Comics Life

I’m back.  Been busy with some stuff.

SPECULATIVE RELATIONSHIPS

I ran a kickstarter for Speculative Relationships: Volume 2 with my pal Scott Kroll.  We got funded!  Here’s what it looks like:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1619738205/speculative-relationships-volume-2

We have some super awesome contributors in this one.  Each artist is on their way to having amazing careers making comics and they all turned in mind-blowing stories. I’m so proud of the team and proud to say we have an amazing diverse group of creators telling unique heart-felt stories.  There is a lot of scifi out there right now, which is great. But… A lot of it tends to fall into some of the same old tropes.  Even the best stuff tends to focus on dudes fighting bad aliens or robots.  Don’t get me wrong, that stuff is fine (I mean, Predator is one of my all-time favorite movies).  But I feel pretty strongly that when a genre is en vogue, it’s important to take advantage of that to showcase ideas and creators that are under-represented within it. To that point, Isabella Rotman and I talked about diversity in comics a bit in this interview for Speculative Relationships:

I also really loved this thing that Ben Passmore (one of our contributors) posted:

I’m not a huge reader of Sci-fi or speculative fiction, in part because much of what I’ve come across is a thinly veiled narrative supporting some of the oldest oppressive ideas (colonialism, magic white dudes, ect.). Chunky young brown Ben wasn’t super into that, not because of some deep political analysis, but because I felt expected to be a magical white guy and that stressed me out. The comics in this anthology stray from this, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot, and it’s totally worth it for there to be narratives that are different in the word so that little chunky brown kids are less stressed. 

We also did a bunch of interviews to promote the book.  You can check them out here:

Speculative Relationships Creator Spotlights

I feel really good about the results in the book and I can’t wait to get it into more hands once we finalize the printing.

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COMICS LIFE

I’ve done a few different things for some things.  Here’s the line art for a pinup I did for Image Comics Dark Engine:

Which should be out soon-ish?  And the final is in color.

And here’s a sneak peek at a secret thing I did for a new Dark Horse book by Donny Cates & Eliot Rahal:

I’m in another show at Third Coast Comics in Chicago this weekend.  The show is themed ‘bad guys’ so I had to do an Apocalypse for that:

Here’s a logo I designed for the title page of Aaron Pittman’s cool scifi webcomic Grimfish (which you should read):

Somewhere in the last couple months I also did some Luther Strode fan art for fun:

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VICTUS & KINSHIP

I haven’t forgotten about Victus and I assure you, the 4th issue is coming.  Here’s some early sketching for the cover design:

I am posting 1 page from the series per week on my tumblr, to lead up to the release of #4.  So if you haven’t read it yet, you can check it out there.  Issues 1-3 are still for sale in my store as well.

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KINSHIP

Kinship is a project I haven’t talked about much yet.  It’s a comic I’m writing with my brother Logan, and the incredibly talented Drew Alderfer is drawing it.  We are putting together samples for a pitch.  The series follows a group of native americans in the early 1600’s, who have to defend their village from a group of foreign bandits.  We are taking a lot of queues from Seven Samurai and it’s really shaping up to be something special.  Here’s a couple of Drew’s designs for the main good and bad guys:

I couldn’t be happier with the work Drew is doing and working with my brother on the script has been amazing.  We really hope we can find a home for the series!  It’s about time we see some native american heroes in comics.

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INSPIRATION

Here’s some stuff that’s inspired me lately:

This album & band is better than the title implies.

Tradd Moore is KILLING it on Legacy of Luther Strode

My friend Landis has been working on this book.  His hatching is next level.

This Guillaume Singelin Metal Gear thing is drooooollll…

I really liked this new John Vestevich story.

There is a really cool show of woodblock prints from different religions at the Art Institute right now.

The clouds have been perfect in Chicago lately.  So I’ve been taking a lot of pics.

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I’ll try to get back on the wordpress horse.  Thanks for reading!