Busy

It's been a busy two months, most of which I've spent finishing up the artwork for my next book with Chronicle, which should be out next year for Father's Day. It's been a lot of fun to draw, but I'm glad to have most of the pressure off for it. Meanwhile, I've been teaching a comics class at The School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago again. This past week's exercise was for the students to try and duplicate a panel from a comic, and then re-draw it again in their own styles or without trying to copy directly. I did a quick example of this panel from Uncanny X-Men #192.

Drawing On Comics Week Eight

Week Eight's exercise came after watching the Lars Von Trier film The Five Obstructions. I gave the students each two "obstructions" which they had to follow while re-drawing their midterm comic stories. To let them have their revenge on me, I let them give me obstructions. They chose to have me re-draw Be A Man with no text, no characters and no panels. I picked seven pages and the cover to re-draw, making a little minicomic I handed back to them the following week. Here's one of the obstructed pages.
In other news, the new issue of Filter magazine features a full spread and spot illustrations by myself for an article titled "Televisionaries," about kid's TV shows like Yo Gabba Gabba, Pee Wee's Playhouse and Fraggle Rock. And if you missed it coming out at your local comics shop a couple weeks ago, Marvel's Strange Tales Vol. 2 #2 included a four page X-Men story I wrote and drew. I'm taking baby steps toward fulfilling my childhood dream of being the regular penciller on Uncanny X-Men.

Happy Thaksgiving

I'm thankful for the X-Men, which I used to collect and for Secret Wars II, which I still have fond memories of. In fact, I think there's an Omnibus edition for that series coming out soon...

More Merry Marvel Madness

The first comic book I bought was issue 192 of The Uncanny X-Men. Here's a scan of a drawing I'm working on based on the cover. I also wrote a short piece about the impact this comic had on me, over at Fanboy Fables.

And if you're in Chicago, you can bring your copy of Strange Tales #3 to Third Coast Comics where I'll be signing this Saturday, from noon to 5PM.