CleveLand!

I'm sure it'll come as no surprise, but the Mystery Game Board piece was done for Scene Magazine, in the issue that comes out today.

They're running a feature on Cleveland's screwed up politics, and wanted a CandyLand type game board with several Cleveland incidents on it. So, everything from the sink hole to the Ameritrust Building, to the County Commissioners, to National City Bank's troubles are illustrated.

Scene Magazine supplied me with a PDF of the finished version, which you can see by clickin' and embiggenin'.

I'm thrilled with the way this one came out. I think it's a great piece.

Yes! It's the Love and Capes Trade!

I've been hinting at this for a while, but I can finally announce it now... the Love and Capes trade paperback.

Maerkle Press will be partnering with IDW, publishers of such fine stuff as Star Trek and Angel and Transformers, who will be publishing this collection of the first six issues of Love and Capes. The complete stories will be released, as well as a reprint of the "How a Page is Created" special from #4, and a six-page behind the scenes sketchbook section. And there will be a brand-new introduction from Mark Waid, who's written some little things like Kingdom Come, Brave and the Bold and The Flash.

This has been a long time in coming, I know. I have to especially call-out Harlan Ellison (yes, that Harlan Ellison) who got this ball rolling. Chris Ryall, editor at IDW will be releasing an official press release soon, but I thought I'd mention it here, too.

Love and Capes: Do You Want To Know a Secret? will be coming out in November, just in time for Christmas. It's 168 pages, ISBN 978-1-60010-275-2. And, it will be solicited in both hardcover and softcover, so for those of you libraries that want to order a hardcover, you can (and please do). I'll link to the official press release as soon as I get it.

Maerkle Press will continue publishing the "floppy" issues of Love and Capes. Issue #7 will be the Free Comic Book Day issue, and I'm still lining up when issue #8 will come out. With issue #8, I'll be back on a regular publishing schedule for the second "season". I just had to make sure there was a FCBD issue, because it's such a great promotion, especially since I can now announce the trade. Yay!

Drawings with Sharp Teeth

The Big Project is done and approved by my art director. I'm not going to post any more art until it prints sometime next week, and then I'll show a lot more of it. I just want to allow the client to debut it.

It was a lot of fun to work on this one. A lot of stuff to draw, a lot of techniques to figure out, and a lot of things to make fit. This is definitely going on my next promo postcard.

My Withered Drawing Stump

It's getting close to leave for Pub Quiz, where my team, the fearsome Team Eleven, should do some serious damage. We're like the New York Yankees but not evil.

I finished inking the Mystery Piece. It took longer than I thought. I'll be coloring it tomorrow. Whoa, that's a lotta drawing and inking there.

Fun and Games

I've recently gotten a big assignment from one of my frequent clients. I don't want to step on their denoument, as Kingdom Come Batman once said, so I'm keeping their name and the name of this project quiet for now. But it's a mind-bendingly big job. The mind wobbles at it. It's going to feature a game board and fifteen illustrations, including the picture of everyone's favorite Micro Machine Candidate Dennis Kucinich. Dennis... last in polls, first in comedy. and, if we voted on First Ladies, he'd be a winner by a landslide.

I know I'm going to need frequent breaks from this gig to keep my head from imploding. Especially since it's due on Monday. On the upside, it shouldn't be too terribly long before I can post the final. Until then, I figured taking a couple of Sanity Pauses to show you the work in progress t'ain't a bad thing.

Witchy Woman

In today's installment of Messin' Around, we present the Scarlet Witch.

One of my art school teachers posited the idea that men were mostly angles and women were mostly curves. It's something I apply to these Powerful Women pieces. But, for this one, I wanted to see how angular, yet feminine, I could keep the drawing. Scarlet Witch has a lot of angles in her costume, especially in her headpiece, so I could play off of that.

I also like the wacky Ditko-esque background that I was able to achieve. Part of it was a Happy Accident in using the Photoshop Twirl filter and applying it to the wrong area.

Now, if we could just get Wanda here back together with The Vision.

Look! Up on the blog!

Just messing around a little bit today. I wanted to try a different style, different color approach, different color choices. So here's the Superman illo I kicked around today.

It'll Be Here Before You Know It

I received my advance copies of Love and Capes #7 from the printer today. I got both the Free Comic Book Day and the retail version (available in July). I am so looking forward to this FCBD. I didn't know what I was in for last year. This year I do, and I think it's gonna rock!

Now You See Her, Now You Don't

I've had a little time to experiment and keep up the sketches. So, today, it's Phantom Lady.

I used to love DC’s Freedom Fighters comic. There was just something cool about a new universe of heroes (who all seemed to relocate to Earth One like it was moving to another city) that I’d never seen before. Freedom Fighters was cancelled in the DC Implosion, but she eventually came back in All-Star Squadron. For those of you DC people, that means she started out on Earth-Two, moved to Earth-X, and then Earth-One. And didn’t age a day.

Only later did I find out she was part of Quality Comics. That’s something I miss about comics these days, that sense of history that they had. So many characters today are clean reboots and you don't have that desire to find the old comics, see what they were about.

Phantom Lady’s costume has got skimpier and skimpier as the years have gone on... and I’m apparently not going to deviate too far from that tradition here.

Illo a la Retro

I've just done a spate of illustrations for Lone Star Press and my friend Bill Williams. These are for a forthcoming Wowio book that he's putting out, and I'll let him announce those particulars. I'm sure he won't mind me telling you to check out his books over there, though.

These are illustrations for a prose book, and I wanted to do them in a kind of classic pen illustration style. But I don't have any of those crow quills anymore, and was never all that comfortable with one anyway. So I decided to work all in brush. This one, a picture of an old-time coffin shop, turned out particularly well. I like that there are no ruler straight lines. I think I got some interesting textures, too. And working with only one gray helps keep it simple yet interesting while separating the image nicely.