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.

Hanging out backstage with Dead Man Holiday #-2

Okay, just like I did with the last issue, I thought I'd write a post dealing with my experiences producing and self-publishing Dead Man Holiday # -2. Accompanying this article are the drawings I did for people who ordered a signed copy of Dead Man Holiday # -2. (Here are the drawing I did for # -3.) The drawings are in exercise in speed in design and production. There are some I think are really cool. There is one of a skeleton moth playing minigolf.

Production wise, Dead Man Holiday #-2 was much the same as the issue before it. I designed the look of the comic before I knew much about process, and did made some choices that are really time consuming that I am now stuck with. One change I did make this time around was to do some of the inking with brush. I think this sped the inking up a bit, and made the book a little more rustic looking. But what I'm still shloshing through are the grey tones. I really hate doing them, I'm not that great at them, and they're something I did to fill up space. When I first started Dead Man holiday I was insecure about my compositions (and rightfully so) and decided to cover the whole thing in grey to compensate. I do think it's adds a gritty heaviness that serves this particular story, but this method will not be following Dead Man Holiday into positive issues where it will no longer fit my process or the story.

One weird thing that happened while drawing this issue was that things all of a sudden got easier. No reason for it, I didn't change my methods or realize anything new. In the middle of drawing the Koreatown scene everything just became a whole lot easier, like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I think all of the pages after that are better than the ones before, too. Still now sure what happened there.













Publishing wise, everything went fine. I found out about using the "Unsharp Mask" filter on my pages right before exporting the final version, which makes your art look a LOT sharper if you're dealing with stuff you have to photograph/scan (non-line art). I tried to be a cowboy and not get a proof from Ka-Blam before I printed, and they came back looking a little dark and muddy. Totally my fault, lesson learned. I was pretty worried about it, but no one seemed to mind. This will be corrected for the collection.













A lot of the reviews I got praised the artwork really highly, which really meant a lot to me, but expressed concern about the lack of story. As I've said, I think this will iron itself out as people get the rhythm of the series down after a few issues. I had good luck personally reaching out to a lot of sites for interviews, and found that it's really the only way to get them. I only did a couple of interviews, but I think they were really substantial and will really help people understand what I'm trying to do with Dead Man Holiday. I used to be of the mind that I didn't really want to influence people's interpretation of the book, but people seem really responsive when Income out and tell them about it, so maybe that's the way to go. I was really honored to be interviewed by The Pulse, which I didn't even reach out for.

I had another contest over at the Indie Spinner Rack boards, and it went slow but ended up going really well. Thanks neil-brideau, Zach Taylor, DBM, Chris Ruggia and Charlito for participating and saving me from looking like a total chump! It's always nerve wracking starting one of those up because I don't know if anyone's even going to participate. This post from Neil was especially nice.

And I think that's about it. This isn't as long as the one for last issue, because I didn't ha veto climb as big a mountain to get the damn thing done. Like I said, the first one took me a couple of years. This one took me eight months, and the next will be even shorter. I'm right now in the middle of drawing a nine page, diologueless zoom in sequence that make up pages five through fourteen, so look forward to that!