Save The Date, Now Playing Somewhere Near You*

After debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Save The Date - the movie I co-wrote and created artwork for - has started playing at various film festivals, including tomorrow in Kansas City. Here's some of the first sketches I made for the film.

*Relatively speaking - on the grand scale of the entire universe, the movie will essentially be playing inside of your head tomorrow

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.

Steven The Extraordinary Dinosaur

I'm getting more and more used to teaching college students at The School of the Art Institute, but last Friday I got to try something new for me - working with second graders. 826CHI is the local chapter of 826 National, an organization that works with students age 6 to 18 to improve and inspire their writing. One activity is the Field Trip, where a class comes to 826CHI and writes a story together, guided by volunteers. While one volunteer leads as the storyteller, another acts as the illustrator, creating two drawings the students can see on an overhead projector. After writing a few pages together, students each write the next page of the story, which is then bound in a little book along with a blank page to add their own drawing. This is one of the drawings I made of Steven the Extraordinary Dinosaur, who likes to wear underwear on his head and sells chocolate and underwear door to door with his talking rocket Rocky.

Darth Vader and son in Diamond now

I'm home from the Sundance FIlm Festival, where Save The Date premiered to a largely positive response. Hopefully everyone else will be able to see the movie soon, but until then you can get ready for Darth Vader and son, which will be out in May and is currently available to pre-order in the Diamond Comics Catalogue (you can also ask your local comic shop to make sure and order you a copy). Here's some pencil sketches from the process of designing the book's cover - trying out slight variations of where Luke and Vader are looking, as well as their positioning. I think I drew about eight pencil versions in all, and fully inked and colored three or four of those. In the end, of course, we ended up using the first drawing I did. Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Star Wars are all TM/R/C/etc. Lucasfilm 2012.

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.

Sundance 2012!

About five and a half years ago I got an email asking if I'd ever thought about writing screenplays, and so I started working on a story. The final idea turned into a screenplay that I co-wrote with Egan Reich and Michael Mohan. The movie, Save The Date, ended up being filmed this summer, and now they've scheduled the premiere. It all feels fairly strange, but exciting.