Double Feature!!

 

I am happy to direct you to my latest project (actually, my January project): Marla of The Plains is my adaptation of Syne Mitchell’s short story “Tiger’s Eye”, originally published in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s anthology Sword and Sorceress IX. Syne and I collaborated as part of our ongoing association in the comics community facilitated by the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW).

You can view this eight-page strip as a flipbook here:

https://anyflip.com/ugicz/lckw

And speaking of Syne Mitchell: today, Valentine's Day, she is launching her webcomic, My Ex, Vlad. It’s a romantic comedy… with monsters. I have seen it and I am here to tell you it's great fun and exceptionally well done.

Check our her website here:

https://myexvlad.com

 

Crazy like a fox

So,I haven't posted here for a while, but I have been busy working on my Adaptuary (January) project and Marla of the Plains is completed. The big reveal of this collaboration is waiting on some additional collaborating with my collaborator, but it won't be too long now. Honest.

I'm not sure yet whether there will be a February project: I am starting a 10-week class at the School of Visual Art tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes first.

But I did have some noodling I wanted to share: I have been looking at Krazy Kat by the great George Herriman lately and practicing his style, sort of,  and thought I would try my hand at a bit of a pastiche.I don't know where I am going to go with all thus, if anywhere, but here it is FWIW:

 Flaky Fox

Enoch Hedgehog

 

 

Constable Bjorn

(Bjorn is Swedish for bear)

 

Here's a few random scenes: 

Needs a lot more work, but might be fun to try some strips.

Soltice ain't all it's cracked up to be....

So, I did this:

Read the full story on Epicurus in Exile.

The Twelve Days of Newton

Season's Greetings!

'Tis the season... for Apple and Rainbows. This year, in honor of Isaac Newton's Birthday on December 25, I spent my studio time in December creating drawings for the Twelve Days of Newton. 

As you look through these, it might be nice to know two things:

• Newton had a Pomeranian dog named Diamond. Apocryphally, the story is that Diamond accidentally set fire to twenty years' worth of lab notes by upsetting a candle, a circumstance to which Newton responded "O Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest the mischief thou hast done." 

• According to legend (once again) Newton had a cat named Spithead, and he is credited with inventing the cat door for him. Newton cut a hole in his door and covered it with a scrap of fabric so Spithead could go in and out without Newton having his work on light interrupted. (BTW, Spithead is coastal place name in England, nothing to do with saliva.)
  

Without further ado:

 First day of Newton: Not exactly a pear tree, but a whiff of Brooklyn memories...

 Second day of Newton:  Let it snow? Funnily, I drew this before we got our dumping.

 

 Third day of Newton: Need to warm up with a Yule log after that exertion!

 Fourth day of Newton: This isn't going so well, is it?

 

 Fifth day of Newton: Neither is this.

 Sixth day of Newton: This is much easier.

Seventh day of Newton: But  the fourth day of Hanukkah? Not sure how the math works..

 Eighth day of Newton: Try to be neat!

 Ninth day of Newton:Those seasonal TV specials are great!

 Tenth day of Newton: Solstice comes but once a year (well, twice, technically).

 Eleventh day of Newton: Happy Isaac Newton's Birthday!

 Twelfth day of Newton: Nobody knows what Boxing Day is, not even Isaac Newton.

Whatever holiday you celebrate this season, here's hoping it's happy and healthy! And best wishes for the new year.

The Return of Captain Stratosphere

 So, I updated the Buck Rogers pastiche comic so it would be more understandable out of context; to wit, with this cover:

New flip book link here: https://anyflip.com/ugicz/knuc/

Friday semi-marathon

So, some of the SAW peeps had a maxi-session on this Friday holiday-for-a-lot-of-folks, and from 7 am to Noon I participated in reviewing three of the Friday Night Workshop videos and doing the exercises. here we go...

The first was Simple and Specific. The exercise was to evoke a very specific emotional response or feeling in four panels, using minimal words (sound effects allowed). We did it in under twenty minutes. Here's mine:

The next was Four Panel Fun and it had a very specific prompt. We were to find three things in our space to use as characters and a prop and then create a four-panel strip with this structure:

1. Introduce the characters and prop in a context.
2. Introduce conflict.
   
3. Deal with the conflict.
4. Resolve the conflict (or not).

Here's what I used:

Here's the strip:

The last one I did was Drawing Monsters. The first part asked us to draw some blobs on the paper and then turn them into monsters and name them.

In the second exercise, we were given a series of specific prompts and sixty seconds to draw a monster from each prompt.

1. Monster with at least seven eyes
2. Baby minster
3. Minster with hooves
4. Extremely long monster
5. Monster that is strong but not large
6. Monster with a long tongue
7. Monster with a hat on
8. Monster in the water
9. Monster with a stomach ache
10. Monster wearing glasses
11. Monster with too many horns

After so much fiddly-bit work on Captain Stratosphere, it was nice to try some different styles. Most of all, it was great to spend some time with my online community, sharing experiences and tips and stories and art.

Captain Stratosphere

I made an IG post, but I guess this should go here as well... social media has gotten so confusing.

The November Strip has been completed, just in time for the holiday weekend!

Read the whole thing in flip-book version here.

As it turned out, it wasn't an eight-hour comic after all... here's the disclaimer from the last page:

As Captain Stratosphere and team fly off (to the left, for the first time in this comic), I would like to take a moment to (a) thank you for reading this and (b) explain its origin. A few of us in the SAW online cartooning community did not feel up to a 24-Hour Comics Day,  so we had our own 8-Hour Comics Day. In the first four hours, I laid out the roughs for this strip and planned on finishing it that day. But as I started inking, I realized that to really capture an homage to Dick Calkins – his combination of sparse backgrounds, fussy detail, and weird hatching – I needed more time than that. So, I completed a whole ‘nother comic in the last four hours of the day, and gave myself time to really work on this one.  I am still not sure just how successful it was, but it sure was fun.

Have a great Spacegiving!