Pictures

Acme Comics Weekend

by

This past weekend, 10/23-10/25, myself and a handful of other comics creators (Chris Giarrusso, Jacob Chabot, Brian Smith, Art Balthazar, Ian Flynn and Michael Watkins) were the guests of Acme Comics in Greensboro, NC. We were flown in, put up, fed and essentially made to feel like rock stars and all we had to do was sit around and draw and sign comic books. And boy did we ever draw. Holy cow. There were well over 200 sketches done by all of us in total. The crew at Acme scanned as many as they could and posted them on their site.

By my count, based on what’s on their site and what I can remember that wasn’t scanned, clocked in with about 38 sketches. I encourage you to check out the scans of everyone’s sketches here (I encourage you to check out Brian “Smitty” Smith’s takes on E.T. and “The Star Wars”), but for simplicity sake, here are 32 of the sketches I did:

Read more

Process

by

In the event you haven’t been paying attention (and shame on you for that), G-MAN: CAPE CRISIS #2 came out on September 9th, featuring Part 2 of the 5-part Pix: Teenage American Fairy story, “The Most Dangerous Donut”. Did you miss it? Well, go to a comic shop and get a copy. Come on, people!

Now that that’s out of the way…

A lot of people ask me what my process is for creating comics. And by “a lot of people” I mean hardly anyone if anyone at all, and by “ask what my process is” I mean people, when they ask, like to ask things like do I use a computer for everything now, do I also put the words in the “little bubbles”…things like that.

But regardless, I thought I’d take the time to give you a tour of how page 5 of “The Most Dangerous Donut” came to be.

WRITING/LAYOUT

It all starts with the writing. When I’m drawing my own story, the writing happens in three basic stages. First is all in my head, where I think about the story, picture pages in my mind’s eye, and figure out the basic beats and some of the dialogue and how it’ll all fit together once drawn.

Stage two is the layouts, and this is maybe the meatiest part of it. Here’s where I lay out the pages, panel-by panel, including a rough sense of dialogue and where it’ll go. Here are my initial layouts for page 5:

Read more

Swabby Luke

by

At some point circa 1999, in the pre-Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace days, there was a slew of new Star Wars action figures being released. One such figure, Luke Skywalker “Escape from Mos Eisley”, was referred to around the office as “Swabby Luke”, on account of his wearing a “Swabby Hat” (see Fig. 1)

swabbyluke_fig(Fig. 1 – Luke Skywalker “Escape from Mos Eisley” – note “Swabby Hat”)

Credit where credit’s due, the use of “Swabby” was not my doing (credit goes to one Mark Powers who may have picked it up from Mike Rockwitz, if memory serves), but regardless, a good handful of us in the office found it quite entertaining…

Read more

New Stuff

by

Just in time for the holidays, all kinds of new stuff: First up, speaking of holidays, a new holiday card for 2007 is up in Pictures. In Comics, under “From What School?”, you’ll find a one-page comic based on a conversation about comics on a talk radio show (phew!) that may or may not entertain … Read more