The Green Ghost

Here is one of the commissions I mentioned in my last post, a gift from Bill Murphy (co-creator of The MidnightMen comic book) for talented cartoonist and fellow Arizonan Scott Godlewski. This is my take on his pulp character The Green Ghost, from preliminary sketch to finished, two-tone color illustration.



For those of you out there who dig excellent, pulp-influenced comics and are interested in reading The Green Ghost’s adventures, you can order his first book, The Vodyanoy, online from IndyPlanet. Scott has also worked on the very cool Mysterious Adventure Magazine and The MidnightMen (we both drew two-page stories for the project) comics, so gowan and check out Scott's work there as well. You’ll be glad you did.

Also, thanks to Bill for the chance to work on this. GG was a lot of fun to draw.

Inking and waiting

Lately I’ve been having trouble concentrating on my own comic book pages (like I mentioned before, I'm not very patient, and waiting for publishers’ responses is killing me), so I thought I’d take a quick break and take a shot at inking someone else’s work. Like comic book superstar Mike Hawthorne’s pencils of 2000 A.D.’s Judge Dredd. The original pencils can be found HERE.

I’ve also recently had the opportunity of drawing a couple commissions of comic book characters I really like, but since both drawings are gifts, I can’t show them here… yet. Be patient (like me, *cough cough*) , I’ll post them in a week or so. And hopefully I’ll have some news on my fencing story, too. Stay tuned !

Patience is a virtue (that I don't have)

Well, I just got back from the post office, and I’m happy to finally be able to say that my fencing/noir story is officially on its way to a handful of French comic book publishers. Now comes the fun part… waiting, worrying ("Did the package make it there okay ?" "What if they don’t like the art?" etc. etc.) and waiting some more. I submitted the book to five of my favorite publishers over here and I hope at least one of them will be interested in the story I have to tell.

Here are a couple of the sample pages I sent(some of you folks out there may recognize them, as I posted the b&w versions here a few months ago), my first attempt at coloring in the two-tone style made famous by Seth, Mike Cho and Darwyn Cooke, all artists whose work I really admire.

The Ogre (by Jon Morris)

Had to share this great drawing my pal and cartoonist extraordinaire Calamity Jon Morris sent me this afternoon. For those of you out there who don't recognize this little guy, it's The Ogre, the main character from my Paranormal comic book trilogy.

Thanks to Jon for sending this along, it totally made my day. It's always fun to see how other artists draw your characters.

To see more of Jon's work, you can go check out his website right here.

Interview

An interview I did last week with the excellent French comic book website Klare Lijn International just went online today.

Feel free to check it out right here.

Drawing comics (according to me)

I was asked the other day to show how I draw comics, from sketch to finished page, so here goes :

I usually work from very small, very rough thumbnail sketches, which I then scan and enlarge to the size of my originals (for the curious, I usually work at or around 10 x 15-inch format or A3 format, but on my current project I'm using the smaller A4 format, which is pretty much the same size as a sheet of 8.5 x 11-inch paper).

I then print out the page on a sheet of typing paper and pencil over the rough sketches, making quite a few changes as I go. Then I lightbox the finalized drawings onto a sheet of smooth-surface, 250-grain bristol paper using a non-photo blue Col-erase pencil (although you can’t tell that by the following image, since I greyscaled it for better readability. Sorry...guess you’ll have to use your imagination if you want to see blue pencil linework this time around). Once the pencils are finished, I ink the panel borders and do the lettering (not shown) with an Ames lettering guide and Staedtler Marsmatic technical pens.

Now comes the fun part: inking. By far the part of drawing comics that I love the most. I ink my pages with a no.4 sable hair brush and Pébéo india ink, a relatively inexpensive ink that scans very well.

Once I’ve finished inking, I scan the page again, clean it up, do any tweaking that my brush or white-out didn’t catch, then color or greyscale the page. I should mention that the above page is far from finished, though, as I’ve just noticed about a half-dozen things that bother me, and which, in hindsight, looked better in the penciled version... so I need to go back and fix them. Soon.

But anyway, there you have it : the Cliff’s Notes version on how I draw comics!

Fencing sketches

I’ve kinda had my fill of superhero drawings for a little while, so I thought I’d get back to work on my fencing/noir story. Generally speaking, most comic book publishers ask to see about five sequential pages when you pitch a book to them, but I’m planning on sending at least twenty (the prologue and first chapter) so that the editors who read my submission will want to find out what happens next. At least, that’s the idea. I’ve finished about a dozen pages already and am hoping to finish the art and two-tone colors/greyscale (I haven’t decided yet which would serve the story best) on the first twenty pages by mid-september. But in the meantime, here are some character drawings taken from my sketchbook.