Jul 17 2010

Inked Ukulele One-pager

I hesitate to call this a “comic strip” since it’s about 70% words (maybe “illustrated essay” would be more accurate) but whatever it is, it’s inked.  This strip will appear in the Fall issue of Signal to Noise magazine, which is where my previous very wordy one-page music strip about Winston-Salem’s “5” Royales also appeared.  Like the Royales strip, this one will be in full color, but I’m not going to post that until the magazine’s been out on the stands for a while so folks can have a chance to pick up the real live issue.   This strip is also notable in that it  includes the single worst caricature of William H. Macy ever committed to paper.  What can I say–I’m up against a deadline here.  (And since it says “William H. Macy” right  above the panel, I guess I can get by with it…)

Jul 10 2010

Ssalefish Illustration – Finished (Pretty Much)

Here’s a completed illustration I did for my local comics shop, Ssalefish Comics & Toys.  I did a rough version of this image on the endpapers of a copy of Amelia Earhart – This Broad Ocean that I gave the owner, Bret, a while back.  He liked the illustration and wanted a more polished version–and with the final volume of Scott Pilgrim set to drop here shortly, I was more than happy to drum up an illustration for a wee bit o’ store credit.

Jul 09 2010

Oyster War Chapter 2 Penciled Page

Despite the fact that spending most of the summer doing odd freelance work and being “Mr. Mom” while my daughter is out of school, I have managed to wedge in a few hours a week to keep cranking on Oyster War.  I’m currently penciling the second chapter and I’m going to give it my all to have that chapter finished and colored by the end of the summer.  It’s a relatively short chapter at only seven pages–albeit giant, 13 x 18 four-tier TinTin-style pages–so I think that’s something I can accomplish even with a pretty crunched schedule.

For no particular reason, I’m picking this particular page to be the one I post progress on here.  Chapter two is the second half of act one and this particular page is the obligatory “gathering of allies” sequence.  The character Tevia is obviously a pretty ham-handed homage to Queequeg; Ju-Long was borne from some of my research reading about the (often overlooked) role that Chinese immigrants played in the 19th century America.  The ship in the first panel is The Layla (although I intermittently consider and then abandon the idea of renaming it The Fusty Puffin) and it wound up being pretty close design-wise to my initial ruminations on it a while back.

It’ll likely be a while, but I’ll repost this page once I’ve got it inked.

Jul 06 2010

Sketchbook 7/6

Dave Petraeus, Dave Petraeus, rock me, Dave Petraeus.

Jul 04 2010

Happy Independence Day!

I’ve been sticking pretty tightly to all comics-related posts of late, but given that it’s the 4th of July, I’ll let that slide:  Happy Independence Day, all!

We spent the morning of this fourth of July at our neighborhood “parade,” which might be more accurately described as, “flag- and crepe paper-encrusted kids, dogs and bikes travelling around the block several times while someone plays Sousa marches on a boombox.”  It’s great fun.  We get the streets blocked off, do a pot luck/grill-out for the whole neighborhood, and arrange for the local firehouse to send an engine over (in exchange for a go at the potluck table, of course).  Here’s my daughter in her patriotic regalia:

In the evening we finished off the day in typical American fashion for the fourth: grilling.  Here’s an obscenely loaded dinner plate featuring lots o’ grilled stuff: grilled tuna steaks and sea scallops topped with salsa made from a friend’s garden tomatoes, grilled vegetables and corn, and a ripe avocado.

Livin’ large in the USA!