More Sasquatch pages

Here's pages 5-9.

My new 24 hour comic this weekend

I'm posting the first 4 pages to my story "Sasquatch", my contribution to 24 Hour comics day for 2006. I actually went over my time limit by 3 hours this year. I suppose it makes up for finishing an hour early in the previous 2 years. This year I did the entire piece in photoshop and added tone to the whole thing. I'm very pleased with my piece this year. I feel like I made some kind of breakthrough. I recommend the 24 hour comics challenge to any cartoonist, but especially to those of us who can never seem to get their books finished on time. It's an incredible learning exercise that forces you to face your bad habits and overcome them. I've found that if I pace myself with the goal of completing 1 page every 45 minutes, I can usually finish the book on time. I found that if I allow myself an hour per page I will fall behind ( as I did this year). I usually become a bit discombobulated by around the 19th or 20th hour. The pages that you build up in the beginning when you are fresh will make up for that. I've also learned this year how to better compose with simple shapes. It made the panels look better AND go faster. Anyone else out there done a 24 hour comic? Had any similar/different experiences or suggestions?

24 Hour Comics Day Is This Saturday

Tomorrow is 24 Hour Comics Day. The challenge is to do 24 comics pages in 24 straight hours. For info got to www.24hourcomics.com/. I've done one every year since the first one in 2004. Today I've posted a couple of pages from my first one from 2004 called "Yeti Hunter" and a couple from my 2005 entry "The Last Shot". I'm planning to collect them all together and self publish them at some point. This year, I'll probably do it on the computer and post some pages here on my blog ( that is, if anyone cares to see them ).

The Forgotten and the Foreign #1: Alberto Breccia

The first installment of The Forgotten and the Foreign is Alberto Breccia. You can read a bio of him here: http://lambiek.net/artists/b/breccia.htm.I'm particularly a big fan of his earlier, more traditional work. I've posted up a few examples. I've posted up a panel for his most famous work--Mort Cinder ( 1962 ). I 've also posted 2 pages of the sci-fi themed SHERLOCK TIME. Can you believe he did this in 1959? The man was way ahead of his time! I've also posted 4 pages of a British digest-sized western called DANGER MONEY.

Some Marvel Love For Ya....

Here's a couple of Marvel Comics related pieces--by request! One is actually a piece I did when ILM was bidding on Ang Lee's Hulk movie a few years ago. FX houses often put together "bids" to get a production interested in using their services. This often involves lots of exploratory artwork and this was one of the pieces we used to entice the Hulk production team to use ILM. This was actually the second time I did bid artwork for a Hulk movie for ILM. Years earlier I worked on a completely different version in which Jonathan ( The Punisher ) Hensleigh was attached to direct.

The Silver Surfer piece is another I did straight to computer with my Wacom tablet. I'm begining to enjoy drawing this way more and I'm happy to not have to deal with ink or scan stuff in anymore. The brush strokes are less spontaneous, but it's fun to go back and forth with the black and white and work both subtractively and additively.

This will be my last bit of superhero stuff on this blog, at least for a while. I don't want to look like a big advertisement for the mainstream comics industry! I'm mainly going to post my own creations for now. It's fun to get nostalgic and all, but anyone that knows me knows that my taste drifted away from mainstream comics decades ago. Even when I was heavily into mainstream comics, I generally bought them based on who drew them. I'm mainly a lover of the medium of comics in all it's forms. I'm also interested in the many different creators who've influenced me over the years. Sooo...in addition to my own art, I'm planning an ongoing series of posts about comic artists and illustrators who have been an inspiration to me. Not just the usual suspects, but talent that is either not seen very much in this country, or was forgotten through time, or for some reason was not fashionable. I'm going to call the series "The Forgotten and The Foreign" , and will start with the next posting.