Lately: March 2012

In my comics class a few weeks ago I gave an assignment where each student had to draw a comic with a few restrictions I gave specifically to each. At the end of the class I let them assign me restrictions to work under, and they gave me a few: no panels, aerial viewpoint, non-autobio, a sidekick/more than one character and the characters should have tiny heads and large hands. I started out not knowing what to do, but after French cartoonist Moebius passed away I decided I'd make my comic a tribute to him. Moebius was and is a big inspiration for me, and I came up with a short story of two explorers encountering a strange lifeform that transforms them. Here's sketches and abandoned inks for the first page. The whole comic is four pages long so I could print it up on a single 8.5"x11" sheet of paper. I eventually re-penciled it and drew the final comic in full color.


Also lately, although the book is basically finished, I've been working on the covers for A Matter Of Life. Here's the pencils to the front cover. You can see a little sneak peek to a couple of the pages in the online, PDF downloadable Rooms Magazine.

A Matter Of Life

Last night (or, technically, really early this morning) I finished the last interior page of my next autobiographical book. There will still be corrections and technical work to be done before printing, and I also need to draw the covers. This chart (written inside the front cover of the sketchbook I drew this book in) displays the dates I finished each part of each page over the past year - pencils, line inks, colors. The chart also displays my OCD.

Lately: December 2011

In addition to doing some last minute artwork for Save The Date and teaching at SAIC, I've mostly been working on A Matter Of Life, the next autobiographical book which has stories mostly about fatherhood and religion. Here's part of a cover design sketch on the top left. On the top right is part of my drawing for the retailer incentive cover for the first issue of Adventure Time comic book (in this month's Diamond catalogue, so order at your comic shop now). The bottom left is a drawing of Racky, based on one of John Porcellino's King Cat covers, drawn as a thanks to John for speaking to my class at SAIC. The bottom right is part of the cover to a minicomic I created in conjunction with the New Trier Literary Festival. I gave a talk to students, then had them write a comic with me - I sat and drew thumbnail pencils while they gave suggestions for what the comic should be about and what should happen next. I inked the comic at home later on and failing to think of a good title, settled on naming it after an Anders Nilsen book.