and after walking around for a few hours decided that I would regret it if I didn't buy it. I’m glad I swung back to pick it up.

Written by Amy Kaczmarowski and Rick Silva and drawn by Missy Pena, Perils of Picorna is a fantasy Dungeons and Dragons type of world. The story is about a young servant girl, Picorna. This first chapter is about her taking on a daring mission, the first step (I'm assuming) of her becoming a full fledged hero. The world is completely realized, right down to the back story of most of the characters. The writers give us just enough back story without detracting from the current story.

The backgrounds in this book are fantastic. They are rendered with ease, and never seem labored. I always have a good sense of where the characters are in their world. Most of the artwork in this book is fantastic. For being Missy Pena's first published comic, she should be very pleased. Her character designs are tight and fun to look at. Each character has their own distinctive facial features. Character design and backgrounds are definitely Pena’s strong points.

Pena is such a great artist that the cold font sound effects that are pasted over her artwork clash immensely. I cringed every time my eyes slipped over a sound effect, feeling instinctively that Pena could have rendered something much more pleasing to the eye that fit more organically with the rest of the panel. Being on font, the text font was not distracting at all. There were a few odd shaped word balloons, but nothing entirely too distracting.

The page layouts were well thought out and considered. As far as words versus pictures go, I feel like there were a few too many words in some parts of the book. Characters would speak paragraph after paragraph to each other. Five paragraphs on a page and you might as well be reading a novel. People don’t usually talk like that, unless they’re long winded and in which case you might avoid talking to someone like that. There could be some more concise way to get the information and characterizations across. Much of this feels like the writers trying to cram too much information about the world or situation at the reader. I feel that some of it could have been weeded out and put in the back few pages, where there is a page of back story for the two main characters. So much dialog halts the flow of the story. Anything more than three or four sentences in a panel is too dialog heavy.

There are two action sequences in this story and they both felt stiff and rigid. There was little mounting tension in both sequences. And the characters action poses felt wooden and unnatural. I would suggest lengthening the action scenes in the future; really make them count for something. These are big moments, let the readers know that by giving them the space they need. Especially the final action sequence, it’s only 3 pages, one of which is a splash page. I would suggest that Pena study up on some classic fighting comics, anything by Akira Toriyama (the creator of Dragon Ball), to help strengthen future action scenes. And don’t forget the dramatic tension that can be utilized with page turns. The bottom of the right hand page should keep the reader wondering what’s happening next, so that they can’t wait to turn the page. Like a sword slicing through the air, right above Picorna’s head, that would hold me rapt.

The design layout of the book was poor. Some of the panel boarders were cut off and the margins were anywhere from a half inch to one sixteenth of an inch.

Aside from those nitpicky things, I very much enjoyed Perils of Picorna. I am now invested in this character and am anxiously awaiting her further adventures in 2011. I also can’t wait to see how Amy Kaczmarowski, Rick Silva, and Missy Pena evolve as a group.

Mega VS. Met!

2010-06-27T09:58:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun pic I drew in class last semester. I really was listening to the lecture. Seriously, drawing helps me focus. This is Mega Man fighting a Metall, which as kids we used to call them "Lil' Mets". They are one of my favorite baddies in the series.

Fire Man DLN. 007

2010-06-27T09:54:00.000-07:00

Here he is, the hottest robot master from Mega Man: Fire Man. Keeping with my theme of "what do the robot masters do when they're bored", I have Fire Man putting his head to some good use. I just noticed too that in this series of fan art I've had a few of the robots eating...that must be something I do when I'm bored, that and draw robot masters.

Snake Man DWN. 022

2010-06-27T09:46:00.000-07:00

Yes, yes, I know I've posted this image before, or something extremely close to it. I'm a bit of a Mega Man nut, and thought it would be funny to show how Snake Man eats. He's got to be doing something while he's waiting in that large room, waiting for Mega Man to come and blast him.
In my previous post Snake Man was eating a real rat. C'mon, that's just nasty. Above Snake Man is mawing down on a Ratton, from Toad Man's level in Mega Man 4 (released December of '91). Anyway, it was fun to try this picture again, and this time colour it on the computer.

You know, Snake Man might be one of the toughest bosses in Mega Man 3 (released September '90).

I Wish I Never Met You Final

2010-06-19T05:26:00.000-07:00

Hey All! This is a piece I worked closely on with my thesis advisor Stan Sakai at my time at the Center for Cartoon Studies. It appears in DoubleThink #9, there still might be some issues at Earth Prime Comics in Burlington, VT.

I added to this comic, for this viewing, and any future printing, some spot blacks on the kids' shirts and the table tops. I did all that in photoshop and was pretty happy with how the inverted NIRVANA came out on the shirt. For those of you into photoshop, you just select the area you want inverted and hit apple I, changes black to white and white to black.

Okay, enough tech talk. Hope you liked the comic.

White River Liver

2010-06-13T16:45:00.000-07:00

This is probably what would happen if I talked to strangers, or if I said anything more to my dog than "good boy" and "NO!"

What Story Are You Telling?

2010-05-26T10:22:00.000-07:00

I've been working hard on my story, Die, Baby, Die!, for almost a year now. I've gotten so invested that I feel as though I know the characters personally. I've enjoyed getting to know the characters (even the annoying ones) and how they've taken me into unexpected territory.

Working on a longer piece like this, I thought I knew exactly how it would all end up. But the story has gone through many, many different iterations. It started out as a straight up Demon Slasher story, with only one true main character, Chiyoko. I was going to be short, 90 pages, and to the point.

The further I got into my demon research, the more involved the story became. For months I wanted to show just how a demon could walk on earth among us. I spent months reading up on it and trying to fit it into my story. It wasn't until a few friends and close ones looked at it that I realized I was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Time to give up my intricate demon possession and demon back story. Dammit.

Meanwhile I'd been working out the characters. Shinji, Hisashi, Chiyoko, Yumiko and Miyuki were the big ones for the first chapter. I couldn't wait to get started on Inspector Ieada, but he wasn't to show up until the second chapter. I've always enjoyed a large cast of characters who are involved in something big, who are completely different, but are forced to be together. I find that you get the most interesting dynamics that way. I always thought people who worked together was the way to go for that, but High School works too. I remember hanging out with many people who weren't my favorite around that time in my life.

The characters had started taking on qualities that I hadn't expected. That is when writing comics is the most fun and rewarding for me. They've all won a little spot in my heart for their inadequacies and quirky hang-ups. I remember hearing from a couple of friends who I showed my first draft to that I should cut a few of my characters, that they had no point in being there. I went very strongly the other direction and gave said characters larger parts and explored them more than ever. I'd gotten very attached to the little world I'd created and couldn't see compromising it for anything.

So, I finished the first chapter last month. It was very rewarding. There are a few pages and panels I want to touch up here and there, but it's mostly finished. I'd talked to a few people who read it and they had pointed out how their favorite character is Hisashi. I must admit that I didn't see that coming. I had wanted Chiyoko to be the favorite character from the get go. But then I had her saying and doing things that I hadn't planned, but fit her character like a glove. Thus making her flawed and less sympathetic, but more real. I'd heard from a few friends along the way, and am hearing it more that I've finished the first chapter: the main character of this story is Hisashi.

What? I'd always thought it was Chiyoko. Hisashi was a huge part, sure, but the story centered around Chiyoko. At least it had in my head. I'd always figured they were the two main characters, Chiyoko and Hisashi, but Chiyoko a little more main. It looks like I could have been wrong. Sometimes you get waaaay too attached to a story that it's hard to see things clearly. I like feeling that close to a story, I wouldn't want to tell Die, Baby, Die! any other way. But it was interesting to get that feedback about Hisashi, I'll be paying more attention to what I'm doing and how I'm telling the story and how it's sways the readers. I'm not going to change any plans that I've already laid down, but I am going to be more mindful of what scenes convey to the readers. I had gotten too submerged in my own world that I'd almost forgotten what it would look like for a reader who only gets to live there between the pages.

One Window

2010-05-26T05:45:00.000-07:00

Here is the second round of thumbnails for a smaller piece I've been working on called One Window. In the classes I've had with Steve Bissette he showed us many of his short horror stories. I found it amazing that he could tell such short, yet horrific stories. One of my favorites, COTTONMOUTH, was told in only four pages! Every word and every line count. When I got to the end of COTTONMOUTH I had to set it down, say "what the hell?", then promptly pick it up and read it again. Anyway, here is what I came up with.

Gross, I know. The first draft of this was a bit more wordy, and repetative, so I tried to cut down on that. I think the pacing works well. I wanted the panel layout for the first three pages to be the same as the window panes that the character is looking out of. Trying to get the reader, for three pages, to be in that constant state of looking at the same sight. I only drew in the window panes in the first panel, but they would be drawn in every panel. These are only the thumbnails, and I wanted to convey what was happening in the outside scenes, because the window panes will not change from panel to panel.

Portrait

2010-05-23T19:33:00.000-07:00

Below is a portrait of me done by one of my classmates, David Yoder. You can link to his blog on the side bar and check out his work. David drew a portrait of everybody in our class and made trading cards out of them for his thesis. Oh yeah, the whole "bird's nest" thing. It goes like this: people in my class made fun of me because some days before class I didn't style style my hair as if I was about to go to a photo shoot.

The Cave of the Silken Web

2010-05-11T06:10:00.001-07:00

I was wandering around KMart in West Lebanon the other day and I found a Shaw Brothers movie that I had never heard of: The Cave of the Silken Web. I thought I was in for some excellent Kung Fu action, so I had to pick it up.

The movie was made in 1967 and was the Shaw Brothers third production. There was a bit of Kung Fu in the movie, but it was mostly a musical comedy. It followed the exploits of Xuanzang, a monk, and his "hapless adventures", one of whom is the Monkey King (which you may or may not have seen in that movie with Jackie Chan and Jet Li, The Forbidden Kingdom).

The Monkey King is a Chinese legend that goes way back. The portrayal in this movie was delightful, he stole the entire show. I think that Jet Li closely studied his performance before filming his scenes as the Monkey King in The Forbidden Kingdom.

The Monkey King aside, what really attracted me in this movie were the Spider Demon women who inhabited the Silken Cave. Here are a few of them pictured below...

The six arms were lost after the trippy intro, which was too bad but understandable. There were seven spider demon sisters who lived together. They were all trying to eat Xuanzang's flesh, because it would enable them to live forever. The spider demon ladies all claim to want to work together, but they are full of spite and trickery. Not only do they use these qualities against their enemies, but also against themselves, which makes things really interesting.

This movie got me excited about the idea of spider demon women, who were full of trickery and sensuality and spurred me to do a bit more research. There wasn't much that I could find on this topic, but what I did find I posted below.

This is a scan from the Usagi Yojimbo Kumo story line. It's collected in book 14: Usagi Yojimbo Demon Mask, which is a great collection where many mysteries abound. The scan is a bit blurry on the left edge because I didn't want to crack the spine of the book (sorry). In this story there is a spider demon woman, who is a torso of a woman with a spider body. It was a great story which introduces on of Sakai's great characters, Sasuke the demon hunter.

All this research got me jazzed to work on a character that might turn up somewhere down the line. A character with the six arms thing going on from The Cave of the Silken Web. I was going for a seductive character who might lead men on and then suck the blood out of them or something nasty like that. It's all just in the idea stage for now, but I like how it's shaping up.

Commencement!

2010-05-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

The end of one thing. The beginning of something else. Commencement!

That's right, my two years at the Center for Cartoon Studies are coming to a close this Saturday. It's hard to believe that three years ago I was showing up to CCS to show off my portfolio. I've learned so much since then, but I still have much more to learn.

Evan Dorkin, who created the comic book Milk and Cheese, among others, will be our commencement speaker. I've never met him myself, but he is the thesis advisor of my classmate, Jason Weeks, and from what Jason says he sounds like a firecracker. It should be a great speech.

This graduating class will be the largest that has graduated from the school yet. I believe there are 25 or 26 of us. Most of whom, you can link to on the side bar. I'll list them here, in marching order: Jen Vaughn, Bill Volk, Jason Weeks, Keny Widjaja, David Yoder, Max De Radigues, Josh Rosen, Katherine Roy, Phillip Sherwood-Berndt, Blair Sterrett, Tim Stout, Laura Terry, Ryland Ianelli, Kevin Kilgore, Modi Kwanza, Melissa Mendes, mo, Jose-Luis Olivares, Nick Patten, Matt Aucoin, Eric Baker, Mark Bilokur, Casey Bohn, Gary-Paul Bonesteel, Randall Drew, Holy Holly Foltz, and Lauren Hinds.

The ceremony will be open to the public. Afterwords, there is an art show in the CCS gallery, open all day. Come down and check it out after your done watching your Saturday Morning Cartoons.

It's been a crazy two years. I'd like to thank my professors, and all the visting artists, my classmates and my thesis advisor, Stan Sakai, for all of their time, inspiration, and the memories.

Now, let's go make some fucking comics!

Die, Baby, Die! Press Release

2010-05-02T09:43:00.001-07:00

I'm sent this add around to let people know that the first chapter is finished. You can read it by scrolling down, or I added a new page, which you'll see at the right of the screen, called Die, Baby, Die!: You Ain't a Baby No More, Baby!

Die, Baby, Die! First Chapter: You Ain't a Baby No More, Baby!

2010-05-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

Here it is, the first installment of Die, Baby, Die! It might see some minor changes when it goes to print, and I am planning on adding a backup horror story just for fun. Hope you enjoy!

Die, Baby, Die! Cover Roughs

2010-04-13T10:59:00.001-07:00

So, I've just gotten back from MoCCA and was trying to notice which covers people were drawn to. What actually makes people want to pick up a comic book? It doesn't matter how good the content is if nobody will bother to pick it up. Below are a few quick studies of covers ideas for my first chapter of Die, Baby, Die! They are in no particular order. Please weigh in and let me know your thoughts on which cover you find most appealing and why.
The cover above will be a lot cleaner. I was even thinking about only colouring Chiyoko's lips and eyes in the bottom right corner and leaving the rest as black line art.

The one above is a spoof of the Breakfast Club movie. I couldn't resist, I've always wanted to redraw that cover and it seems to fit perfectly with the characters I'm working with in the first chapter. All the characters would be computer coloured in this case.

Below are three different colour studies of one design. The font might actually be a bit different, I'm not crazy about that Y, but this is the general idea of it.

Thanks for checking this out! I'm trying to get this cover finished sometime soon, and I'll post the final version when I finish it.

MoCCA 2010

2010-04-12T00:40:00.000-07:00

Hey all. I just got back from the MoCCA comics festival. Unfortunately, I didn't get any photos because I discovered that my camera was busted right before I left. It was a great event. I got to meet a lot of talented people. I even was let into a swanky New York City apartment party to drink free booze.

I walked away with a big pile of comic books that I can't wait to read. I've already cracked into some of them. But it's late now, and time for bed. Because tomorrow it's back to the grind of crankin' out the pages.

Die, Baby, Die! pages 8-13

2010-04-04T19:49:00.000-07:00

Here are pages 8-13 of Die, Baby, Die! This scene takes place right after something terrible has happened to Miyuki! Once establishing in the first scene that this is, indeed, a horror comic, I used this next scene to slow things down a bit and introduce a few more key players, mainly Chiyoko.

Page 8 will have the Title and Chapter heading in the large space after the first tier. It will look something like this DIE, BABY, DIE! CHAPTER ONE: YOU AIN'T A BABY NO MORE, BABY! Anyway, that's my tentative title, I'm planning on writing it in brush and dropping it in before final printing.

Above I did an extensive amount of hatching to distinguish the wood frames and porch from the outside walls. I dropped it after the third panel. Without the hatching it makes the panels feel less weighted. I couldn't decide if I should just hatch all of the wood in this scene to keep everything consistant, or if dropping it out works fine, because the "camera" is farther away and might not pick up every detail...

I am happy with the way this scene turned out. I think the pacing is there, and I really enjoyed working with the grandparents. I tried hard to really establish the inside of the temple, because it is going to play a large part in the story much later on.

MOCCA 2010!

2010-04-04T19:36:00.000-07:00

People of the World,
I will be attending the Mocca Comic Convention this weekend April 10th and April 11th. This will be one of the first shows I've attended as a vendor in a while. I'm bringing with me DoubleThink issues 8 and 9. 9 is pictured below...

They both are also available at Earth Prime Comics on Church Street in Burlington for those of you who won't be at the Con. DoubleThink #9 retails for $3.00, and #8 will run about 1 buck. Also, just a little tip here, Earth Prime will be giving away DoubleThink #8 for free for this years Free Comic Book Day, which is May 1st.

Some of what appears in DoubleThink #9 has appeared in various forms in this very blog. A Worm's Life, I Wish I Never Met You, and the first four pages of Die, Baby, Die! are all in this comic book that is none too shabby.

Hope to see you at the Con! If I do I will greet you happily and try to sell you comics. If that fails, I might beg you to take them and bring them home to show to your friends and grandparents. Till next week!

Die, Baby, Die thumbs pages 8-13

2010-02-11T09:09:00.000-08:00

So, I'm still working on adding in the sound effects for the first scene. I'm going to run it by Steve Bissette on Monday and see where we're at with that. I'll post that later, hopefully it will be the final versions of those pages. Now I'm getting ready to layout the next scene. Here are the thumbnails I've started with. They are a bit rough, as my thumbnails tend to be, I'll explain some of the confusion in the text. That dude is Hisashi sweeping steps.

Introduction to Chiyoko, one of the main characters in this story.

In this page I was thinking of having the Grandmother saying something nasty in the first panel. But upon looking at it again, it almost works better as a silent panel.

Okay, I've gotten some feedback here. Chiyoko's grandparents run a small temple. This story is set in modern day Japan. One of my friends who lived there said that Japanese Buddhists don't pray this way. I've found a few videos showing that they do. I might leave it as is, sometimes if you leave out enough details the story will work, or if you have way too many details the story will work, but if you're somewhere in between it all falls apart. I think I might err on the side of not a ton of details and focus mostly on the story here.

These last two panels I think I'll flip.

I like this scene so far, but I'm not sure if I like how it ends with the grandparents. I was going to have the grandma say how she doesn't trust Hisashi, that all boys are after one thing. And the grandfather sticking up for Hisashi, saying he's a sweet kid. Then he says, "Don't you remember what it was like when we were that age?" And then he slaps his wife's ass and they run off, we can only assume to fool around. I cut that because it detrailed too much from the story of Chiyoko and Hisashi.

The comment about Chiyoko's mother I kind of like because it leaves her mother in mystery for the reader, which is something I could or could not come back to later. Although I do have a scene written when she is talking to one of the characters about loosing her parents. Maybe I need a bit more dialog from the grandmother before the grandfather says that Chiyoko is strong like her mother.

The next scene is Hisashi and Chiyoko walking to school and Hisashi gives Chiyoko a charm because he has a crush on her. I have it thumbnailed out, but it needs some changes. When I get to that and scan it in I'll throw it up on the web.

Mega Self Portrait

2010-02-09T21:32:00.000-08:00

I always thought it was silly to draw yourself as something that you're not, say a certain robot who has a gun for an arm...so I had to do it myself.

This was another just plain fun picture to draw. I pretty much stole the pose from the art work for Mega Man 8 (1996). My puggle, Owen, is taking up the role of RUSH. I put the mini pipis in my hair to continue a running joke from class. Apparently, people think that my hair is rather unkempt, and I caught the nickname of "Birds' Nest". I believe it was Jason Lutes who coined the name, and it kind of stuck, I guess...

I tried to stick with a small colour pallet for this pic. There's really only a handful of colours, but I think that's what makes the picture stand up well.

Guts Man DLN. 004

2010-02-09T20:15:00.000-08:00

Who is the biggest, baddest, strongest robot master from the 8-Bit video game era? Guts Man, that's right, Guts Man. This is another Mega Baddie that I had fun sketching. I'm running through most of the robot masters from the first game. I chose this pose because I found, in the book MEGA MAN OFFICIAL COMPLETE WORKS, an illustration to promote the Mega Man racing game, MEGA MAN BATTLE AND CHASE (1997), where Guts Man is using this gesture while in his Wild Arms racer. Apparently this gesture is akin to flipping somebody off in the States, so Capcom illustrator Shinsuke Komaki had to redraw the entire image. I think it an appropriate pose for Guts Man, and redrew it here for an American audience.

Another fun thing about drawing all these Robot Masters is that I have some smaller pieces that I can practice my computer colouring on. After a lesson with Alec Longstreth, I've been itching to throw some colour into some of my sketches. That yellow looks a little bright on my monitor, so I might recolour him in the future, but right now I'm happy with the way it turned out.

Disclaimer: Guts Man is copywritten and all rights of him belong to CAPCOM, besides, this is just fanart anyway.

Mega Man and his insides.

2010-02-09T20:01:00.000-08:00

I've recently been drawing a ton of sketches of the Mega Man characters. One of the appealing parts about Mega Man was always the super cartoony graphics. I can remember being a kid and drawing many of my own Mega Man inspired bad guys. This picture is inspired by Astro Boy by Osumu Tezuka. I've read before that the original Mega Man game (1987) was slated to be an Astro Boy game. Somehow, that title fell through, but instead of scrapping the game Capcom went ahead with production and cooked up the Blue Bomber that we all know and love! I don't know if this is true, so many of the little facts have been lost in time. But I have noticed in my own research that the Mega Man games closely resemble one of my favorite Tezuka comics ever titled the World's Greatest Robot, which is a battle of the seven strongest robots in the world. Which is very similiar to point of all the Mega Man games.

Disclaimer: Mega Man is copywritten and all rights belong to Capcom. Besides, this is just, like, fanart.

Fistful of Furries Page Five

2010-02-08T21:17:00.000-08:00

Wow, just wow. What a gross and pervy ending. This comic was made before I learned to kind of "turn down the grossness notch". But, whatever, I still think it's funny.

For those of you who are into this sort of thing, I drew in a few of my classmates from the Center for Cartoon Studies 2010 class. And another fun fact, that wolf hat that Robyn's wearing is a tip of the hat to Sokka's wolf helmet from Avatar the Last Airbender.

Fistful of Furries Page Four

2010-02-08T21:13:00.000-08:00

Let me say right off the bat that all these characters on the top tier do not belong to me. They all belong to their perspective parties. And those weird bunnies doing it on the third tier, well...I ripped off this panel from my classmate Gary Paul Bonesteel. You see, he did a comic about a sappy emo bunny, this was the highlight of the whole book, so I swiped it. There's a link on the sidebar to a world full of Gary Paul's Furry inspired comics.

Fistful of Furries Page Three

2010-02-08T21:10:00.000-08:00

I was having more fun with trying to lead the eye through the page. I found that I had learned a lot about furries through my research. I didn't do any "hands-on" research, but there were many cans of worms opened from just the things that I found online. http://www.lildobe.com/ has most of the shows that popularized furries in the main stream media.

Anyway, that's why the comic is so wordy, and I don't even think I scratched the surface of the potential of the Furdome. Keny Widjaja suggested I follow this up with "BEYOND FURRIES". Who knows what the future will hold?

Fistful of Furries Page Two

2010-02-08T21:07:00.000-08:00

Here's page two. I should take this space to let people know that this comic is totally not for children. Enjoy... I was trying out different page layouts for this page. You wouldn't know it from looking at this, but I was reading Lil' Abner by Al Cap and trying to get that kind of down home feel.

On a side note, I love trying pipe smoke.

Fistful of Furries page 01

2010-02-08T21:01:00.000-08:00

This is the first of five pages that I drew for a comic history assignment (I printed it in DoubleThink #6). We could choose any aspect of contemporary comics, and I decided to try to unveil what makes people go furry. For those of you who don't know what a furry is, check back next week where Inky Solomon gives you the low down on Page Two.

Wormy

2010-02-08T20:54:00.000-08:00

Here is another small autobio piece I did at the end of 2009. I know I said that I'm not big on autobio stuff, and that they appeal to nobody outside of my friends and family, but for some reason I did another one tentatively titled: WORMY.

This story may end up seeing some changes before seeing print. Hell, it might not even get printed. It was another comic I felt I needed to get out of my system before jumping back into my longer work, DIE, BABY, DIE! It's refreshing to get a whole story out in a day, as opposed to slaving away for a month or more on a 20-something page story. Knocking out a quick one lets you know, "Yeah, you can be productive." It's a weird mind trick to play on yourself, but as long as your mind doesn't know, then you win...or something like that.

The Humph!

2010-02-08T20:50:00.000-08:00

Here's a sketch of Humphrey Bogart I did while watching some old mystery movies. Bogart was the best. You should check out The Maltese Falcon, it's one of my favorites. One of his great lines in it goes something like, "I don't like you two birds suckin' around." I don't know if anyone but Bogart could pull off a line like that.

Hollywood Frakkers

2010-02-08T20:46:00.000-08:00

So, this is an autobio comic I did after a trip to the video store: This is the type of strip that you just kind of jump into and hope for the best. I definitly do not work this way most of the time, but every once in a while it's fun to just sit in front of a piece of paper, move your pen around, and see what happens.

I don't think I'll refine this any further. It seems to me that most autobio strips are great for the cartoonist's friends and family, but after that they tend to be not easily accessible. What do you think? In this case, I think it might appeal to Battle Star fans as well, but what do I know, I'm just a cartoonist.

Creature Baby Mama Drama!

2010-02-08T20:37:00.000-08:00

This is a project I did in late 08 for Anna's writing class. The assignment was to do a one page comic about love...

I had been kicking around the idea of doing a comic called "CREATURE" which is a world inhabited by creatures and all the story telling is through pictures and sound effects, no words. This is actually what I dreamed Disney's movie DINOSAUR would be when I saw the first preview. Boy was I disappointed when I shelled about seven bucks to see that stinker!

On the bright side, you didn't shell out anything to read the stinker above. I went the whole motherly love route. This is actually my second attempt at this story. I'm sure if I did it again today, it'd look better. And if I did it a few years after that it'd look better. But sharing old work is good, right?

Usagi Yojimbo Deformities

2010-02-08T09:15:00.000-08:00

Kriota Willburg came into our school for a two day intensive anatomy lesson. She was a really great teacher, she understood the body extremely well, and she taught with humor. After the two day intensive, which was geared towards cartooning, we had homework. Homework, BLECH! We had to draw one of our favorite comic book characters and deform them in some way. I chose Usagi Yojimbo, he is one of my favorites...

Here is Usagi in normal garb and no deformities, and here he is practically naked. I swear this was part of the assignment! I chose this type of underwear to give Usagi a bit of current fashion.

Above is a study of the skeletal system and then the muscles. I figured Usagi would have a six-pack, since he's such a great swordsman. I'm not sure if that is what bunny ear muscles look like or not, but it was fun to draw.

Here is Usagi deformed! The funnest part! To the left he is extremely aged, and to the right I added a bunch of fatty tissue to the ronin. I had a lot of fun with this homework assignment, but am still waiting to get graded on it.

Sexy Foltz Lady

2010-02-08T09:03:00.000-08:00

I usually sit beside my friend, Holly Foltz (you can find her link on the sidebar), during our Monday classes. I like to sit next to Holly because she is always sketching sexy ladies. It's fun to watch her sketch. Her vixens have a very Disney-like quality to them.

This picture above was an impromtu collaboration. I had just got some new pens that I was dying to try out, so I handed Holly a piece of paper and asked her to sketch one of her sexy pin-up ladies. She obliged and came up with this smoking hot dominatrix. I inked a bit of it in class and brought it home to lay in the blacks.

We had so much fun doing this pin-up that Holly and I have been cooking up plans for further Sexy Foltz ladies. There's sure to be more facinating female pin-ups in the near future.

Cut Man Robot Master DLN. 003

2010-02-05T20:52:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure that while Cut Man is sitting in his Boss Room waiting for Mega Man to come and kill him, this is what he does to kill the time. This was a fun piece I did today after having a lecture on computer colouring with Alec Longstreth. Alec is a swell guy, who is very enthusiastic, so enthusiastic in fact that I did this piece all in one day.

I didn't follow as closely as I should have the character designs. I just recently procured the book, MEGA MAN OFFICIAL COMPLETE WORKS which is an amazing art book that has all of the illustration work from Mega Man 1 all the way through to Mega Man 8 (including the GameBoy games and over seas releases). It's the kind of Mega Man book I've been dreaming about for years.

For a while I was hung up on making a FanZine called MegaZine. It first started as I would like to draw each of the Robot Masters doing something funny or cute, like above, and I would do a little funny bio about them and some character stats, like their favorite food and stuff like that. Then the idea swelled and I was going to do interviews with Keiji Inafune and all that good stuff, but COMPLETE WORKS has already done all that. Which makes me relieved that somebody has undertaken the task so I didn't have to. Now I think I'll be happy with my funny fan drawings of the robot masters and maybe some game tips and fun facts.

Disclaimer: Cut Man is registered Trademark of Capcom all rights belong to them, this is just fan art anyway.

Die, Baby, Die! first few pages

2010-02-05T20:04:00.000-08:00

Here are the roughs for my first seven pages of Die, Baby, Die! I call them roughs, because even though they are inked, they haven't been totally cleaned up on Photoshop and there still maybe be some changes to be made. Note that I didn't include page 5 because I totally forgot to scan it when I was in the dungeon scanning today. These bottom panels will fit the page eventually.

This is pretty much the same as before, except I changed Miyuki in panel one. I also added a bit of detail to her face, because after working hard to rip off Dave Gibbon's style (WATCHMEN), I decided to change the way I draw this story. Pages 6 and 7 are closer to what I want it to look like, but I'm dreading having to redraw pages 2-5!

I'm planning on shrinking Miyuki in Panel 4, so that she looks farther away from the Demon, and maybe adding some screen tones on those oh-so-hideous legs so that they push closer to the reader. I might add the shading in with ink, old school style.

AAAAH! Big page turn moment! I think it works nicely. I might want to thicken the lines around the YEEK, and again add a bit of tone or shading to that oh-so-hideous arm. I've been struggling to figure out what I should do for this panel border. I might do it with some scratchy thick lines, to emphasize the freaking outness of this page. Before I had laid it out like some of the edge was cracking away like glass, but I've gotten many different opinions on that. Some say that when you break up the panels, the white space in between represents time. I never really thought of it that way, but it makes sense. Things happen in between the panels, that is for sure.

Another idea was to always keep every panel border the same thickness and shape because comics are about what is inside the panels, not what the panels look like. Some people claim that doing a shakey panel border is way too fancy and just showing off your drawing skills at drawing panel borders. I'm not sure I agree with this, because it is just another tool in your "cartoonist box" to help you get across your story or the feeling of your story.

So all of that being said, I wonder what this panel border will end up being? If I spend too much time thinking about it I'll be Dead, Baby, Dead before the damn thing gets drawn.

I'm kind of liking how this page turned out. This is where I think I started feeling comfortable with Miyuki as a character, too bad she's not a main character because she's really fun to draw. The last two panels are some more of that "too fancy" drawing stuff, but what the hell, I like to draw and I wanted to panels to carry more weight than the top panels.

This page is missing some sound effects. I'm having a crit with Steve Bissette and some of my classmates on monday in hopes to tackle this problem. I have a clear idea of the sound effects I want, CREEEEEEEK! and CLUMP being those. We'll see where that crit leads these pages.

This page isn't finished yet. There are some CLUMPs missing. The two penciled panels I'm hoping to clean up and ink by Monday. Some of the Es need a bit of touching up, I wonder if they are thick enough. I'm sure Steve will tell me. Cheers!

Die, Baby, Die! first two pages

2009-12-11T09:47:00.000-08:00

Here are the first two pages of my longer work, tentatively titled, Die, Baby, Die! I'm not quite finished inking it, and am still getting used to the tools. I feel like the lettering is getting better. I especially like the panel on the second page where Miyuki is bleching her homework.

I'm struggling still with interiors of buildings and broke out the ruler because I can't draw a strait line to save my life. I'm hoping to get these pages to their final stages sometime before Christmas.

The Birth of a Nation

2009-12-11T09:19:00.000-08:00

Here is a two page comic I did, the Birth of a Nation, which got printed in INBOUND #4: a comic history of Boston. The books are available for purchase at www.bostoncomicsroundtable.com
I think this comic came out pretty well. I did a large amount of research on the group, the Sons of Liberty. I thought it was important that people get a glimpse of what they really were all about, instead of associating the name with the Metal Gear Solid on the PS2 that sucked.

Finding the Right Demon

2009-11-30T07:37:00.000-08:00

I've been working hard on my newest comic, tentatively titled "Die, Baby, Die!", which is about a demon who is haunting the girl's restroom in a high school. I decided to set the story in Japan, because I love the demonology of the Japanese culture. Pictured below is Tatsuya Morino's rendition of the traditional Kappa monster. This image appears in the book YOKAI ATTACK! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide written by Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt. The Kappa is a demon who is usually found in a pond, and he is always laying in wait to snatch and strangle the careless traveler. Many legends tell that an offering of a cucumber, the Kappa's favorite food, can grant you passage by their pond. The top of the Kappa's head is indented like a bowl, and it holds water. The water is the sorce of their power, so if you can prompt a Kappa to bow to you, it's head will tip out the water and you can save the cucumber for yourself.

Anyways, below are some of my attempts at making the demon in Die, Baby, Die! inspired by the Kappa...

I like how the one above looks, he kind of reminds me of Dr. Suess' the Grinch. Below are some more random sketches. I was trying to feel out the character in my sketch book.

Below is my attempt at capturing the Tengu, which is the mountain demon in Japan. They are remarkable swordsmen, but tend only to stick to the mountains.
The next one is a transformation drawing. For a while I was really hung up on him being a Bird Demon. The Konoha-Tengu, which is the less powerful of the Tengu family, was a prime option. I've done many sketches of that character, but in the end none of the traditional Japanese Yokai (demon, goblin, ghost, or spectre) seemed to fit my story. I think in part it was because if I used a traditional Yokai, I'd want to remain true to the legend of that certain Yokai. I needed something that was more my own, so that I could bend it, and stretch it, and fit it into my story.
Below is a sketch of the character, Hisashi, a sixteen year old who is possessed by the demon. Beside him is his ancestor from seven generations ago. His ancestor was killed in a horrible way and wanted to exact his revenge on his murderer by killing all of their blood line. I figure that it took Hisashi's ancestor about seven lifetimes, or generations, to perform enough evil deeds in hell to get a chance to wreak havoc on earth. So I kind of wanted the demon character to be a mix between the two, except he would be more demonic looking since he has been in hell doing terrible things for seven life times.
Below is a rough picture of Hisashi only transformed slightly by the demon. There is a chance for me to show stages of the possession, and if I go that route, this would be one of the earlier stages.
Okay, by this point I've been working on this character design on and off again for about two to three months. Nothing seemed to be fitting what I had in mind. The problem was that I didn't have anything very specific in mind. So, I tried the old Jason Lutesy technique: picture the demon inside you head and draw it with your eyes closed. The picture on the right is what I came up with, the inks on the left are me trying to clean that idea up.
I realized that what I found scary in a demon were: big teeth, horns, black eyes of nothingness, hair, and some kind of longish snout. I tried a bit more. With this next drawing I kept in mind that if Hisashi was being possessed by this demon, it would be trying to push itself out of his body. And if he were doing that there would be recognizable parts. And I thought what if Hisashi's eye sockets turned into the Demon's nose? That would be really messed up.
So I pushed it some more. Here is a mid-transformation picture.
I then thought to have this demon in a pose where he is mocking the Buddha statue (which is in a temple where the final fight scene takes place in the story). I also drew the face of one of his victims (Yumiko) in his palm. I thought he might use that to taunt the heroin of the story, Chiyoko. I penciled this.
And inked it.
I kept pushing this weird, horse looking, Hisashi-nosed demon with horns. This is what I came up with. I decided to give him two tails to tip the hat to Clive Barker's demon, Jakabok Botch, in Mister B. Gone (a scary as hell book which I'm too afraid to finish).
And finally, I did a picture of the Demon tormenting the heroin, Chiyoko. These are still all just rough ideas at this point. I think that I'll end up going in the direction of Hisashi's eyes and face being on the tip of the Demon's snout. I've gotten much feedback about this demon looking too cutesy. Well...

I guess I can see that. Jason Lutes said of the picture above that it looked like Alf. Which wasn't what I was going for at all. I'm going to work harder on the eyes of the demon, to make them less round and more scary-like. As always, any feedback will be much appreciated. I'm currently starting the pencils for the first chapter of Die, Baby, Die!. The Demon doesn't make his appearance until the sixth chapter, so I've got some time to figure it out.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

2009-11-06T09:09:00.000-08:00

This is a picture I did for my good friend, Brahbrah. I looked mostly at the first part of the Nausicaa graphic novel. I'm planning to computer colour this in the future.

Todd Haire Extraordinaire

2009-11-06T09:01:00.000-08:00

This is a brush drawing of my old boss from Magic Hat Brewery, Todd Haire. It's influenced by Charles Burns, who Todd introduced me to. I asked Todd, "Is Big Baby Asian?" To which he replied, "No man, Big Baby's fuckin' Big Baby!"

Godman, the Complete Story

2009-11-05T05:29:00.000-08:00

Well, here it is, the final version of my dream inspired comic I started over a month ago. It was suppose to be only four pages long, but I got a little carried away. Some parts were based on a weird dream I had, other parts are my attempt to explain the dream. Either way, I think I came up with a fun comic.

Horror Story Intro Thumbnails

2009-10-15T18:08:00.000-07:00

This is the introduction to a horror story that I had plotted out. I sent the "script" to my thesis advisor, Stan Sakai. We sat down over breakfast at the Baltimore Comicon and he asked me politely how much feedback of his that I wanted. I told him, "everything." So Stan told me that the introduction to my Demon Horror Story was confusing. He didn't realize it was a horror story until he was about a third of the way through the story. He suggested an alternate intro, which is what I attempted to thumbnail below. I think it sets the correct mood for a horror story. You be the judge...

These are all rough thumbnails, I still have a bunch more research to do, as far as the building interior and finalizing the character design of the demon. But the two characters, Hisashi and Yuki, are pretty solid. Drop a comment and let me know what you think.

Metal Cognition: Firewall page 28

2009-09-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

Here's the next page of Metal Cognition. I'll be focusing more on backgrounds and environments fo the rest of the book, and the rest of my works from now on. I'm pretty happy with the close up on SAL's face in the last panel.

Godman

2009-09-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

This is the first page of a comic I'm doing for Jason Lutes' class. We had to keep dream journals and then use our dreams to come up with an image for the first page. This is mine, pretty creepy dream, huh? So, I've thumbnailed out the next four pages, and will post them sometime next week. I've finished penciling the next page, but I've been busy with other work, some of it homework, some of it janitorial work.

Do Robot Monkeys Dream of Electric Bananas?

2009-09-24T10:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a drawing I did for a little project I'm doing just for fun, I'm trying to do a panel a day (I'm actually a little bit behind on that), and just see where it takes me.

Snake Man

2009-09-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally got around to doing a picture of Snake Man. This isn't one of his special powers in the game, but it is how he gets his special powers. This was inked with a G-Nib and Crow Quill (a little) and colored with colored pencils that instead of color names have cat names, like hairball instead of brown, and lick instead of pink.

Metal Cognition pages 26 & 27

2009-09-14T07:59:00.001-07:00

Here's the next two pages of Metal Cognition: Firewall. I just finished inking 27 today.

Bullet!!

2009-09-14T07:55:00.000-07:00

Here's another possible cover for my BULLET! anthology...

Spidey Spirit!

2009-09-14T07:48:00.000-07:00

This weekend I did a little picture of my favorite superhero doing what he does best, cracking cheesy one liners while webbing up some baddies.
This is a preliminary pic for a story I'm working on to pitch to Marvel. Where Spider-Man invites all of the bad guys over for Thanksgiving dinner, only to reveal that the bird they are eating is no other than the Vulture! (for those of you who don't know the Vulture is this bad guy who is really old and bald and flies around stealing money and stuff)

The Blue Bomber

2009-09-11T11:27:00.001-07:00

I was just playing through Mega Man 3 and got the sudden urge to do a sketch of Mega Man fighting Snake Man and a ton of the other bosses! This is what I came up with...

Okay, it's missing Snake Man, but it was still fun to draw.

Land O Lakes

2009-09-09T15:34:00.000-07:00

Notice the difference between the two pictures? Look carefully...

There's something that the bottom Land O Lakes lady is displaying, and it ain't butter! The trick, if you want to know, is to cut out the knees of the Land O Lakes lady and paste it behind the butter, cutting away the butter she is holding so that it flips up.

My father showed me this when I was a kid, and I thought that all of the Land O Lakes butters were like this, so I would rush to the butter aisle in the grocery store and try to flip up all the butters that the Land O Lakes lady was holding. Many years later did I figure out what really happened.

BULLET!

2009-09-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

For my Thesis Project at the Center for Cartoon Studies my teacher, Steve Bissette, suggested that I do a "one man anthology". Which is to come up with a title and pack all of my work together, regardless if they work as a story or not. This way, it would prove that I have been working the entire semester, and I wouldn't kill myself working on a longer project that I might not be able to finish at the end of the year.

Steve also mentioned that I am spending too much time drawing illustrative cover. He said I need to have graphical covers. Something that grabs people's attention and doesn't take forever to draw. It's the inside that should take forever to draw. So these are my attempts at a graphical cover for a one man anthology that I'm thinking of calling BULLET.

I'm thinking close-up on pretty girl's faces, with a solid colour background (red for the one below and blue for the one below that) with the shine in their eye the only thing that is white, and in bold yellow font BULLET! at the top.

Metal Cognition: Firewall

2009-09-09T09:52:00.001-07:00

These are three pages that I've been working on this past week to try and finish my story called Metal Cognition. It is basically a robot mystery story. Before I got started on it I had been reading a lot of Isaac Asimov for research, particularly the R. Daneel and Leige Bailey novels. This is the second part of my action sequence...

I spent a lot of time planning out page 25, trying to lead the reader's eye through the page. Hopefully it was successful. I'm still working hard to finish up the rest of the story. I have one more scene that I thought would be 7 more pages, but I might add a couple more pages to give myself a little breathing room. The only problem with "breathing room" is that if I take too much I'll never finish this book. I originally planned it to be 24 pages, and that didn't happen.

Old Raph

2009-09-09T09:37:00.000-07:00

Here is a drawing I did after I read the collected Tales of the Turtles that came out last year. Raph is my favorite, even in his old age.

The Breaking In

2009-09-09T09:21:00.000-07:00

This is a poster I made for the guys who are the Breaking In, Todd Haire and John Ravell. The zombie carrying the insides in her purse was somthing that made me chuckle. This was a very Steve Bissette inspired piece.

Heavy Metal Mechas

2008-07-15T08:33:00.000-07:00

This is my first actually published works that appeared in Seven Days, a kind of crunchy Vermont newspaper that is written in Burlington. They have many other comics printed, James Kolchalka's being the most popular. Mine only got printed twice, and in the music section because I used to work with the music editor, Dan Bolles, and he needed to fill up some space fast.

This is the fist strip printed. It's a great little four panel gag strip, but it didn't elicit much of a response from any of the readers. I did another comic strip when I was in college titled Monkey Fandango, it was about a second grader, Jill, who had a pet monkey named Taylor. She could talk to the monkey and they had secret adventures. It was a huge rip off of Calvin and Hobbes. My main problem with Monkey Fandango was that I actually knew that people would be reading it. I wanted to make it easy to read, and enjoyable for everybody. I found out later that if I want my comics to be what they should be than I need to make the comics that I want to make, not the comics that I think everybody would want to read. It wasn't like I was printed in the Sunday funnies alongside Dilbert and Zits, where everything has to be funny, yet politically correct.

I suffered from the same kind of feelings when I was offered to do a strip for Seven Days. Dan told me it could be anything, but it had to be about music. I struggled for awhile because I don't really know too much about music. Not enough to make a weekly comic strip out of anyways. Finally I decided that this comic, like all my other comics, should be character driven. I wanted robot girls to be in a heavy metal band, and my strip was set.

These strips though, are very subdued. I wrote them as if a seven-year-old kid would read them. The humor doesn't flow naturally like it does for some of my more adult themed comics. I'd almost even call these a bit contrived. Here's a look at the second strip...

I like this one, I think it's funy and you can start to get a sense of what kind of girls these robots are. On the fence I drew a picture of Charlie Brown, from one of Schultz's early strips. The ugly kid in it is part of a group of kids called the Leather Bros, who were the antagonists to my character Shovel Boy, which I drew probably six years ago. I like the shape of his head, and he looks a bit like Yoda. I drew this character in my book titled Sloth, also.

The whole Seven Days printing thing left me with kind of a bad taste in my mouth. It taught me pretty much that you can get your work printed depending on who you know, not especially depending on the strength of your work. I'm sure there are some exceptions out there. But it's hard to muscle in on a paper who already has their comics section full. If their not looking for something new, and are spending all their time doing layouts and writing shit, they're not going to have time to look at your work.

I guess I need somebody who will go into the printing place, interrupt meetings, shove my work in the editor's face and say, "READ THIS. PRINT THIS!" I guess I need an agent.

To Narrate or not to Narrate

2008-07-10T17:06:00.000-07:00

Narration in comics. It’s kind of like a voice over in a movie. Kind of. Narration is used to give the reader a look at the thoughts of one of the characters. Or else it is used to progress the story quickly and efficiently. Phrases like “Meanwhile” or “Two days later”, let the reader know exactly the setting or time shift in the story arch without having to set up an establishing shot or spend four panels with the sun setting and rising.

I’ve worked on many books and decide well in advanced if I’ll be using narration or not. Narration is one way to tell the story, as in the same way that you would tell the story around a campfire. “Once upon a time”, or “Bob rounded the corner and was startled to see the one-armed man”. The beauty of comics is that you can show these phrases with pictures and no words. It’s more challenging and more rewarding to draw a character scared, with squiggly shiver marks around them than to just have a speech bubble stating “I’m scared.” or a narration square saying, “Bob was scared”.

So then is it that creating a mood, or progressing a story just using pictures is more difficult than using narration? Is narration, consequently, the easy way out? I wouldn’t necessarily say that, but narration give a whole different kind of feel for progressing a story.

I’ve been pouring over my comic books and have found that, more often than not, most comic book artists don’t use narration. Out of my large collection of comic books and collected works I found very few titles or books that use narration regularly.

Spider-Man Maximum Carnage uses narration, most especially to progress the plot to the action sequences of the story. Simple phrases like, “Across town” which can take you from one panel reading about Spider-Man web slinging to Carnage and Shriek hatching a nefarious plan. These, story-progressing-narrations, are found on almost every fourth or fifth page. The tool that they’re serving here is plot progression. Not only that but a company like Marvel has to “turn it out” every month. There’s the story, the pencils, the inking, and the colours. Four to five people have to get this twenty-four page book out in a month. So phrases that can quickly bring you around a story spanning over ten characters are a welcome tool. Another consideration is page count. Most comics have a page count that is a multiple of four. Twenty pages, Twenty-four pages, Twenty-eight pages, you get the idea. The reason behind this is that every four pages are printed on one large sheet of paper that is folded down the middle. They are collated, then tucked together, and stapled with a glossy cover and you’ve got yourself a comic book.
There are some different narration blocks in Maximum Carnage that are the character’s inner thoughts. These often progress the story, but also, and more importantly, give the reader insight into the character. It’s a great, and often easy, way for character development. This, I feel, has always been one of the appealing points in the Spider-Man series. Because, not only is Spider-Man, filled with action, web-slinging, and fighting baddies, but there is also a soap-opera-ish story line that is weaved throughout each issue. Peter Parker struggling to keep his identity secret to protect the ones he loves. Any kind of fight with Mary Jane. The rivalry between Eddie Brock and Peter Parker as far as photography goes. These are the story lines that get people hooked and buy issue after issue.

So Spider-Man uses the narration blocks practically for pacing, plot progression, and character development. But if you’re a comic book artist and you’re working for Marvel, you probably don’t have to worry about any of this because the writer will do it for you.

Charles Burns, who got his start during the drug induced comic movement, has created some of the most unique characters to grace the page: Big Baby (a young bald pre-adolescent), el Borbah (a three-hundred pound Mexican wrestler who is an undercover detective). Throughout Burns’ career he has used narration blocks. In the earlier onset, Big Baby and el Borbah, they were just plot progressing phrases, such as “a few minutes later..” They were hardly used at all. Burns would tell his stories through pictures and character conversations.

It wasn’t until much later in his career that Burns utilized narration for character development. His epic tale about teenage love, lust, STDs, and misunderstandings, Black Hole, was the book where Burns really developed the emotional range of his characters. This worked spanned from 1995 to 2004. Burns had total freedom for this book, much like his other work, if he was restricted in anyway, it may have been length of issues. So he could set his own pace, not use plot progressing phrases or summaries to keep his story to eight pages so that it could be printed in Heavy Metal (as he did do with el Borbah).

There are two main characters which get the narration block treatment, a teenage boy and a teenage girl. Getting to know their thought process really draws the reader into the story. The boy, Keith, is the insecure high school kid who is afraid he’ll never get laid. Chris, is the girl that he has a crush on. They both go through a crazy ordeal, including a strange epic of STDs that is plaguing the town. Burns carries out a lot of inner monologue with both these characters. In this way he has gone from the funny, wacky, sometimes grotesque, and always shocking story telling (Big Baby, el Borbah), and added a bit of emotional drama. This added element grounds his characters, fleshes them out, and in that way makes the book more like life. The characters are easier to relate to and thus brings the characters and story depth.

Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Maus, chronicles the struggles and survival of Spiegelman’s grandfather’s time spent in a Nazi imprisonment camp during World War II. Along side this story arch is Spiegelman’s own struggle to completing such an heart-wrenching book and his somewhat sour relationship with his father.

Spiegelman uses narration lightly to set up the scenes with himself, his wife, and\or his father. They are small sentences like, “Summer vacation. Francoise and I were staying with friends in Vermont…” During the heavily emotional segments where you are with his father in the concentration camp, you learn that Spiegelman has interviewed and tape recorded his father’s memories of that time. These sequences rely heavily on the narration of Spiegelman’s father. He must write it word for word, because as you read it you can almost hear his father speaking. The character designs are simple, yet highly detailed. The whole book is groundbreaking. It’s one of the books that proved that comics aren’t just funny books for teenaged boys. Spiegelman’s excellent use of his father’s narration to tell the story and to make it personable are a strong factor in this formula.

These examples show us the wide range in which narration can be used. It can be used simply to propel the story along, or it can be used to reach a deep emotional connection with your reader. Many comic artists out there don’t use narration. It’s not just daily strips that are four panels long, which can be but is often not enough space to delve into deep emotional states. Some books that are deeply emotional tell their stories and characters emotions with actions and conversations. Is it thus more work for the artist? Perhaps, but it depends on the artist. For a more visual inclined person telling a story with no words can be easier than to plot out a script.

James Kochalka is a great example of an artist who rarely uses narration in his books. He does often use them for his four panel daily strip titled American Elf. He usually narrates his thoughts on any number of subjects from Mario Sunshine to his cat Spandy. When he does use narration it gives the reader a real sense of who he is and how he thinks. If you read American Elf from the beginning, October 26, 1998, to the this day, it’s scary how personal Kolchalka’s comics are and you get a sense that you really know him even though you may have never even met him.

His other works, Monkey vs. Robot, Super Fuckers, Fancy Froglin’s Sexy Forest, are all wonderfully drawn and move at a comfortable pace without the use of narration. Monkey vs. Robot, in fact, hardly has any words at all. Do the characters and story feel “real”? Not specifically. It feels about as real life as watching the Monchichis. Do you get to know exactly what the monkeys and robots are thinking? No. But does this make the book any more less enjoyable? Not in the slightest. Monkey vs. Robot is an excellent read that draws the readers in with its cute drawings and easy plotline. The absence of narration makes this book stronger. It doesn’t need any explanation, it doesn’t need any deep emotional thought. The pictures, in this case, say it all and are worth a thousand words. It’s a fun, light-hearted read. And it feels as complete, if not more so, than any of the books with narration mentioned above.

Does that mean that comics without narration can only be action oriented or Saturday morning cartoonish? Not even remotely. Many artists can get as emotionally deep as Spiegelman without the use of narration, or hardly even any words at all. Yoshihiro Tatsumi, is a Japanese comic artist who got his break in the sixties and whose influence can still be felt today with the re-release of some of his adult comics he calls “Gekiga” which translates roughly to “dramatic pictures”.

Tatsumi’s strongest works from 1969 are collected in The Push Man and other stories, released a few years ago by drawn and quarterly. Most of the stories in the collection are only eight pages, some are a bit longer. Each story focuses on the seedy underbelly of common day life in Japan in the late sixties. No narration is used at all. Tatsumi’s pacing is smooth, and efficient. Even with only eight pages to work with his stories are never jumpy or erratic, but always smooth. The strength and dramatic emotions from Tatsumi’s stories lie in the powerful images he draws so effortlessly. In Sewer, the images of a dead baby floating in the sewer drain are shocking and alarming. To see that human life is disposed of as so much excrement is saddening.

Tatsumi’s work proves the point that deeply emotional work can be touching without the aid of narration.

Stan Sakai, creator of the samurai bunny Usagi Yojimbo, has been drawing the same title for over twenty years. Each volume follows the ronin rabbit through his many adventures in feudal Japan. Sakai’s story telling skills, as well as his excellent layouts, make any issue of Usagi a treat to read. Sakai rarely uses narration in Usagi. When he does use narration, it is usually Usagi telling a tale of the past, even then the “voice over” is minimal and Sakai lets the action unfold like a well paced movie.

Sakai’s character’s expressions speak volumes. And, like Tatsumi, it is often the wordless panels that are the most emotionally gripping. Those exciting moments before a dual to the death are heightened by Sakai’s pacing. That moment in real time, which might be ten or twenty seconds, feels excruciatingly long with Sakai’s breakdown. It builds suspense and is reminiscent of legendary director, Sergio Leone’s, pre-shoot out scenes in his spaghetti westerns like Fistful of Dollars, or Once Upon a Time in the West.

Sakai’s issues of Usagi seem to encompass all elements of entertainment in one book, much like a well done kung-fu movie. There is comedy, drama, action, love interests, ghost stories, revenge tales, tales of deceit, you get it all in Usagi Yojimbo. All of this is done without narration. In Usagi, it works extremely well. His emotional parts hit home. You can hear the way that a line is delivered by the look on the speakers face.

All this narration vs. non-narration brings us to one of the most recognizable names in comics: Frank Miller. Even if you haven’t read any of his stuff (highly unlikely if you’re reading this essay) then chances are you’ve seen his stories in the movie theater. Robocop 2, Daredevil, 300, Sin City…any of these ringing a bell?

Miller has both narration and non-narration comics that are equal in caliber. Neither of his styles suffer any from the presence or the absence of narration. Miller is a very adaptable comic creator in this respect. Miller’s Ronin is a great example of his story telling without the use of narration. It’s an epic tale of feudal Japan meets futuristic technology. The images are solid with a sketchy quality, you can’t help but feel jealous of the guy for being able to draw so damn well. The pacing is good, though during some of the explanatory conversations, or to coin the phrases from the Incredibles, “monologue-ing“, gets a bit much. Other than that, the book is flawless. The story is well plotted out, all the plot twists are a shock. Miller goes from seemingly no words to some pages that are wordy indeed. This balance is respectable.

Miller’s other works, most notably, 300 and Sin City, use narration almost exclusively. Sin City was created in the same vein as 1940s-1950s film noir detective stories, which had an abundance of voiceover work. Sin City is no exception. It’s remarkably well done, though. For one complete story we get the voiceover work of one character. Marv, the crazy lug from The Hard Goodbye, is one example. Marv is telling us the story as it’s unfolding in the frames. He not only tells us the story, but he’ll give us background on the supporting characters that is important for us to know.; or Marv thinks it’s important for us to know. Marv says of a female character during an interaction, “Lucille’s my parole officer. She’s a dyke but God knows why. With that body of hers she could have any man she wants.” In these few sentences, the scene is set, we know who Lucille is, and we get a good sense of the kind of person that Marv is.
Each Sin City tale is told in the same manner. We stick with one character through the whole tale, be it the do-gooder cop Hartigan, or Dwight the bad-ass. Each spins a different kind of tale, uniquely their own depending on who is telling it, though we all know that it’s Miller who is telling the tales. Like I said, the guy is adaptable. It’s hard to imagine what Sin City would be like without the narration, it wouldn’t be Sin City at all. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine Ronin with narration. Miller illustrates that dramatic feelings can be expressed both with and without narration. The feelings will feel different depending on if and how you decided to use or not use narration.

There is one last technique for narration in comics, and that is the use of narration to tell a personal essay. Personal essays tend to be extremely personal, not the type of things that you would bring up about yourself at Sunday brunch with your family…depending on how close you are with your family. Personal essays, I would say, tend to be about something that happened to you and how you feel about it. I find personal essays, comic or otherwise, very intriguing. Some of my favorite works by R. Crumb are his personal essays. Where he writes out something at the top of the panel and illustrates it in the rest of the panel. My Troubles with Women is one of R.Crumb’s quite revealing works. Most of the panels have a great narration at the top, though some of them are just strait-up pictures of Crumb’s fantasies. One of the narrations on the top of the panel says, “It came to the point where I found that some girls will let you do anything you want to them if they like you a lot!” and the picture in the frame is Crumb on top of a girl who is on her stomach, he has her head in one hand and her foot in the other and is shoving the foot into her mouth. “Let’s see how far this will go!” Crumb says, while thinking, “Hey, she’s good!” Out of context that panel might seem to be drawn by a weirdo, but it fit’s the strip perfectly. Crumb does an excruciating self-examination as to why he is so awkward around women, spanning from his memories of his parents fighting in front of them to his happily depicted relationship with his current mate.

Another essay that strikes true with me is David Sedaris’ Twelve Moments in the Life of an Artist. This essay is handwritten, so certainly a narrative, but it follows the same vein as R. Crumb’s essay comics. It’s about something that happened to the author, and Sedaris writes with the same rawness and edginess of Crumb’s work. This particular essay deals with Sedaris’ musings about what it is to be an artist, or more specifically, an artist with no talent and little drive. Sedaris paints a picture with his words, his attitude in this essay is satirical and comical. He focuses on how he could have been an artist if he’d just had the talent, and discusses his short stint as a performance artist. “I was living art. My socks balled up on the hardwood floor made a greater statement than any of their hokey claptrap with the carefully matted frames and big curly signatures in the lower left-hand corners.” Sedaris says of the traditional artists. This statement show the sarcasm that Sedaris uses to prove his points.

The most appealing aspect of a personal essay is the deep inner reflection that occurs by the author and/or artist. It may be satirical, it may be dramatic, but there is usually some kind of question, however vague it may be, that is pondered and answered by the last word/picture. A good personal essay will loosely follow this formula. It isn’t the formula that makes it worth reading, it’s the struggle to find the answer as to why you bothered to sit down and write it in the first place. This kind of deep reflection makes for an interesting read, whether it is about R. Crumb’s Trouble with Women, or David Sedaris’ Twelve Moments in the Life of an Artist.

I’ve been struggling in my own work with how much narration that I need to use, and how long should I let the “scenes” play out by themselves. I have no deadline, no length restrictions. It makes for total freedom, but also leaves me with the question of, am I making this too long? If I did have a deadline I would trim out all of the childhood sections and get right down to it, but when I have the pen in my hand I feel that it is very important that I visit the areas of how I got to where I am. Sometimes restrictions can help us produce work, sometimes our best work.

I have noticed though, that a personal comic essay flows so much differently than any other comic. It doesn’t flow like a movie, smooth and seamless. It jumps around like a cricket. It’s more like following a person’s thought process, and less like a well plotted out story arch. I wonder if this jumpy story is good only for people with ADD or if it flows nicely for everybody. I suppose time will tell.

Moving to a New Place

2008-07-02T11:05:00.000-07:00

A new month has started and with it comes new responsibilities. New problems. New everything. I just moved away from everything I knew and was comfortable with so that I could get settled in at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction. So far, the move hasn't been easy.

I'm struggling to find some decent employment around here, I have some potential prospects but I'm sure that none of them will give me free pizza on Fridays. I'm living off of the money that I saved up over the last six months when I knew I would be moving. But, of course, I had to get two new tires, and oil change, and other petty things like eating.

I like the area we moved to, it's quiet and quaint. But I can't shake the feeling of being incredibly bored. It could be that there is nothing exciting going on in Woodstock, VT (except a farmer's market on Wednesdays from 3-5), or it could be the fact that I'm not spending forty hours a week busting my ass at a job, so that I can come home and complain that I don't have any free time. I could be a combination of the two.

To bid my time I've been working on an essay titled L.P.R., keeping up with my daily comic book diary, and laying out pages for a new comic book. But still, I find myself on the internet all too often. I think the only people on the internet as much as me are teenagers who don't have cars and just got out of school for summer vacation. Ah, too be young.

The Old Bitch

2008-06-27T12:23:00.001-07:00

I just recently landed a job at a video/copy center. It seemed like the perfect job for me. There is an elderly woman who manages the whole place, I'll call her Ruth.

Ruth is sixty-four, she has been running the video place for eighteen years and she leaves a pair of her flip-flops behind the counter (which is two feet wide by four feet long). She has short grey hair, glasses, her pointed nose and her chin stick out about an inch farther than her mouth. Her perfectly squared fingernails are painted an electric green to match the car of her favorite racer. She has blue eyes that sag at the bottom. Her body type: dumpy.

Ruth is my boss. She seemed as sweet as key lime pie when I first met her. She seemed to take a liking to me. A twenty-six-year-old working in a video store? Now that's somebody I can trust. It didn't take long for her to turn me against her. She would ramble on and on about small town gossip. She would tell me things about the customers that I didn't want to know. She would tell me personal details about the customers that I didn't think anyone should know. At first I would entertain her and ask questions, but after only a week I tired of her incessant negativity. I would nod, and then walk away and pretend I was straightening movies.

Things got worse the second week. She would come in on a rampage about one of my fellow employees who rented a movie to a "bad family". She would yell and scream about it. So much so that I got nervous that something bad was going to happen. I found out that week that she was as dry as a dead tree branch and could ignite just as easily. If she wasn't yelling at a customer, she was yelling at you. And if she wasn't yelling at you, she was writing it all down.

I'm not kidding. She has a three ring binder full, FULL, of things that employees have done wrong. She prints out the invoice where a common mistake might happen, circles your ID number, writes out your name in red or pink ink, followed by a vile paragraph. Her paragraph might read something like this:

You shouldn't have opened up an account for this woman. She already has an account and she is not supposed to rent here anymore! The whole family is a bad family! Didn't a message pop up telling you not to open this account?

My natural response would have been, sorry, Ruth, I just started working here and I didn't know that Connie was part of a "Bad Family", and by the way no such message popped up . PS how the hell do I open an account, you never trained me how to do that?

One time she wrote that a high school student, who shall remain nameless, had messed up so badly that he ought to be shot. This is just the kind of environment that I want to be working in.

Not only does she keep this nasty book, but she encourages every employee to read it. She told me, "I can't get all five of you together just to tell you 'don't do this', so I put it in the book." Wow. Nice management style, and a healthy way to communicate to boot. It might actually work if phrases like deserve to be shot or are you stupid? Weren't sifted throughout the pages.

I thought to myself, sure this old broad is crazy. And mean. Oh yes, she's mean. But I can work for her. I can stand it. I need a job, why not this one. She'll never treat me bad. She'll never yell at me like that. How wrong I was.

I was working tonight. Ruth was behind the counter chatting to some kooky old lady who had hired a pet psychic to find her lost dog, the second psychic because the first told the kooky lady it was dead. She was going on and on to Ruth about this. And Ruth kept feeding her questions so they talked for nearly twenty-minutes. In between Ruth would snap at me, "Clean those movies!" or "Put those away!" She didn't ask kindly. She snapped. So I was out on the floor putting away movies, as I was ordered drill-sargent style. There was a girl waiting to rent a movie. Ruth was behind the counter, but couldn't be bothered. She snapped at me again, "Matt, you have a customer!" Jesus, what was with this lady? I thought.

I handled the customer, who was pleasant and smiled at me. Then Ruth rounded on me, with a store full of customers no less. She yelled, two feet from my face, "You don't need to get all flustered when a customer is waiting!" She said this loud enough for everybody in the dumpy little store to hear. I was at a loss for words. Nobody had ever treated me like that before. If I was flustered before it was nothing compared to what I was right then. I hate conflict and confrontation, it's my least favorite thing to be a part of. But I knew if I backed down than this old bitch was going to walk all over me.

I said in a calm, but assertive voice, "Ruth, I really don't like the way you are speaking to me." I cold feel my face flush red with embarrassement. She looked away from be and said, "Well you were!" She stretched this last word out like a child would when they are trying to annoy their siblings. She then did an embarrassing, vaguly accurate impression of me being embarrassed. CUNT! I was out for blood, but still wanted to be professional.

"And now you're belittling me in front of the customers!" my voice was raised now too. She took a step back. "Well, I don't mean to. But we can't keep the customers waiting like that." Her voice had dropped considerably. She scurried off to shelf movies and left me behind the counter. Why was she screaming at me about a customer who had smiled at me and left the store completely satisfied?

After that outburst I longed to go outside and smoke a cigarette. I don't even smoke. I either wanted to do that or go punch Ruth's old, fat, bumpy, pink neck. I stayed and waited on customers, who heard my public humiliation, and tried to keep my fingers from shaking while I punched in their phone numbers. When they had all left Ruth came back behind the counter. I still hated the bitch, but I wanted to keep it professional. I said, "Look, Ruth, I'm sorry about what happened earlier." There, I apologized. Now it was her turn. Then I would tell her that if she wanted me to do something that yelling at me was a bad motivator. But she said nothing. She ignored me. She wanted to pretend that it never even happened. Fine!

She told me minutes later that she the kooky lady with the missing dog drove her crazy. Her mouth pursed up like a dog's puckered asshole and her eyebrows fused. So all this rage that she directed on me was because this kooky lady misses her dog so she hires a pet psychic to lie to her and Ruth has to listen to it only because she is inquiring about the dead dog? This bitch was volatile!

Bitch! She was about to leave when I noticed that she left me with a register that didn't contain any five dollar bills. I mentioned it, and she did her sweet as key lime pie voice, and went to go get some from the pizza place around the corner. Good!

She was gone for close to an hour. I couldn' help but picture her lying in the back of the parking lot, blood trickling from her mouth with a huge welt on her head. The twenties that she had taken to exchange for fives were all missing now. Some vagrant teenager, probably a previous employee, had clubbed her on the head on her way to the pizza place. I would probably be the one that found her, lying helpless on the asphault. "Matt," she'd croak, "call an ambulance. I can't move." I'd stare down at her and smile. I'd get into my car and burn rubber in her ugly face as I blared "Instant Karma" by John Lennon with my windows rolled down. She'd most likely die in the parking lot. Cold and alone. When asked if I saw her, I'd say "No, officer. She left to get fives and she never came back."

The door swung open at eight thirty and Ruth came back with a fistful of fives. So she was alive! I felt disappointment creep into every cell in my body. "Sorry it took me so long, I ran into my sister-in-law and we got to bull shittin'. I ate half of her pizza and my neice's salad." She let out a guffaw to let me know that we were on good terms again. Then she grabbed her things and went out the door. I wished her a good night.

There was still a chance that maybe she'd get coldcocked in the parking lot without the incentive of money. I kept my fingers crossed until closing.