Jillian

This drawing was commissioned by Halle Butler, intended to become the cover for her first novel, Jillian. The finished copy was to be printed in B&W with gold overlay, filling in the monster spots and pupils, in homage to this cover illustration for Grendel. Here's a digital mockup of the complete design. Imagine the book's spine meeting the right elbow of the crouching monster.

Halle and I met over a year ago to discuss themes and generate ideas. Halle is a good friend; she performed one of the funniest Brain Frame readings ever and we've worked on several films together. She co-wrote Crimes Against Humanity, the feature in which I recently starred. Her work is deceptively mundane, cruel, and hilarious. Jillian is about two miserable female coworkers. As described online:

Halle Butler's debut explores how two people use self-deception and hostility to deal with their lives. Megan, a bitter young medical secretary, takes a break from her overwhelming feelings of social rejection by keeping track of the disgusting habits of her co-worker, Jillian. Meanwhile, Jillian's misguided "go for it!" attitude leads her towards a series of unadvisable decisions.

We settled on two monsters, one lactating and wailing in pain, the other defensive and furious. I sketched several options, carefully considering what should be most visible on the book's spine.

After settling on a composition, I invited Robin Hustle over to model with me. We had a good time contorting our faces and bodies for the camera. Hilarious nude photo shoots are a favorite pastime.

Defining musculature through imagined fur is difficult! It took a long time just to get the poses right. (That crouching pose? Actually impossible.) Once I had the bodies plotted and spots blocked in I began shaping their sub-structures, including genitalia.

I used five different pencils. A 2B mechanical and four wooden pencils, 3-6B. These are the same pencils I use to draw Possession Scenes. When I showed the drawing in progress to Jeremy he said, "Is that your face?"

The completed cover, while treasured by Halle and myself, has proven problematic. The original distributor, Love Symbol Press, dissolved while plans for the book were in progress. Halle pushed her successive distributer, Cubside Splendor, hard to publish this cover, but they declined. Maybe someday, my monsters will see the light. If you saw this book on the shelf, would you scream, or buy it, or both?

Brooklyn Zine Fest

If you happen to be based in (or imminently visiting) the NYC area, and you're reading this sentence before Sunday, April 15th, you've been chosen to win a $500 gift certificate! Just kidding. But you are in luck: This weekend I'll be visiting New York to table at the Brooklyn Zine Fest. The fest is at Public Assembly, at 70 North 6th St in Williamsburg, and it runs Sunday only from 11am to 6pm. I'll be tabling with Lale Westvind, who will have plenty of copies of Chromazoid to sell. I'll be selling Dock Ellis, Compiled, and my last (!) copies of Are You Lonesome Tonight. In addition, I'll have Motion Sickness posters, Brain Frame 5 posters, and two brand new screenprints, of Mr. Square at the Pit of Despair and this page from Go Down.

The Brooklyn Zine Fest has been posting interviews with every exhibitor. You can read my interview here. Please, if you're able, stop by this weekend to say hello!

Mr. Square at the Pit of Despair

 

When I heard that some of the crew that formerly produced The Skeleton News were starting up a new publication called The Land Line, I was totally pumped. When Grant asked me to make a comic for it, I was even more pumped. I saw this as an opportunity to try out some new things, namely: a more classic cartoony style, and a more complex, stylized one-page layout. Having previously completed Go Down, and riding high on the fumes of conceptual color comics, the fact that this comic would be printed in black and white on newsprint demanded that I find more in that limitation than mere limitation.

I read this comic at a benefit for The Landline. I used the opportunity to work through an analysis of the layers contained within Mr. Square which, at first glance, is pretty inscrutable. Here's a video of me doing the same thing, but alone and in poor resolution. (Analysis starts at 4:30, if you don't want to hear me doing silly voices.)

UPDATE: I can't believe I messed this up, and I'm even more upset that I'm losing so much math nerd cred over this, but check it out: a line is the easiest way to define one dimension, and a plane is the easiest way to define two dimensions. My puns are all wrong, and I'm really sorry.

Speaking of The Landline, they've got a Kickstarter up to cover the cost of printing issue 1 (which looks, as you can see, awesome) and to keep the whole production going. It's free, it's free of ads, it's beautiful and remarkable and full of high-quality, funny, sexy, interesting, gross things. They've almost reached their goal, but they need more help! Please consider donating, and if you're in Chicago, pick one up if you see one, because these babies are golden.

Compiled

This is really exciting. I've been meaning to complete this compilation for two years, since I produced the cover for these comics in Offset class. This is really my first full size comic book, and most definitely the first thing I've been proud enough of and confident enough in to send off to publishers, for example, or drop at Quimby's. That's right, I finally have comics at Quimby's.

This book contains five comics and one prose piece. Four of the comics are available in full to read on my blog; the fifth comic is not online, will never be online, and yeah, if you want to read you have to get the book. The written story is the version of They Glistened that I read at Brain Frame 3.

You can see me talk about and flip through Compiled in the video above; here are some closer images of the cover design.

ELSEWHERE: My mother interviewed me about Tumblr! I didn't know she was going to put the audio online, I just thought she was using it to take notes. Oh well, I guess the sounds of me eating and knocking over things in the background aren't that noticeable.

Trubble Club

So there's this group of comics artist in Chicago called Trubble Club. They meet every week to make jam comics: one person draws a panel, another draws the next, so on and so on. The participants are all talented, productive individuals with whom anyone would be honored to associate. When I first started making comics in Chicago, Trubble Club was the coolest thing and a symbol of local success. My friends and I joked about starting a rival jam comics group, and placed jealous bets on who would be invited to the Club first.

So, last month my friend Grant Reynolds invited me to join. The freshman infatuation with Trubble Club had worn off, and I'm friends with a lot of the folks who participate, so it wasn't really a big deal (but it was kind of a big deal - or at least it still felt like one). Anyway, I've been attending for the past several weeks. Today Jeremy Tinder posted some new TC comics, and you can see my work in one of them:

That last panel says "SQUELCH" and I drew it.

Ya'll should check out Trubble Club's website and get excited about the upcoming (recently completed) Trubble Club Full Color Comics Spectacular Issue 5. I have one panel in it, and it's really, really dirty. (Disclaimer: that is not actually the title for the collected TC comics, I just made it up.)

Go Down Part 2

Wuh-oh! What's happening here!?! This is the second part of Go Down, the comic I made for the first issue of Chromazoid, a comic anthology and mixtape that still needs help, so help us! These are pages 4 through 6. The end of this comic gets even crazier.

I really like how the panels in the 6th page are shaped like the crystals.

Go Down / Chromazoid

So, what do you think about this special sneak preview of my newest comic? Do you like it? Does it pique your interest? Personally, I think this is the best work I've done to date, and twice as exciting - because it's in color. It's my first comic in color! (Well, not including these two, but let's not talk about embarrassing, ancient history.)

What's that you say? You'd like to know what comes next? Well, then why don't you consider donating to the Kickstarter campaign for CHROMAZOID, a brand new, full color, horror comic anthology put together by my dear friend Lale Westvind? Contributing a mere $25 earns you a signed copy of the book as well as two mini-comics and a mix tape! Give more, and you get even more cool stuff! There are nine artists featured in CHROMAZOID, including yours truly and a gang of other criminally talented fresh meats.


Seriously, this is an incredible project and I would really love it to get off the ground. If our first issue is successful, this will become a truly great series of compilations, full of art by people who really, really deserve to have their work seen and distributed. Don't you want to be able to say, years down the line, that you helped the first ever issue of CHROMAZOID hit the stands? I guarantee it will get you laid at that future party.

About the comic: Because I had to work in color for this project, I wanted that trait to be important to the story, and a definitive part of the world I'd be drawing. I've been thinking about crystals a lot recently. (When I told Otto this, he said "Oh, good, you're getting back to your roots.") An image of a multifaceted, ever-changing crystal in anaglyphic red and cyan keeps appearing to me, and so it became the catalyst in this story. I colored the rest of the comic with ink wash pencils, leaving blank space for the crystal. I made overlays with tracing paper on each page, using a pen and ruler to outline the crystal and its facets. After scanning each page and its overlay, I filled the facets with flat computer color, artificially misregistering the red and cyan layers (and setting them to 'multipy,' so they would combine as if they were printed pigments) to create the illusion of offset printing and three-dimensionality (not to mention otherworldliness). I left the crystal's outlines blank to emphasize its unique properties and make it seem even more out of context with the rest of the comic.

A lot more happens in Go Down (it's eight pages total). Please consider donating! I'm very excited about this work and I want everyone to read it.

Pop Serial #2

HEY GUYS, HEY! My friend Stephen Dierks, a poet and writer and small-press publisher, is trying to make the second issue of his art/literature print magazine, Pop Serial, happen. He has the ambitious and wonderful idea to publish Pop Serial #2 as a perfect bound edition, because, in his own words: "I like visually appealing art objects, and hopefully you do, too. Also, I want the magazine to be more durable and nicer to hold and turn its pages." Amen. Stephen has initiated a Kickstarter fund-raising project to make this happen. If you pledge $10 to the perfect-bound cause, you are guaranteed a copy of the magazine, and if you pledge more, then you may receive a variety of additional printed prizes.



Lots of wonderful artists and writers will be in this edition, including yours truly. Now is your chance to own the first officially printed and published copy of any of my work, ever. Jump on it. Also, help a brother out.