Baby Box: Out of ink

I fell asleep reading about monopolistic competition and now I'm really out of sorts. I thought a snack would help but all I could come up with was a bowl of crushed, unsalted saltines, salted and drizzled in olive oil. There had to be some logic in that, but I can't see it for the life of me.

Yesterday I had a much more productive day when I woke up. I drew a bunch. I even ran out of ink, so I couldn't finish this Baby Box:


Otherwise I might have started the one below. As it is I just reviewed the tabs to describe each panel.



They have quotation marks on them – get it?

Kicking around the Baby Box

I've been rereading Kazimir Strzepek's The Mourning Star and thinking about projects I've got on hold, and it's making me want to pick up the Baby Box again. Probably not in the way I conceived of it at first, cause I've been drawing these goblins I really like lately, and they had nothing to do with Baby Box before.




See look, these goblins. I've been working on a goblin alphabet, too, but that's not hard – it's mostly based on some other alphabet.

Man, by Sketch #3 they're already turning into the space aliens from Life is Lies, with the unibrow... and the spears...? and the parka. Anyway, I'm excited for what I want to do with it; we'll see how the ideas play out.


This golem is going to be in the new Baby Box. I think there'll be two Baby Boxes. Originally I wanted the comic to be like what's below, and I think I'll still do that, but I also want to do something I can distribute really easily – like how Beau started distributing copies of Mime Hunters whenever he played a show; except I don't play shows. We'll see how it goes.


Man, though – so much is so good about Mourning Star. I was at the comics store the other day and I gushed a little bit about how much I wanted the third one to come out. I also want more Joann Sfar to get published in the US – this, for example. Fat chance, I guess. But think – Blacksad #4 is out in Europe, and the first three were just published last year in the US practically all at once. Does that mean they were a hit? Then why hasn't the newest one been translated ?? I don't grasp how this all works exactly, but my posit is "not entirely well."

Kromdor, Being of Evil

In college I did art for a humor magazine, contributing incidentals for amidst articles. At a later point they picked up a comic strip I was doing:

Kromdor, Being of Evil


Aside from his vague resemblance to a Klan member, he wasn't all that evil. Stealing lollipops, giving homeless people Canadian change. Sometimes I still sketch him; above you see an excellent recent opportunity to test purple markers. But, I was going through an old folder and I realized I had a couple of these that I never submitted to the magazine.

Sometimes the strip is convoluted and bizarre. Sometimes it's really, really simple. Usually it's about spelling mistakes.† His evil minions are a green onion and a porcupine (now ghost porcupine – he died very early on). Below is the run where the porcupine's ghost appears.





That is some serious stuff. I'm pretty sure I drew them while I was a substitute teacher at a boarding school in Vermont, because they're on the back of a worksheet for like, Oliver Cromwell. It wasn't really Cromwell, or the Commonwealth, but yeah, something like that.

_____________________

†This led to another, unattempted strip – Metaphot, Devourer of Words – based on typos. Actually, I have a lot of excellent emails that would serve the idea well.

Life is Lies: IDs

This was a fun one. Now it's up!


Recently I dug out some sketches I'd done and defaced them in the name of Science. Stuff like a Tabasco bottle, a cyclops I guess, or a robot, whatever you draw when you're sitting around in a bar. Mostly these guys, though. I get tired of coloring things in digitally, right, and I like limited palettes; so, let's go, markers –

This was the original idea for London, and I'm glad I didn't go with it.

That said, it did lead to a different, excellent idea.

This one just isn't right for those aliens, but at least I finally drew his pint glass proportionally large. Right, I mean – they're three feet tall, and they're always holding regular-sized glasses. I figure they get little shot glasses of beer. Or no one serves them. Or
EVERYONE SERVES THEM.

(that last bit makes sense if you read this week's comic).

Nickel & Dime

I'm cleaning up a strip I did in 2004 and I love it. I'd consider redrawing it, although I'd rather collaborate on the writing this time. I'm into the action. When I did my thesis the following year there was significantly less action, and I've approached long narrative in more or less that vein since, so it's good to go back to something pretty different.


Here you see the planning page for Franklin Roosevelt fighting guerrillas and a giant python in South America with his cryogenic power suit. He and the ghost of Thomas Jefferson are trying to destroy an ICBM with an anthrax cluster bomb warhead. I completed maybe half of the whole arc. In the unwritten half they fight an elite team of Calvin Coolidge ninja clones, and ultimately discover their nemesis in the undead lich-king that was once William Tecumseh Sherman. I don't know what the deal was with Sherman, but Calvin Coolidge ninjas makes complete sense.

You may notice that Roosevelt's cryogenic power suit looks like a robot; that's because that's what robots look like – it's a robotic power suit. Other Observations: Apparently everything I wrote five years ago was directly influenced by Ninja Gaiden, cause duh. And I was doing different things with onomatopoeia back then.


Oh man, what was a thinking in the second draft?? CHGGIU is a way better laser sound than ZKGGSH.

The North Pole

I scanned this today to send to someone as a follow-up for an interview I had yesterday. It's pretty old, actually, and unfinished – the first eight pages of a twenty-four hour comic marathon (for which I was awake ten hours and asleep the remainder, clearly). The premise is that Santa Claus is a ninja, although that didn't really come out in the first section (unfinished scenes: fighting a giant pagoda robot and armies of ninjas; debriefing in Guantanamo Bay by the CIA, discussing Santa's origins as a Babylonian deity; etc). I should probably finish it.







If I don't get that job I can at least say I sent someone a picture of an octopus fighting an ape for professional reasons.

Mailbox

Among those who know me I am regarded a great teller of stories. I tell fantastic stories about such entertaining times as when I found a chair on the street, and when I fell asleep unexpectedly. Their simple elegance reveals the self-evident truths of the universe. Here is such a story:

In my apartment building the buzzers and mailboxes don't correspond to the apartments, so everyone took to simply writing their names on the mailboxes, and now we get our mail. I wasn't the first to do this, but I was second, and mine have awesome animals. They also get knocked off periodically, because my particular box has the master lock the mail-gentleman (or lady) uses to give us all our mail at once, and I guess he's in a hurry sometimes and my label comes off.

So I switch my guy up, cause they get crumpled and why not go for variety?

This guy's gotten a little chewed up, see.

This guy's next in line maybe. By seniority at least...

Except this guy will actually get my business mail to me.

Plyzine

I was asked to draw some stuff for a magazine. The project (my end at least) involves a very long list of amazing items. At some point, however, I found I was losing concentration:

Not Just Werebeer

I was using my magic crystal ball just now to spy on Those Who've Seen This Blog. It's very useful. I noticed that last month someone was referred to the site via Portsmouth Brewery's blog, which is a coincidence – about that time ago I went out there to snag some Kate the Great. Some real Grail Quest action. Portsmouth is great, check them out.

"mmm, i'm delicious!"
I know I have a few posts about Werebeer already, but it's not the only beer I've made. In fact, it was the second; first I had to learn how to make it, from a friend of mine. Logically, that one was called Friend Brew:

snapshot from a now-who-knows-where restaurant placemat

second draft: it's good with just a touch of color, right?

I'm dying to make more labels. First I need to make more beer, I guess – order in all things.

...and then I found $20.

Life is Lies #1

I drew this comic about aliens and submitted it to Tiny Mix Tapes, because they have a comics section. I get the impression they're not going to take it, but I still think it's pretty great.


UPDATE (3/4/10): hey! looks like i spoke too soon – got a message a couple days ago, they're going to take it! i'll post here when it posts there, but it'll be more like this:

sweet!

Aliens and Robots

I have a habit of giving either food or t-shirts for Christmas. If you have a similar habit, but don't make t-shirts, and people are getting angry at you for giving them food for Christmas, too,† you should get in touch with me.

Aliens and robots go hand-in-hand – or hand-to-hand.

there's a companion shirt with a robot-stronaut, but it was a present to someone, so I don't have it anymore –
but you can still see the studies for the other shirt.

________________
†let it be known, despite what my critics may say, that everyone i've given food for Christmas has loved their presents.

Shark!

These are some detailed images from a project I did on continuous narrative, with an accordion book. I was trying to scan it again the other day, but in the end it'd pretty hard to give a sense of the thing to someone without presenting them the actual physical object. These pictures, for example, are just the bottom third of three consecutive pages. I had the full pages up earlier, (with some burn and dodge), but I like the way these crops came out.

Sandwiches!

This piece is semi-autobiographical. I wasn't really wearing a snuggy when I had that conversation with my brain.

The earlier drafts were posted... three months ago. Worth the wait!

Yesssssss!

Werebeer

I've been thinking about making beer again. I still have a lot of my old labels, but I'm going to need new ones if I make a different beer. Where to next, then?

Some Trajectories

I was involved with an excellent culture site until very recently, when it was taken down for reasons of artistic objective. I just made that up, I don't exactly know why it's down. I suspect it may be for good, though, so I'm going to repost a few things that left with the site.

I actually had a link up to the last one before – clearly recognizable if you've already checked out my other beast prints. I wrote a sweet blurb about it for So:

I want to read little-known secrets penned by well-known scholars of some forgotten caliphate; elaborated from a Pharaohnic death manual, a bound vellum volume captured during Alexandrine campaigns into The East, or both. The text in question will show certain influences, peculiar in their combination – Vedism, Kabbalah, the Island of Mu, and traces here and there recognizable only to those versed in the ways of the Incan khipu kamayuq. Impartial records will indicate the grimoire's passing inexplicably from Turkish petty-khans to the well-to-do of the Low Country; optimally, it will have been procured from the Nazis before the fall of Berlin.

To fulfill this desire, I must know a minimum of eight dead languages – no less than two of which I am to have invented myself.

Editor went with something else. Oh well – I'm like, halfway on the dead languages thing.


I go nuts for manticores. They're rockin'.

Cyclopes, too. What's up, in-the-plura~l?

This language has already been displaced by a successive script.

Pen & Ink

This is for a project I have no affiliation with whatsoever. That said, it inaugurates an exciting return to pen & ink for not-me, and the equally exciting advent of scanned images that look better and don't require massive level adjustments in Photoshop just to be visible.

Koya Hijiri

My undergraduate thesis dealt with a 19th century Japanese Gothic short story, Izumi Kyoka's Koya Hijiri (The Holy Man of Mt. Koya). Half of the project involved analytical writing, and the other half was a comic book adaptation of the story. Oh man, Wikipedia has an excellently concise-to-the-point-of-disservice blurb:

Eccentric and superstitious, Kyōka developed a reputation for writing about the grotesque and the fantastic. "The Holy Man of Mount Kōya" (高野聖, Kōya Hijiri), is a tale about a monk's journey through a mountainous wilderness, encountering inexplicable and unsettling experiences. Borrowing and embellishing themes from Edo period popular fiction, folklore and Noh drama, more than half of Kyōka 's works incorporate some form of supernatural element. Kyōka's narrative style borrows from traditional rakugo storytelling, and also uses dramatic dialogues similar to that used in kabuki drama.

Hoo... that second sentence. Kyoka's definitely worth reading, don't let Wikipedia dissuade you. These four pages are just about at the end.