I really need to update this site more often! 🙂

One other thing I’ve needed to do for months is add the new comic Thrilling Tales of Vistas Unknown to the store. I’ve had a number of people ask how to buy it now that the Kickstarter is over and fulfilled. I’ve been either too distracted or working on other things. Soon!

Anyway.

Prior to going on vacation in October I drew a Variant cover for a friends comic series, coming to Kickstarter soon (but I don’t know when)! I’ll show it as soon as the Kickstarter launches.

I’ve also been working on getting the Kickstarter page built for the upcoming Sîan campaign, coming in January! I’ve been saying that it would launch this fall, but fall is almost over and I didn’t quite get things done in time, and I’m not quite done yet!

One thing that slowed me down is that I wanted a subtitle for the logo: like Conan “the Barbarian” or Xena “warrior princess”, or, you get the idea.

The first thing that popped into my head was Sîan: Queen of Thieves… but, there is a semi-current fantasy comic by someone I know with the same subtitle so that gave me pause. Also, at this point in time in her career, Sîan is a young woman who grew up on the streets in an organized pack of child pickpockets and beggars, and as she aged out, she graduated to more mature forms of thieving and is in the beginnings of her career as a cat burglar and thief for hire. So “Queen of Thieves” doesn’t feel right, and I can’t say that thief will always be her vocation as her adventures continue.

I figured “Thief of… (enter city/country name here)” and that is where I got stuck. I made up a random name I liked, added it to the logo, made cover mockups and put them on the Kickstarter page, then my wife came home and told me she absolutely hated the name, and there I got stuck. We left on vacation shortly after, but even once we got home I was completely paralyzed.

Monday I got semi-unstuck and came up with a few options, and while my wife didn’t love the one I’ve picked, she hated it less than the others! LOL!

This is such an inconsequential detail, so it’s ridiculous that it has taken up so much of my thought and time. It’s not like I can’t change the subtitle every story arc.

Anyhoo…

Here’s the three covers with the current trade dress. Let me know what you think!

The Kickstarter went live yesterday for the campaign to print THRILLING TALES OF VISTAS UNKNOWN!

So far it is doing better than I could have hoped! Well, I hoped, but, you never can tell. As of noon today, the campaign has been live for 26 hours and I’m at 45 backers and 232% funded! I set the funding goal at a modest $800 Canadian, so I expected to fund easily enough, but not quite so fast! By comparison, the Wahoo Morris campaign had 15 backers on day one and took several days to hit 45 backers. It had a much higher goal, and I think a more niche market than my new comic.

Oh, I also got a “Project We Love” badge, which is nice in an ego affirming way, but it also places the project higher on the Kickstarter homepage which dramatically improves visibility from random people scrolling the comics category.

It is fun running a campaign, but it can be stressful and draining. I’m kind of exhausted and it’s only day two!

New Pin-up finished.

I used some direct figure reference for this one which is something I don’t usually do.

I wanted one more new pin-up for the upcoming anthology and was drawing a blank for ideas or inspiration. I went to twitter and scrolled the Fantasy Art Pose reference feed and found a few poses I liked and incorporated two into a scene. The seated figure I drew from scratch.

I feel a little weird about using photo reference this blatantly. It wouldn’t be hard to find the source photos if you went looking for them.

In the handful of instances I’ve used direct reference in a published piece, I’ve either shot it myself, or transformed it dramatically from the source. I feel no guilt about grabbing a photo of a gun or guitar or car and dropping it into a page for a quick trace-off, but usually I’m looking at photos of environments, props, or people to figure out “how they work and look” and not copying them directly.

I had originally sketched out a background behind the figures, column with drapery etc., but decided to leave it here as this took a ridiculously long time as it is and don’t want to add another days work to something I feel vaguely like it’s plagiarism!
It was still a fun experiment in inking, lighting, shading and modelling with brush line work, more so than I usually do.

I’d be curious to hear how other artists use reference if the reference is what sparked the composition in the first place.

I’ve been on a cover/pin-up kick the past month, with a few finished to show and half a dozen in the works.

I’ve shown these three across my socials, but now I’m posting here for posterity!

I found myself with a few days before Christmas with nothing to work on, and I didn’t really have the brainpower to start something new.

Now, I like to have a procrastination project on the go at all times so if I’m frustrated with whatever I’m supposed to be working on I can procrastinate with something semi-practical. And, a few years ago I scanned in a bunch of old unfinished short stories and set them up in Clip Studio for this purpose. I’ve finished three of them over the past few years, so I opened up the two remaining (that are ready in CSP) to see if I could get into either one.

One is an 8 page Wahoo Morris short that was written to be the backup in the Image version of Wahoo Morris. It’s only layouts and lettering, so requires a complete pencil job, which wasn’t what I had the brain power for.

The other one is a 12 pager I wrote and drew summer of ’93 as samples to try and get work. I’d rededicated myself to art and comics mid ’92 and was determined to get better and break in! I drew 3 original short comics between February and August (instead of X-men and Hulk pages which I did plenty of in ’92) and mid-way through the second story something clicked and my anatomy and drawing made a huge leap and crossed a line into what is recognizable as my semi-ready to be professional style. Still lots of flaws, but I was starting to get there! It’s not much of a story, opening at a house party populated by people I know (including an overly idealized version of myself) when superbeings smash through the window, smash up the place and leave. I was basically trying to prove I could draw real people doing real things AND superhero fights.

I inked the first 4 pages, tightly pencilled 2, and there rest was in various stages of unfinished pencils and some inks on page 12. had to stop working on it as I took a second day job in September that was a term contract, with the intention of using the money to head to conventions and meet editors, but, by the time the term job ended and I could get back to the story it was Christmas, then I was on my way to Poughkeepsie and a year of working on Elfquest comics.

I pulled out the pages in ’94, but by the time I started sending out samples again in ’95, I was a lot better, so it sat unfinished.Every once in a while I would pull it out with the intention of finishing it for publishing, but again, there’s not much story to it, and some of the “plot” of the frame is inside jokes that only a certain handful of friends would have found funny 30 years ago.

And the superhero action is rather claustrophobic, being done in mid-shots the whole way through, never pulling back to show the action and where it took place. Given that the fight is in the living room of an apartment building I think that’s sem-appropriate, but there were a few spots where things are a little unclear, and one transition that was very unclear.

Anyway… all that to say, just before Christmas I opened it up and started inking a bit, not really intending to get very far, but I inked some more, then some more, then in a day or two I found I’d run out of fully pencilled figures to ink and had to pull out a pencil and fill in the backgrounds, background characters (party goers trying to get out of the way of the action), and one or two panels of the main action I had to pencil fully from scribbles.

Next thing I knew, I was done the existing pages, then got the idea of adding a splash page to help with the one potentially confusing transition. It didn’t fully fix things, but again, it was fun to do which is the important thing!

In conclusion it was fun inking super-heroes (something I haven’t tried in 20 plus years) and it was interesting inking my 30 year younger self. There was plenty of iffy anatomy, especially with the muscle-bound super-beings (which I’m still not that great at drawing), but nothing that a more experienced inker couldn’t fix or polish up on the fly. Now I have to figure out what I’m going to do with this thing now that it’s done!