Play the cards you're dealt

Storytime!

The first time I heard the name Nathan Fox was at the Heroes Convention maybe 5 years ago. I guess Chris and I had just started really showing our work together or maybe it was as Chris' Batman LOTDK run started coming out, I can't remember for sure. Either way, our mutual friend Jim Royal told us that our stuff was kind of reminding him of Nathan Fox's stuff. When I got home from that weekend I got online and checked around and found Nathan's work. I was pretty blown away by what I saw. This crash one is the one that really burned itself in my mind, I'm not even sure if it was one of the first things I saw or if it came later but it really stuck with me. Needless to say I was an instant admirer of his work.



Fast forward to a few months ago, I'm getting files on press for printing at my day job. I see all these files labeled "nfox" and think..."naaaaah". I opened them up and it was unmistakably Nathan's work. I was crazy excited to be printing this stuff! I checked the order form and saw that the order was placed by Paolo from Cadence Comic Art. I'm pretty friendly with Paolo so I sent him an email to ask him what the deal was. He said Nathan would be sitting with him and his gang at the upcoming Baltimore Comicon and I should come by their table and he'd make with the introductions. Then, a day (or a few hours) later Paolo emails and says he has a couple pin-ups by Nathan that he'd like to get colored...for free. Now, my friends and family all know better than to ask me for free stuff, I guess Paolo didn't know my rules yet. I'm kinda glad he didn't because I said sure I'd take a crack at the art but asked if I could just do one of them. Turns out they only needed one colored (that was the Kade thing I posted a while back). So, I did the spec job hoping Nathan would be into it and would lead to more stuff with him. (I didn't really think it would since he does such an awesome job of coloring his own work.)
I met Nathan (he's a gentleman) at the Baltimore Con and it turns out he liked what I did and he said he might have a magazine job coming up that I would be right for. I guess he sent some stuff to the art director and we were on it! So yeah, did anybody read all that stuff I just typed? I hope it made some kind of sense because there's no way I'm reading it! Yeah, here's some of the art, buy the magazine it has metallic ink (not where I planned for it to be for the most part but ah well, what are you gonna do right?) You can find the whole 6 pages at the WIRED magazine website here.

truffle shuffle

wanted to have these up one at a time, but somehow ended up working on them all at the same time. which was absolutely terrifying; to whatever degree they function, comparatively each was its own little trainwreck a half hour before its finish. happy with a couple, some had an idea i didnt measure up to, and some im thrilled to survive. take care, cb.

bzzz

still buzzing from last week....wow....
...at the tail end of a chunk of pages i can't show, here's a panel (again, just grey until rico goes to town) and a couple of thumbnails. aiming for these to be real claustrophobic, trapped in an 87 crown victoria with atlanta police. always start losing my nerve when it comes to obscuring so much in shadow, once things get to the full size page it can be hard to resist deviating from a simple solid plan. but ive tried to be cagey so far in choosing when/what to show of faces and eyes, no going back. anyways. plenty more posting in the next couple weeks, have a bunch of marvel cards to do and then back to comic pages i can share. lots more on the way from rico as well.