Holiday Cheers

It's time for this year's seasonal greeting! As usual, Julie and I are sending out two flavors of card this year, and here are both of them for your amusement. If you didn't get one by e-mail, dear friend, consider yourself hereby greeted.

Birthday Cards

Here at last are a few birthday cards that I did for relatives over Thanksgiving vacation. First, something for the nephew...



And something for the niece, combining a couple of her current favorite subjects. :-)



Finally, here's one I did for my dad, featuring characters from some of the stories I've done over the last year or so. I've knocked out the background on this one, and I have a notion to use it for a special project in the near future...



Many thanks to wife Julie for helping piece together the fragmentary scans I made with our wonky travel scanner!

Caliban and Prospero

Hello again! I have some new greeting card art to post soon, as soon as the scans are pieced together and cleaned up. But in the meantime, here are some sketches for a story idea that occurred to me over Thanksgiving vacation...




The story, obviously, is a riff on Shakespeare's The Tempest, one of my less favorite of his plays. When I outlined the plot to wife Julie, she suggested that it would make a good long-form comic. It occurs to me that, if I can complete a 24-page story in one weekend, I should be able to do a 100-page story in four weeks. Anyone up for National Graphic Novel Month?

(As it turns out, there's already a NaGraNoWriMo, but that challenge is for weenies - their target is a 48-page comic script, never mind a completed comic. I'm contemplating something a lot more hard-core.)

Halloween Flyer 2010

Here's this year's flyer for our annual video party. Not as fancy as last year's, but right now I'm a lot more pressed for time. Plus, the minimalist black-and-white treatment kinda suits the theme, which is obsolete VHS tapes exhumed from the video vault.



Party date has been set for next Sunday afternoon; art peeps, let me know if you need location info!

Trucks Again!

Last year I had to skip it because it was on the same weekend as 24 Hour Comics Day, but fortunately this time I was able to check out the "Touch-a-Truck Day" and crafts festival hosted by the school across the road. (Literally across the road. Like, you step out the door and there's a fire engine and a sewer maintenance truck. Sweet!) No petting zoo this year, but we did get a cute robot.

24 Hour Comic: Young Nick Part 3

And now, the final finale. This is the point at which I suddenly remembered I needed to provide the hero with a fiddle, and resolved the problem with what Julie accurately identified as a Mary Shelley-style "I found a suitcase full of books in the road" solution. Hey, maybe that's why Young Nick is quoting Milton.

Part 1 here, Part 2 here.










One last thing: A few people have asked how much of this story I planned out ahead of time. I'm ashamed to admit it's quite a lot. Since I've spent the last six months working mainly on other people's stories, I wanted to take full advantage of this chance to tell one of my own, and so I went with an idea I'd been kicking around for a few months and pondering in earnest for a couple of weeks. However, I refrained from actually putting anything down on paper until the 24 hour clock started running, and about half of the plot and rhyming text was cooked up on the spot.

Speaking of which, the rhyme scheme employed here seems to have been borrowed from the "Vicious Cabaret" sequence of Alan Moore's V For Vendetta, which just goes to show you can't escape your influences.

24 Hour Comic: Young Nick Part 2

The legend continues. I was starting to lag behind schedule as I got to the courtroom scene, so here come the dramatic black backgrounds! There always seems to be one panel that stands out as my personal favorite; see if you can guess which one it was this time.

Part 1 here, Part 3 here.