Thanks to Mike over at the Satisfactory Comics blog, who’s posted a nice review of Midnight Sun, along with some scans of artwork therein. As Mike notes, I’ve been involved in a few random projects over the years with him and his frequent comics collaborator Isaac Cates and he’s linked to a few of those in the post itself.

Among the many kind words about the book, Mike gives a shout-out to my supposed boot-drawing skills… and while I’d love to be able to claim this rightful honor, I’ve got to come clean and confess to the use of actual boots as reference for a lot of the drawings in Midnight Sun, and certainly in the panel he’s highlighted:

Thankfully, the design of basic leather lace-up boots hasn’t really changed that much over the years, so I was conveniently able to use these beat-up army surplus books from my rock and roll past as reference throughout. No boot-drawing prodigy be I, I’m afraid… but there’ s no shame in using reference, folks. I’ve seen many a student sit at a desk for hours, struggling to draw, for example, a decent-looking car, while an entire street-full of cars sits just a few feet outside the building. Foolishness, I say!

Now, if only I’d had an army surplus airship handy… For a very, very early draft of the book that involved a whole lot more drawings of the Italia itself, I got so frustrated by my inability to get decent drawings of the oddly-shaped craft that I built a little model of the thing by doctoring up a model of the Hindenburg with a hacksaw, Dremel tool and a bit of Bondo:

While you’re over at the Satisfactory Comics blog, you should really check out Mike and Issac’s collaborative story they’ve just wrapped up for the upcoming volume two of Elfworld.  If there’s ever been a more challenging collaborative story done in comics, I sure as heck don’t know what it is.  I’ve been intending to do a full post on the completed project, but for the time being, just go have a look.  I think the best way to view it from the beginning is to start here, reading bottom-most post to top-most, then moving forward in time by clicking “Newer Posts” on the bottom left of each page.

Props to the folks at the Newsarama.com blog (blog@newsarama) not just for picking up my post yesterday where I briefly discussed the odd squarish format of the Midnight Sun GN, but also for coming up with the title I should have come up with for that post: “Hip to be Square.”