s'up doc

Web prescence?

When Chris and I first met, it was through mutual friend Joe Tem Seung. As I recall, Chris was looking to have a website put together to sell his published art and maybe take on some commissions. Joe sent him my way, we got on instant messenger, and got to work. We got to know each other pretty well over the next few months and have been pals ever since.

If you'd like to check out that first website, thanks to the magic of web archive, a good bit of it can be seen here . It's amazing how much of this stuff still works on webarchive.org, if there's an old website that you liked that is gone, check it out if you can remember the url! Chris will probably cringe to see a lot of this stuff again, I know I do when I see the design (why does it have Chris' name up there twice like that?!)

Anyway, I had done a couple of other websites at the time. Batgirl Online was a site I used to display my ridiculously huge Batgirl commission collection. I also designed Dave Johnson's first website and I had my Mr T. sketchbook online too. All 4 of these sites were hosted by our buddy Mike Freiheit. Mike had a nice little comic art website empire. I'm babbling, I could talk about these good old days all night. I'll stop now though and share some old images...

language barrier

a mile in whose shoes?

Shawn Crystal's ? Rico Renzi's ? anytime. from a bangin short Shawn did with B Clay Moore for the upcoming Hawaiian Dick series, originally printed black and white in Negative Burn. they let me take a crack at the coloring, despite having no experience with other peoples work. psssssh. Shawns one of my favorite cartoonists, even more so than before. it was stunning to discover how well he'd set these up for color, given they look finished without. that bar shot on page 2 took on an incredible amount of depth and dimension as soon as dark blue was thrown in. messing around with that blue's value looked like objects were moving foward and backward in space. heh, maybe thats kind of "dur", but it was trippy. going for that same effect id have drawn out everything, put gobs of shadow everywhere, and asked Rico for all kinds of fades (when he knows better). Shawns work is smart, simple, and effective. POW!
hope everyone had a top turkey day, the kids are thankful that you're here!

from out the primordial soup

so. in a previous post, arnie commented on how faithful the kids pages are to thumbnails. right on, yes, they are. to Rico's eternal torment. nearly every drawing starts off like this madness up top, every step after is an attempt to clean up without f*ckin up. its pretty strange. you see anything up there in that image? i dunno, not only am i seeing finished pages that dont exist yet, but multiple versions (that will end up trashed). in in this stage, im staring at what must look like gibberish, but bouncing eyeballs like pinballs, looking at doodles in different orders, trying to see what ones pop-off the best chemical reaction. comics are so awesome.
Rico does great things with mood and the dot patterns- somethin you cant doodle. the work is so much better when he colors up the rough before it gets to pencils. steering a drawing towards the best color scheme, thats the glue.
hey, lets meet up here in a bit an see what gets cut and what makes the team.

the super cooper

it turns out there's gonna be a new star trek movie, like a re-casting of kirk and the rest. keeps making me think of this though, favorite trek-cast. oh god, im going to die of nerdiness.
so......where are the new jams? Rico and i have 2 projects on the plate: "loose ends" ready and rarin to go (early out the gate so far), and a second super short one with ink-slinger Mark Irwin. this second one is piping hot with a script due any day now. yep. aaaannnny day now ;p its not present day, and may or may not include some form of martial arts. yeah, its just comics, not national security, but i gotta be somewhat mum. if youre looking for a new art fix, check out some Shawn Crystal (link to the right), his stuff is like Pixar cut with EC Comics. Lush brush-work, 3D in 2D, and the darkness!

ganja babe

youd think a beautiful nekkid lady wrapped in green plants with red hair would be a gimme. sometimes i just dont want to give up the goods like that...........tried to do somethin different, mebbe was a lil too different. for Gotham Central (#32) anyways. really fell in love with the angles and curves, dunno if i lost the plot but i like it. Mark Irwin inked and improved, prolly the only inker who couldve done so; Rico colored and made things sing. as always. dig the fade an hated to lose so much purple.
tonight i went to see my pop referee an ABA game along with my baby brother Alex. the kids a damn prodigy on the court, its sick. besides that though, he did a whole great play-by-play thing, including comments like "thats the worst call dads made all year". turns mean into funny! ah, what can you do, who else has a job so unforgiving with mistakes?
as an aside, pop is a self-described "professional a$$hole": referee, landlord, welfare-case worker. its lucky to be able to draw for loot, he puts in a long day. you know a lot of 50 year-olds who sprint with college kids? thanks pop.

this aint a game

hey all, hope youre havin an allright saturday night..........turns out im cooped up drawing. this is a most honorable jam, kicked off by Mike Wieringo, and wrapped up by Rico an myself. dont know where to start with Mike, one of the all-time greats ( and this a belated thanks), i assume no stranger to saturday night sessions. his work was the straight essence of american comics though, all the good stuff distilled. R.I.P.
this past weekend i was lucky enough to be invited to the Savannah College of Art and Designs' Comics Art Forum. Mark Shultz, Jill Thompson, Clement Sauve, Bernard Chang, Kaz Strzepek, Heidi Arnhold, Sanford Greene and Jeff Parker were all guests, i got to tag along. each and every one of these folks' impressed and inspired, not nearly as much as the students- yow, they are beasts! Schweizer, Hunter, Justin, Cara, Doug, Dominic, Olu, and, damn, Cale. you all do some amazing, amazing work, can't wait to put down dollars for your books! (full names and links on the way). thanks for reminding me the best is around the corner.
thanks as well to Shawn Crystal, Pat Quinn, Nolan Woodard, Bob Pendarvis, and John Lowe.

also- the manga girls are coming!

new stuff tomorrow, depending on what kinda party my kid brothers throwing tonight.

p.s. for those who attended the panel discussion......Jaime Hernandez and Andrian Tomine did start off self-publishing, aye, they have "real" publishers now...........well...yeah.

back to the future II

ok, so i was trying to find a lead-in to new work, in all it's rough-ness. the first set of thumbnails are from the space kids story in the last few posts, to wrap that stuff up, and also hint at whats around the corner with the other set. theyre from a story jason latour, rico and i are working on called "loose ends". yeah, i went a lil overboard with sherri, the young lady.... please remember i spent the last 2 years drawing basketball players!

back to the future

ps i added the rest of the finished pages to the previous post after these turned up. thumbnails to this and a new story later on tonight.

the kids get around

No comics yet? Here's some pages i was just revisiting this weekend at the Comics Art Forum at the Savannah College of Art and Design, the black and white versions are in the book "Working Methods" by John Lowe. Just got back from attending SCAD's Comics Art Forum and am all jazzed about comics as a whole- will post more about this soon enough. Comics. Yes.
A big thanks to Rico for keeping the momentum going while i was away, some of the older work is embarassing, but the halloween costume is top. The Renzi's are away on a family trip, so it'll be just me for now.

Killing Girl

I thought I would take this last day as the solo poster on this site to plug another project I work on without Chris Be. It's called Killing Girl , it's written by Glen Brunswick and drawn by Toby Cypress. The 1st two issues of the book were illustrated by the amazing Frank Espinosa. Toby and I were asked not to make the switch too jarring, so take that as you will. Impersonation is not my thing, I'm not good at it. The project was a lot of fun though and I think I added a few new tricks to my bag. Working with Glen and Toby was a blast too!

I'm a failure

OK, the streak has ended. It's not my fault though! I blame Comcast! I got home last night and my cable was out. So here's a picture of my daughter and I from this Halloween, it's cute, you should forgive us!

Batman: LOTDK 175 cover

I really loved the original version of this cover! Editorial decided it wasn't right for this issue for some reason though.

Bruce vs. the Bride

Here's an old commission Chris did for Kwan Chang.

rightstarter

The description Chris was given for this card was a bit different than what you see depicted here. I'll let him tell you about that if he wants.

Molly and the 'Haps

When Chris is too busy doing fancypants projects for superstar athletes to jam with me, I try to find stuff to keep up my chops. I've done a good bit of work with Todd Dezago and Craig Rousseau on their creation the Perhapanauts. It's a fun book, check out the trade paperbacks!

This pin-up appeared in the back of the 1st trade, Perhapanauts: First Blood TPB .

Kids with Guns

Chris did some Star Wars stuff back in the day. His inking sure was different back then! I was working overnight at Kinko's (teaching myself Photoshop after the work was all done) and Chris would send me the stuff he was working on. For fun I took a stab at coloring this page, I didn't get far and the bit I did was junk. So go ahead and laugh, I can take it.

Chris is out of town for a few days enriching young minds. I will try to keep up with the posts, hopefully I can dig up some more old and embarassing stuff. Eventually we'll use this blog for the reason we intended, to keep you guys up to date with what we are working on.