Dead Man Holiday # -1 preview and pre-order!

The above is the first page of a five page preview of the new issue of Dead Man Holiday on the Indy Comic Book Week blog. Check it out!

You can also pre-order the new issue at the DeadManHoliday.com Store. Big discounts for ordering multiple issues!

Dead Man Holiday # -1 release info

Dead Man Holiday # -1, the third issue in the series, will be released on December 30th, 2009 in cooperation with Indy Comic Book Week. Basically, December 30th is the only Wednesday of the year that no new comics will be shipped to comic book stores, and the organizers behind ICBW would like to have a bunch of small press books in their stead.

A list of which specific stores will be carrying Dead Man Holiday will be made available before the event. Preview pages will be released soon. Click Here to read about Dead Man Holiday on the ICBW blog.

Thank you all for your support and I'm looking forward to showing you the new issue!

Scott Pilrgim!

This is a warm-up sketch I did of Scott Pilgrim! I think it looks like him!

I don't think the middle of the Scott Pilgrim/ Michael Cera Venn diagram is as big as everyone else does, but I've no doubt that it'll be a good movie.

Colin Panetta conquers Javiland! (And some reccomendations.)

With Dead Man Holiday # -1 just around the corner I decided to drop by Javiland this past Sunday for this roundtable discussion about self-publishing. Also, I promised the host, Javier Hernandez, I would do the next four shows to thank him for doing a pin-up for said issue of DMH. How about that for full circle?

I also wanted to point people in the direction of a couple of amazing webcomics I recently found that I can'tget over how much I like. I honestly didn't think there was much for me in webcomicland, but now I'm thinking differently. Don't know how much other stuff like this I'll find though. They may be old news to some, but I just found out about them.

Sin Titulo

Kind of like Blue Velvet, hold the sexy but with extra noir.

The Love Eaters

An eight page horror/fable, not unlike The Magician and The Snake or The Crooked Man both by Mike Mignola.

MixnMojo illustration #3: Grim Fandango

MixNMojo.com's retrospective of Grim Fandango is up, along with the illustration I did for it. This is the third and final of my illustrations for MixNMojo.com's LucasArts Secret History Retrospectives. Grim Fandango is the most beautiful, emotionally resonant video game I've ever played, so I wanted to try and come up with something special for it. Instead of something more straightforward, I decided to reinterpret it.
The world of Grim Fandango is rendered to look like the toys and statues traditionally made for the Mexican holiday Dios de la Muertos (known abroad as Day of the Dead). Here's a screenshot from the game:
I went in the opposite direction and drew the game's protagonist, Manny Calavera, as a real skeleton. When a character dies in Grim Fandango, flowers sprout from their body. So I put Manny in a bed of flowers (I really wish that I had thought to research Dia de los Muertos a little- there are certain flowers that are traditional to the holiday). Next to him is the gun from the game, redesigned a bit to fit this realistic setting. After I had drawn the picture, a story completely different from that of Grim Fandango presented itself to me. Here, it looks like a bed of flowers grew around the corpse of a long dead gangster, and the flower on his gun implies that he might have had some sort of flower based nickname in a morbid show of irony. Johnny the Tulip... why not?

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with the way this turned out, and wanted to share a couple of extra things with everyone.

Here are my pencils, scanned before I inked the piece:
I inked this entire picture with a 01 Sakura Pigma Micron, on a piece of normal copy paper. When I use pens I usually use a 03 and a 05 as well, but I thought that a consistent, thin line width would give this drawing a nice, delicate feel.

Here's the isolated "colors" layer from the Photoshop file:
I use BPelt's Multifill and Flatten filters to color stuff on computer, and they're AWESOME, but it's still pretty tedious work. I just got a tablet, and am looking forward to seeing how that changes my coloring.

After I drew, scanned and colored it I desaturated the colors and threw a texture on top (a photo of an old glass photography plate I found online) and that was it. Here are some preliminary sketches I did to get the character and composition down:

And to top it all off, here's some wallpapers of this image for your downloading pleasure:

480x320 (for iPhones)
(click to view full size, then right click to download)

800x600
(click to view full size, then right click to download)

1024x768
(click to view full size, then right click to download)

1440x900
(click to view full size, then right click to download)

1680x1050
(click to view full size, then right click to download)

Update: This illustration has been featured on Publisher Weekly's The Beat's 21 Days of Halloween!

Children of The Bridge

Fran Santoro over at Comics Comics wrote a great piece a little while ago called "The Bridge is Over". It was basically about how the culture of comics has shifted; in the 80s and 90s all types of comics were available in comic book stores and now, due to shifting methods of distribution (mostly the internet and comics showing up in book chains), comic book stores carry only "mainstream" (superhero) comics and people who want anything else have to go elsewhere. (The "bridge" that comic book stores formed between superhero comics and a wider market is over, get it?) The article really struck a chord with me. In the introductions to the first two issues of Dead Man Holiday I talk about how I don't feel like there are any "personal genre comics" around, like there were when I was a kid in the 90s. I'm talking about stuff like Madman or Hellboy and Nexus, which Santoro mentions in his article as, for him, marking the end of the bridge. These titles were the children of the two sides of comics that found themselves in a forced marriage during that time. They were the product of Eightball being packed into the same specialty store as X-Men. Now that people buy Eightball on Amazon or at Quimby's they're in a whole different world as the fantastic imaginations of genre comics. And you know, maybe this is the way it was always meant to be. It was, after all, a marriage only of necessity and not something either side would have chosen. But the split of audiences has led to a split in content as well. That marriage produced some work that was extremely enjoyable and completely unique to comics. That dichotomy, of big intentions and small resources, of sophisticated thoughts and juvenile presentation, to me, is comics. And I miss it.

It's a divide that I'm afraid I'm going to fall into. Dead Man Holiday is very much a product of the bridge. If my work was more directly inspired by Kirby or Ditko, or if it was more limited to straightforward "artistic" intentions (like, ack, auto-bio), I think I would have an easier time finding an audience. But I'm the product of Mike Allred and Sam Kieth, and the audience for that work just isn't around any more. There's a chance, of course, that I'm wrong about all of this. Maybe the audience for that work is gone because the audience for comics is smaller and so proportionally the audience for that type of marginal material is nil. But this is just what Santoro's article made me think about.

I Train Your Kids illustrated logo set

These are a set of illustrated logos that I recently created for ITrainYourKids.com, a Sarasota, FL based youth fitness organization. I was having a bit of trouble coming up with a solid concept for the logos, but after the client sent me some reference material that showed me exactly what they wanted things kind of exploded into what you see now. I penciled and inked them by hand, then scanned and vectorized them and colored them in Photoshop. Yes I do need a tablet, why do you ask? I think the trouble I had early on with this job stemmed from being worried about making my art commercially appealing, but I think I pulled it off.