Hey, Look What's Arrived!
Yup, it's Love and Capes #13, available in both Free Comic Book Day and Retail flavors. The book will be out in 23 short days, and I will be out in Rancho Cucamonga that day doing Four Color Fantasies' event. All sorts of fun will be had.
After the first of May, the book will be available on the Love and Capes store as well.
Wayback Wednesdays: Sweet Baby James
When I was at the Kubert School, 
one of my least favorite classes was caricature. I just didn't think that I was very good at it. I did get good enough that, in a bout of cosmic irony, my first job out of art school was doing caricatures at the Geauga Lake Amusement Park. And doing live caricatures at parties and events has been a chunk of my income ever since.
This was a third-year assignment in caricature class. We had to take a famous person and merge them with an object. I don't remember my other classmates' concepts, but mine was to take James Taylor and blend him with a musical note.
I picked Sweet Baby James for a few reasons. I really like his music, and had just seen him in concert in New York City at the Paramount Theatre (and he rocked!) so he was on my mind. But, in those pre-internet days, getting visual reference was always a 
hassle. You had to buy these things called magazines and books, rather than Google image search a name.
Stone knives and bearskins, I tell you.
And since I was a fan of James, I had a few CDs that I could use as reference.
This is one of the rare pieces from art school that holds up well. I really like the inking on the face, and the sharp lines on his bottom jaw that really get the angles on his face. The dimensional musical notes are pretty good, I think the font works well, and the rainbow music staff adds some needed color. The only thing that bothers me is the 4/4 signature that's a little off. Odd that the lettering, always my strong suit, would be the weak thing on this one.
And if you ever get a chance to see James Taylor in concert, especially if it's an outdoor venue like Blossom Music Center here in Ohio (about which he supposedly wrote "Got your baby/Got your blanket/Got your bucket of beer" in That's Why I'm Here) do go. He's just amazing.
Baseball on the Brain
I've mentioned previously that I'm working on a Free Comic Book Day comic for the Lake County Captains. Now, I can reveal the cover…
In case you're wondering, that's The Captain, Skipper and Skippy, Grover the on-field announcer, and the three racing fish, Willy Walleye, Pauley Perch, and Buster Bluegill. You may remember them from when I designed their bobble fish.
Wow, it's less than a month away! I really need to start busting out pages, don't I?
Chris vs. Previews - and the Winner is Me!
Every month, ace blogger and comics commentator Chris Sims (of The Invincible Super-Blog and Comics Alliance fame) takes on the voluminious Previews catalog. This month, among his non-Batman themed picks, he included:
I've come out as a dedicated fan of Love and Capes before, so I won't go through the whole thing again. But I will say that this trade includes the Wedding issue, which is not only a high point of the series, but ranks up there with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's "Fantastic Four Annual" #3 as one of the best wedding comics ever. You should read it.
It's in the Premier section from IDW. Order code APR10 0387. And it's only $19.99!
I Love Castle
There are empirically better shows out there, but I don't know if there are any that I'm currently enjoying more than Castle. And it's just been renewed for a third season. Woo-hoo!
Here's a promo commercial for the second season. I liked it so much, I just had to share.
Wayback Wednesdays: Superman Cover
In my third year of classes at the 
Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, we had a class taught by Joe himself. One of our assignments was to do five pages from a comic, as well as a cover. I decided to do a Superman book.
Big surprise, right?
I've got the interiors somewhere, but I couldn't dig them up. What sticks out in my mind was the cover. I got this idea to impose two characters over a three-point perspective background. This was back in my George Perez crazy detail phase.
Backgrounds weren't my favorite thing, and while I understood perspective, using it in a panel always seemed to trip me up. So, I drew a complicated background on a separate sheet of tracing paper, and blew it up to ink it. But, when I made it larger and put the characters in front of it, I thought it looked cool as it was.
But, the assignment was to ink the cover, so I inked the background on a sheet of vellum. When I showed it to Joe, he said "You know, the pencilled version looks better. I'd keep that" So I went back to the enlarged pencils.
Happy accidents, I guess.
What always got me about this assignment was some fellow classmate who didn't like the cover. He said he didn't like those tight three point perspective covers where the buildings were so close to each other that there was no room for streets or anything. I thought it worked. In fact, I had ideas of drawing stock backgrounds like this and dropping flying characters on top of them.
So I was surprised and a little validated when I saw DC do a series of covers for the Superman books featuring the same idea just a couple months later. (And no, in no way am I suggesting DC borrowed my idea. They never would have seen it. It was more, as noted philosopher David Addison once said "Mediocre minds think alike.") I can only find one of the covers online, so my memory may be off. But I'm pretty sure that all the Superman books that month used that idea.
The FCBD Interviews Begin
Hey! I'm interviewed over at the Free Comic Book Day website about, well, FCBD and Love and Capes #13, which is, of course, a proud participant in it.
New Tools and New Drawings
A lot of cartoonists have been saying great things about Manga Studio. There's a special going on from the Manga Studio Folks right now where you can get the full version for $149. So I bought it to check it out. Hey, if it's good enough for Dave Gibbons, it should be good enough for me. The deal only runs until the end of the month, so you don't have much time left.
Here's a quick sketch of Amazonia I did just to try out the program. It's pretty sharp. I'm looking forward to trying it in more things.
And, because I know I haven't been posting much, here's a new Love and Capes panel, too. I name-check a lot of people in my book. Here, I've named Darkblade's police chief contact after Chris Sims, uber-Batman fan, writer for Comics Alliance and all around good guy.
Pulling Back the Curtain
Just to share, here are the original rough pencils for a page of Love and Capes. It's a scene between the Crusader and Amazonia, and I think it has some nice movement to it. I've got a sheet of board with the 8-panel grid on it, and I toss some tracing paper on 
top of that and go to town. You'll notice some redrawings in the right column. When I've got an image like Mark leaning back on his hands in the third panel, that doesn't work, I'll overlay tracing paper and redraw away.
There's another sheet of tight pencils that I ink from, but it's nowhere near as cool looking as this. I wish I could translate all the energy in the pencils into the final inks.
It'll be a while before this prints, so enjoy it now.