Rick Parker

An Old friend from my days in NYC has taken up teaching! Rick Parker has a comics workshop and there are still a few spots left! It's on the East coast and I can't make it. Rick is a very talented artist and you may remember his work on the Beavis and Butthead Comic from the 90s. He has also done a fair share of matchbook covers as well!

ZULU

There is an old movie about the British army and their battles in South Africa called ZULU. The movie is really good and I recommend it to everyone. I talked to a friend about it and I remembered the recent PBS show Guns, Germs and Steel based on the Jared Diamond book. Check this link to read the theory of how Europeans colonized the rest of the world.

One episode shows how the Zulu warriors had a superior battle plan and used drugs to psych themselves up for battle.

Back to the West

I have spent the better part of Six Months working on Kolchak, The Night-Stalker. I was very happy doing the book and the first issue will hit the stands next week. Now that it's all done, I can complete the sequel to one of the best reviewed Graphic Novels of 2006. The Eisner-Nominated Gunpowder Girl and The Outlaw Squaw!(The nomination was for best letterer, but I won't complain!) Read the reviews!

Images of Chewbacca

There were a lot of photos of Chewbacca published as the third Star Wars movie came out. These are 2 of my favorites!

Tale of the tape

I threw out all of my old Music cassette tapes today. They were victims of technology. I used to play them in my old 1997 Altima on the commute to work, but when I traded it in for the 2004 Altima, I got the CD player. I thought that I could not give up the old comedy tapes like my Abbott and Costello and Sam Kineson tapes. Now I can listen to them on the Satellite Radio. When my small cassette player broke, I ran out of excuses. If I really wanted to replace my old Wendy and Lisa tapes, I would have done so by now. The clock is ticking for my CDs. Ten more years and I will buy myself an ipod!

Art on Ebay

I decided to visit Ebay to see what's available. There is a lot of original art on the auction site and it's high quality! I saw entire 6 page EC stories by Wally Wood, some sweet MAD magazine art and a few Ross Andru Spider-Man Pages. What reaaly caught my eye was this Earl Norem painting. It was published by Marvel for one of the Savage Sword books, I can't remember which one and the seller does not say. It would have been cool to show the published cover next to the painting, but the seller did not do that.

It looked like the "seller" was really an auction house. They seem to have the best stuff! Pieces like the Spidey pages and all the covers were so expensive, I could not look at them for very long for fear of burning my eyes! There were some newspaper daily strips that were undervalued. A lot of Flash Gordon strips that could be bought for fifty bucks or so.

The Norem painting is okay, The focus seems to be on the giant about to kill Conan, but it's nice work. I followed it's auction and the winning bid was over $3,000 dollars!

Sketch of the day!

I first posted this sketch on my Tokyo Pop Blog! I wish that everyone who reads this blog would check out the other. So this is the sketch of the day!

The old-fashioned Fanzine

It used to be that if you picked up a fan Magazine about comicbooks, You would only read about comicbooks. No glossy photos of movie stars and no ads for DVDs or game systems. I used to enjoy WIZARD magazine when they had more preview art or a good interview. Now that they've started putting actors on the cover, I can't take it seriously as a comicbook fan mag.

I'm buying a lot of the TwoMorrows publications. They print BACK ISSUE Magazine and ROUGH STUFF Magazine. Two of my favorites. Back Issue deals with comics of the 70s and 80s, and Rough stuff talks about Penciling and Inking. Bob McLeod edits Rough Stuff and he gives a bracing critique! Very good stuff. If I want to know the latest in the comicbook biz, I'll go on the internet.

The above image is the cover of Amazing Heroes. An Old-fashioned Fanzine from 1986!

TV Guide

TV Guide covering comic books? It's true! Especially when it's a comicbook about Battlestar Galactica. I have not seen the new TV show, but I hear it's pretty good.

Alan Davis

I'm posting pencil copies of 3 pages of Alan Davis art! It's from the first issue of Excalibur by Marvel Comics and I had so much fun reading the book. Way back when, a freelancer could walk around the Marvel offices and check out the latest art. When I heard that Davis had sent in some new pencils, I had to make some copies. I was such a fan! He's such a great artist and I learn so much by looking at it.

Robot Fighter

I worked for VALIANT Comics in 1990. Jim Shooter started the company after he was fired from Marvel. I was working in the Marvel bullpen when the news came down about Shooter, and I wondered what he would do next. I was also inking backgrounds for Bob Layton at the time and he was in the office that afternoon. I really did not surprise me that Layton would join Shooter in his Valiant venture.

The first books for Valiant were Nintendo Comics. Books that featured Zelda, Captain N and The Mario Bros. I worked on that stuff and I was there to see the prepartion for the super-hero books. Jim had some great plans for the next line of books! Trading cards, zero issues, retail promotions and T-shirts. I worked with Art Nichols, the Art Director at the time. He had previously worked at Continuity Studios and he knew how to get the most out of every pencil line! Art penciled and inked the first two drawings, but I think Paris Cullins and Bob Layton did the art revisons on the final drawing. The color was by Janet Jackson.

I left Valiant in late 1990 and never had a chance to work on the Super-Hero stuff. It must have been fun...at least until Shooter was edged out and Layton took over. That's another story.

Best sellers

This is something new for me. the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly has a list of top selling Graphic Novels and Comics. It has nothing to do with Diamond or Wizard Entertainment. It seems like they got their list from Midtown Comics in NYC. That store has a great location (40th street ...I think) so it's a short walk from the EW offices.

My question is: Entertainment Weekly has a lot of readers and they when they report on something they can affect it's popularity. Why do they trust Midtown Comics to decide the best sellers? Did they call the Manager and ask for a report? No offense to Midtown, but couldn't EW call St. Marks comics located in the Village or some other place? Am I missing something here? I guess that's more than one question.

Congrats to the books on the list. I just wonder about the accuracy of this list.

Gambit art

This page is from a GAMBIT mini-series drawn by Lee Weeks and Klaus Janson. I don't remember exactly when I made this copy, but I was living in NYC at the time. I have always loved Lees' work. He really put a lot into his pencils and it shows. It's rare to see a page half inked. You can see a little of the inkers thought process and maybe imagine his next move.

Slow day

It's another slow day at the office and I find myself wonder if I should leave early to take in a movie or something. What I do instead is search the web! i found this UK based website that's similar to YouTube, but totally uncensored. It's called LiveLeak.