Sep 11 2012

Alphabet Press – At SPX 2012!

As you may know if you follow me on Twitter, I’ll be attending SPX 2012 this year, as I have pretty much every other year since about 2000 or so.  What’s different this year, though, is that I won’t be attending as a solo cartoonist, but as part of the collective Alphabet Press table–a big six foot table selling minis, posters, and prints from lots of different folks (including me!) who’ve participated in the various alphabet-themed online projects like Animal Alphabet, AlphaBeasts, and Alphabooks.

Where? You can find the Alphabet Press at table G13, slightly to the left as you first walk onto the SPX floor:

Just look for the Alphabet Press poster (shown above) and our alphabet-themed tablecloth:

What are we selling? Well, it wouldn’t be SPX if people weren’t up late in the wee hours before the show, frantically stapling books together, but… here’s a quick run-down of some of the great stuff that I know will be at our table as of today (9/11). I’ll update as I get more information.

Andrew Neal

Journal of Jerks
Black & White int./wrap-around color cover
24 pages
$6.00

An Alphabeasts collection from Andrew Neal.

Joey Weiser

Kaijuphabet
Black & White
28 pages
$2.00

Kaijuphabet is a collection of alphabetical illustrations of Japanese movie monsters originally created for the online drawing project, AlphaBeasts. This mini will help you learn your ABC’s while preparing you to identify the next rubbery behemoth to rise from the ocean and destroy your city!

Christian Sager

AlphaBeasts Prints:
8.5″ x 11″ prints in clear plastic sleeves. $5.00
Including: Adventure Time themed Gelatinous Cube, Vashta Nerada from Doctor Who, Zazu from James Stokoe’s ORC STAIN, a black metal homage to Norman Rockwell with the anti-Santa Krampus and a PROMETHEUS themed Quintesson from Transformers.
Alphabooks Original Portraits:
Mostly 5″ x 5″ original watercolors and ink. $10.00
Including characters like: Avril Incandenza from Infinite Jest, Charlie McGee from Firestarter, Don Gately from Infinite Jest, Francis Wayland Thurston from “The Call of Cthulhu,” Sir Guy Grand from The Magic Christian, Ig Parrish from Horns, Judas Coyne from Heart-Shaped Box, Lyra Belacqua from The Golden Compass, Mario Incandenza from Infinite Jest, Captain Nemo from  20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and more!

Ben Towle

AlphaBeasts: An A-Z Dungeons & Dragons Bestiary
28 pages
Black and White int./color cover
$3.00
Containing all 26 original illustrations from the online AlphaBeasts project. 28 pages of old school Dungeons & Dragons monsters–one for every letter of the alphabet.


Animal Alphabet
28 pages
Full color int./color cover
$5.00
26 India Ink and watercolor animal illustrations of animals A-Z, from Alpaca to Zebu. This 28pg minicomic collects all 26 contributions to the online Animal Alphabet project.

Originals
$10.00/ea.

Casey Girard

Animal Alphabet prints
Full color
$10.00

Casey has a full alphabet’s-worth of animal letters available as prints. They’re full-color and you can see the whole range of them in the poster listed next…

Animal Alphabet posters
Full color
18″x24″
$16.00

These are beautiful. Click through for a bigger image.

Skyward Sword Creatures: A-Z Zelda fan art minis
Black & white int./black & white covers
$2.00

Henry Eudy

Various Alpha-project prints
6″x6″/6″x9″
$3.00

Henry will have 6×6 prints of his Oroboros, Scrooge McDuck and Xenomorph Alphabeasts illustrations as well as a 6×9 print of his Gonzo Weirdo Alphabeast entry.

Originals
$5.00-$50.00

Henry will have various originals from the alpha-projects. I own one of his originals and can attest that they look great hanging on a wall. Here’s mine:

Isaac Cates

An Alphabet That’s Fun to Draw w/ Abecedary poem by Michael Wenthe (bundle)
$2.00

Animal Alphabet postcard sets
$9.00/set… BUT: $1 off for every Alphabet Press author you buy from at the same time!

To make these amazing Animal Alphabet postcard sets, Issac selected some of the best artwork from many different contributors to the original Animal Alphabet project and put the whole project on Kickstarter. The original project goal was a modest $750.00, but it completed successfully with many times that: $3384.00. Isaac’s using all that extra cash to make these really top-notch production-wise: high quality glossy stock, beautifully-designed belly bands, etc.

The printing on everything won’t be done until right before the show, but here you can see some bonus stickers, the belly band designs, and the uncut proofs for the cards:

Rich Barrett

AlphaBeasts postcards
26 Full color cards
$9.00

Animal Alphabet flashcards
Black w/graytones
$8.00

All 26 of Rich Barrett’s Animal Alphabet illustrations–one to a page and bound together with a metal clip ring.

Sam Wolk

Animal Alphabet
Full color int.
4.25″ x 3.667″
$5.00

Alpha Beasts
Black & white int.
4.25″ x 5.5″
$3.00

See you at SPX this weekend!

Sep 10 2012

Q is for Quasimodo

“Q” is already a pretty challenging letter, but if I was going to stick with my self-imposed AlphaBooks parameters of using only characters from books I’ve read, using the first letter of the character’s full name (rather than the last name as with “Don Quixote”), and using only one character from any given book, I didn’t really have a whole lot of options this week. It boiled down to either The Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland or this guy:

Q is for Quasimodo — From The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

I’ve picked and chosen a bit among the various details in Hugo’s description of the character in the novel:

We shall not try to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedral nose, that horseshoe mouth; that little left eye obstructed with a red, bushy, bristling eyebrow, while the right eye disappeared entirely beneath an enormous wart; of those teeth in disarray, broken here and there, like the embattled parapet of a fortress; of that callous lip, upon which one of these teeth encroached, like the tusk of an elephant; of that forked chin; and above all, of the expression spread over the whole; of that mixture of malice, amazement, and sadness.

And a paragraph or two later:

A huge head, bristling with red hair; between his shoulders an enormous hump, a counterpart perceptible in front; a system of thighs and legs so strangely astray that they could touch each other only at the knees, and, viewed from the front, resembled the crescents of two scythes joined by the handles; large feet, monstrous hands; and, with all this deformity, an indescribable and redoubtable air of vigor, agility, and courage,–strange exception to the eternal rule which wills that force as well as beauty shall be the result of harmony.

It’s easy to criticize the Disney Hunchback character design for so drastically toning down the character’s deformities, but one thing they really nail that many versions of the character–including my own–don’t really capture is that last line about “vigor, agility, and courage.”

If you follow me on Twitter and are online in the evenings (EST), you’ve probably seen sketchbook pictures I’ve posted from my recent experimenting with big areas of spot black. I decided to carry a little of that over into this drawing–although, I kind of chickened out with the left side of the face. Overall, though, I’m starting to get a little less hesitant with spotting blacks. I don’t see myself really going this direction with my “real” comics work, but one of the main reasons I participate in projects like AlphaBooks is to have an opportunity to experiment a bit with this kind of stuff outside of my regular comics work.

Drawn in colored pencil and graphite, inked in Digital Manga Studio, colored in Photoshop.

Next week: “R”…

You can find all the AlphaBooks entries to-date at the AlphaBooks tumblr: http://alphabooks.tumblr.com. You can also follow many of the entries as they’re posted in real-time by following the #AlphaBooks hashtag on Twitter on Mondays.

Sep 07 2012

Animated GIF: And Oyster War Panel Start-to-Finish

I just thought this would be a fun thing to do:

Sep 06 2012

&@$#! An Exhibition of Comic Artists

If you’re in/near Richmond, VA in September, be sure to check out this great exhibit of original comics art. I’ve got pieces up from Oyster War, Midnight Sun, Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, etc. There’s a pretty stunning array of cartoonists who will also have pieces up. Just to name a few: Farel Dalrymple, Fred Chao, Dustin Harbin, and Rob Ullman.

The exhibit opens this Friday in conjunction with 24 Hour Comics Day and will remain up through the 29th.

Here’s the official website for the exhibit, and here’s some recent press from RVANews.

Sep 03 2012

PR Round-up!

I haven’t done a PR round-up in a while because… well, because I haven’t had a book out for anyone to write about in forever. But there’ve been a few recent write-ups about my work in the last week or so. Here they are:

First, blogger/comics-er/all around nice guy Shannon Smith is counting down some of his favorite comics from 2011 and Oyster War is among them. Read the whole article at his blog, File Under Other.

Second: Panel Patter. While Rob McMonigal doesn’t make comics, he’s also a blogger and all around nice guy. He’s been doing a really great, extensive pre-SPX series over at his blog Panel Patter. You can find all the features under the “spx spotlight” tag, and the article on me here.

Third, speaking of SPX…. Over on the official SPX website, you can find a list of all of the books debuting at the show this year–including write-ups on my Animal Alphabet and AlphaBeasts minis that I’ll have at the show.

I’ll do a full blog post about SPX and the Alphabet Press table (which I’ll be manning, along with some other Alphabet project folks) soon…