X'Hal!

I was a big fan of the Teen Titans, back in the Wolfman/Perez era. I came on board late, right around the time of The Judas Contract. But it was a different type of storytelling than what I was used to, and it was pretty darn fun.

If you're going to do a book of beautiful, powerful women, you can't go wrong including Starfire. Heck, she probably should have been in the first one, but she was a little... I don't know, obvious. I'm making up for lost time with this one, though.

This one is a lot more airbrushed than a lot of images I've done recently. And I worked in (relatively) dead line, rather than my usual brushy style, to get a different look on this one. You've got to shake things up every once in a while to keep them fresh.

There are still six more spaces to get your commission done and be in the next Powerful Women collection, too!

Fish Tales

I got to see the Bobble Fish in person today.

I went up to Classic Park, where the offices of the Lake County Captains are, and got to see the one sample of each of the fishies. The rest are in transit, so I wasn't able to get any for me.

That's my artwork on the boxes, too. Jonathan at the Captains did a good job with it. And my logo and website are on the bottom of every box, so that is sah-weet. I am so looking forward to seeing these at the big signing on June 28th. You can get tickets here.

Below are a passel o'pics. Click on any for biggimization!

There is the feeling like the clenching of a fist, there is a hunger in the center of the chest

For those of you playing the lyric guessing game, I'll be posting answers tomorrow.

Today's page is page eight, which means I'm a third of the way through the eighth issue. I was stuck on this one for a while, as I knew I needed a scene to separate page seven and what comes next. I finally hit upon the idea of making sure that Charlotte landed in Paris safely. It wound up being the perfect beat to separate things.

I think this may be the first time I've drawn Abby's bedroom. Come to think of it, we haven't seen Mark's either, and yet Charlotte's has been seen two or three times. I don't know what that says.

To decorate Abby's bedroom, I went to my own. I don't quite have the same bed, but I do have the same comforter, drapes, and end tables. Sometimes it's nice and quick to steal something I know rather than create something new, especially something that's only in one panel.

I also had to create a Paris scene. I wanted something away from the Eiffel Tower, because while Charlotte has a full scholarship, she doesn't have so good a free ride to get that kind of view. So I did my research on the internets. And I wanted Paris to look very different from Deco City has, so instead of using Illustrator like I do to design the Art Deco skyscrapers, I drew everything by hand. In fact, to get that older and more natural look, I didn't use a ruler or a French curve, either. I even colored it differently. If you look closely, you can see that I didn't really stay within the lines, at least of each building. I used the chalk tool and tried to get a textured, impressionistic feel.

The designs for Pixar's Ratatouille certainly were an inspiration too, as is much of what Pixar does. I highly recommend their Art of Ratatouille book, or any of their art books. They're little squarebound pieces of inspiration in my library.

So, things are going well with the book and I'm on a good pace. Time to work on page nine.

Yo Joe!

I haven't posted a Powerful Women image in a while. By the way, I'm still accepting commissions, and if they get in soon, they could also appear in the second edition, which might even be out in time for San Diego depending on how things break.

So, the publisher of the Love and Capes trade, IDW, just got the G.I. Joe license, and that got in my head. I was a big fan of the comic, and have said in many places that the legendary G.I. Joe #21, the silent issue, was one of the huge inspirations for Raider and a bunch of the secret-agent-action stuff that I did before Love and Capes. I've got crazy love for the characters (though not as crazy, or as fun, as the Comics Pants guys). That got me to thinking about the characters like Flash, who I dressed up as for Halloween one year, complete with a custom laser rifle made by my Dad, and Snake-Eyes, and Storm Shadow... and Scarlett.

She was the crossbow-weilding Joe, and I always thought she was cool, both visually and as a character. So I took a run at her for the next sketchbook. The texture of her bodysuit was done in Painter using the chalk brushes, and it came out almost exactly the way I had it in my head.

Super Secret Project Revealed

I've mentioned a Super Secret Project here once or twice. Actually, I think I use it to describe a lot of things. But now I can reveal what the latest SSP is...

Toon Tumblers DC Glasses.

That's right, Toon Tumblers, one of my favorite pieces of comic book merchandise and the good china here at Casa de Zahler, will now be making DC glasses. I dig the Marvel ones to be sure, but I've always been more of a DC guy. It's going to be cool to get some of my favorite characters on glass.

Now, I can't reveal the first image or where it will appear, or characters in the planned lines. That I'll save for Toon Tumblers to reveal, but once they do I'll post it here. If you wanted to guess that I've lobbied for a certain Nuclear Man to make his appearance early in the line, though, you wouldn't be wrong.

The Bobble Fish was a Tremendously Useful Creation

Here's the first photo I've seen of the first bobble fish I designed for the Lake County Captains. It's Buster Bluegill. I'll be at that game, June 28th, signing statues for anyone who would like. I haven't done too much three-dimensional stuff, and I was a lousy sculpture student, so it's cool to see something I've drawn in three dimensions.

Well, a two dimensional-photo of said three-dimensional item, at least. I'll let you know when I actually get my mitts on one.

Does she speak eloquently? And would she have your baby?

Here we go, page seven. This has one of my most in-jokey jokes ever, and it's visible here in panel one. Anyone want to take a guess as to what it is?

I thought I was hitting a nice little roll here, but now I'm a little stymied as to page eight. A lot of times, I have the writing work done on the next page while I'm working on the current one. It's not that I don't know what happens next. I certainly do. It's just a question of feeling like I need another beat before going on with the story.

Still, I'd like to get page eight done by the end of the month. Then I'd be a third of the way through the book and a third of the way through my self-assigned deadline of end-of-July. That may change a bit given that I do realize that San Diego is the end of July and that does take some time up. Even so, I should be doing well on getting three months ahead of things, which I need to do to have a certain amount of safety room to get the next FCBD issue printed in time.

Grand Theft Auto: Tremont

Here's why I love working for Scene Magazine.

With Scene, I get to do some really fun stuff. I get to mess around in styles that I wouldn't normally, and they're very supportive of such experiments. As a result, I think some of the best stuff I've done has been done for them. This one is just a little different, as it was very art-directed to start. My AD e-mailed and said "We want to do Grand Theft Auto Tremont." (Tremont is a Cleveland neighborhood, for those of you living in the great unexplored non-Northeast Ohio part of the world.)

I had to break it down and figure out how to do the GTA style. It's fun to do different styles, and learning how to break something down like that gives you another tool in your graphics toolbox, and that's always good. I like the angry eyes at the bottom, and the picture of the yuppies at the lower left. Especially the way that Lolita is treated as a background. I'm sure I'll be using that approach again.

It's out on newsstands now. Check it out!

Numero Ocho

I decided to take a crack at the cover for Love and Capes #8 today. It's Memorial Day, so things are a little slower than normal, but that's cool. It gives me the chance to do some stuff that I wouldn't have the uninterrupted time to do otherwise. And this cover will be due in a couple of weeks anyway.

I was thinking of what to do for a cover. There's always Mark and Abby. And I know what happens in the story, so I could have done something on that. But then it occured to me that this will be the eighth cover (tenth if you count the two alternate Free Comic Book Day covers) and Darkblade hadn't appeared on a one. Amazonia, the Arachnerd, Major Might and Steel Worker all had. So I started thinking of things that would include him.

My first idea was to have Darkblade coming out of a shower on the phone, calling me saying "Zahler? When will I get a cover? What do you mean 'what am I doing right now'?"

I didn't like the idea of Darkblade not looking heroic, though. And worse yet, something that wouldn't put him in costume. It's a bit of a risk to not put Mark and Abby on the cover. It's why Abby appears in that heart shaped balloon on #6... I couldn't have her missing from the cover of the final issue of the first arc. So I needed to have some typical hero trappings to make it work.

Then, in the shower today, I got an epiphany. What if Darkblade was threatening a thug? And what if I was the thug?

So I did a rough. Darkblade was on camera left, and I was on camera right, and he was holding me straight. I scanned it and dropped it into the Love and Capes template that I designed and it didn't work at all. But that's why you scan the rough. I started to see that if I reversed the positions that I had more room for the dialogue. And if I had Darkblade lifting me up, the diagonal making it more interesting and creating more dialogue space.

There's a trend in covers to not put any words on it. I figure, if it works, do it. And here the dialogue is definitely needed.

I've also been accused of making Mark look like me. I honestly don't see the resemblance. We've both got brown hair. I use myself as a model, but I model for all the characters, so I don't see why he should be any different. So now we can see what I'd look like as a Love and Capes character. And I even worked Abby and Mark into my shirt. A shirt which is available for sale, in fact.

Nothing like a little merchandise plug every now and then.

Tell me what it's like to be the last one standing

I've mentioned it before, but there's something I really like about doing the quarterly Love and Capes series over the semi-yearly Raider books: How quickly it goes. This is page six, and with that, I'm 25% done with the book.

The page has very little dialogue. Technically, there are only four words spoken on the entire page. I'm kind of known for my dialogue, and it's definitely my favorite part, so it's nice to do something different. It's largely decided by the joke, but once I realized the silent nature of the page, I really tried to play that up. There are things, like panel five, where I could have cheated and added a whisper, but I really wanted the body language to carry the message.

Because it's such a cool page, and because it doesn't spoil the larger plot of the eighth issue, I'm linking to the whole thing. Yes, that's right, you can both click and embiggen!