Archive for ‘Uncategorized’
85 items.
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Serenity Rose 2: GOODBYE, CRESTFALLEN!
“You’ll kill them if you dream, Serenity Rose…”
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Serenity Rose 1: Working Through the Negativity
The whole sordid witchy mess begins!
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“Neuromancer for the Hello Kitty set!”
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SO!
If you were to guess at what a guy who draws “dark” comics does on his weekends… it would probably look very similar to what I did this last weekend. Usually I spend my Saturdays and Sundays glaring at passersby and cursing the cats for not preparing my meals, but this time I (holy shit!) actually went out and lived the “horror person” stereotype.
SATURDAY! On Saturday the Gofflin and I ventured deep into the filthy heart of Hollywood to see two of my favorite goth ladies bring smiles to the faces of the terminally spooky. Which actually isn’t as difficult as it seems, but still, Melora Creager (of Rasputina renown) and Siouxsie Sioux (of “That woman cannot possibly be 50 years old” renown) rocked the ever-lovin’ socks off the Henry Ford theater, its assorted black clad protomass, and me this past weekend. Just an amazing, amazing show. But what really struck me was how different the two performances were, while still both coming under the heading of “goth.” Rasputina with their intensely cool “19th-century American prairie punk” look and snarky-but-swooping cello recital could not have been more different than Siouxsie’s slinky “goths in space” look and charging synth-spook-RAWK. Totally distict, but both absolutely beautiful. I couldn’t help but think of the “all goth shit is the same” people and how painfully, embarrassingly wrong they are. To be totally fair, though, (and apologies if I’ve said this before) I guess when you’re on the outside looking in, things do tend to blur a little bit. Like, for instance, if I really took the time to examine the romantic comedy genre, over time I’d probably be able to pick out all the subtle variations of plot and tone among the movies. Instead of seeing it all as one big undifferentiated pudding of McConaughey.
(Anyway, if you’re a Siouxsie fan, her new album is as big, HI-GAWF, and ridiculously catchy as her glory days with the Banshees, so buy it!
SUNDAY! On Sunday I went and saw George Romero’s new zombie movie, Diary of the Dead. Yeah, he’s got another one already! And… well, it isn’t his best by a long shot, but it was fun. Zombies are my bestest favorite, and no one knows zombies like Uncle George, so I couldn’t help but be entertained. I do love my zombies… And I know exactly why, too. “Barricaded in your house while mindless hordes of slobbering, violent bastards claw at the door trying to either destroy you or make you one of them” is… pretty much how any given introvert sees the real world at any given moment. It speaks to me. Similarly, I’m really strongly drawn to any scenario in which a person wanders around big, empty spaces that are normally filled to the rafters with humans. So of course, Dawn of the Dead is one of my all-time top-favorite films. Diary isn’t really up to Dawn standards, though, unfortunately. If I had to complain – and I don’t but here I go anyway, because it’s the internet – I’d say this time he had his patented “social observations and zombie mayhem” recipe mixed a bit too heavy on the former and too light on the latter. Every minor observation was explicitly spelled out, underlined 80 times, doused in 40 gallons of fluorescent marker and lit up with a flamethrower, every time. Sometimes that can be part of the fun, but, well, not this time…
Still, nobody destroys ghouls like George Romero, so even if you think you’ve seen every possible way to bloody up some shamblers, I guarantee you’ll find something fresh, new and intensely cool in this one. (Acid, kiddies, is a woefully underused item in the zombie genre.) And even if the commentary gets a little “Yeah, WE GET IT, George” at times, the points are still valid and fun to roll around the brain. So go put some money in the man’s pocket and see Diary of the Dead – if you, y’know, can find it. (The Nuart has it until the 21st.)
SOME BUSINESS:
Little bit of business to attend to… If you tried signing up for the FORUM within the past 6 months or so and were never able to log in… um, try again. If you want. The problem was that I never really had the time to sift through all the thousands upon thousands of spambots in the user list (it was getting really, really bad in there), dig out all the real live humans and activate them. But hey, it had to be done, so I finally do-ed it. Sorry about the horrible delay. I actually recognized a few of the names from my LJ and Myspace accounts, which is sort of embarrassing…
Speaking of the forum, we recently put out the call for moderators, so if you’re interested (or just want to vote for someone else all democratic-like), swing right on over HERE.
AND FINALLY: “Good Guys Wear Black” is now en-YouTubed, for all your sharing and commenting needs. You know how it works:
Not sure why I did that… just thought it should be there, I guess.
Now back to cursing at cats!
-a
And there they are!
Now, for whatever reason, when I started this “commissions” thing it never occurred to me someone might ask for a Calvin & Hobbes sketch. Which is really odd because, y’know, Bill Watterson is maybe my #1 biggest art hero ever (it sort of cycles between Bill Watterson, Tim Burton, and Hayao Miyazaki). I guess maybe it always just felt vaguely heretical to even consider drawing these characters… Like the very notion of it was simply not fit for respectable people like me. You don’t re-write Hamlet, you don’t re-paint the Sistine Chapel, and you don’t re-draw Calvin & Hobbes.
But I did it anyway, and it was a lot of fun.
It was cool, too, when I was flipping through my big stack of C&H books for reference, I was struck yet again by the incredible looseness of the drawings. It’s all so wonderfully scribbley and gestural, little bits and wiggles of detritus flying all over the place. So much energy… It reminds me -weirdly- of some of the old EC artists who’ve had such a big influence on me. Especially Jack Davis. That guy was an especially filthy little scribbler. And I love him for it, the creepy old cuss.
God, people’s obsession with “clean” drawings is a total mystery to me.
A couple more commissions that turned out pretty good, if I don’t say so myself but I guess I just did:
The first one is Starla-Faye Jovansensan from Jimmy Misanthrope’s “Agents of the Endtimes” webcomic, and the smaller floating girl in the second one is Faith from Thomas Szewc’s “Alone In A Crowd.” Thank you so much, Jimmy and Thomas!
If you want to be as cool as those guys, click HERE to commission your own… commission. And help keep Serenity Rose Vol. 2 going in the process. Seriously, it takes way less time and is far more enjoyable than taking on freelance jobs. Art directors always want “clean” artwork, y’know.
What do you see, lil’ Serenity…
Wow, so how about those first ten pages? Pretty green, eh? I just thought it’d be nice to start things off with a big explosion of green ectoplasmic hell. (What story wouldn’t benefit from that, I ask you? Annie Hall would’ve been classic!)
I still haven’t decided if I want to burn through this book at two pages a week or play it safe (for now) and roll them out just once a week. It’ll probably vary as we go on, but I think I can safely say there’ll be at least one new Serenity page every seven days. Neat! Page 011, featuring whatever the hell long-haired teenage Sera is looking at, will appear this coming Wednesday.
In other developments, the big freelance project I’ve been working on for the past couple weeks is coming to an end pretty soon, which should free up some time for commissions. Hurray! Sorry to everyone who’s been waiting so patiently for those; you should have them by the end of the month. People have thrown some really fun stuff at me this time… can’t wait to dig in and start some arts.
And did you know the first printing of Serenity Rose Vol. 1
I will keep you updated!
“It is to laff, huh Mistah J?”
This month’s batch of art commissions was especially fun, so I figured I’d share a bit. Multiple requests for characters in the “lady super-people” genre this time, which sort of surprised me but really shouldn’t have. It’s kind of what I do, I you think about it.
Harley Quinn is my favorite, I think (hence the extra-massive image, donchaknow). There were a lot of beyond-brilliant things about the old Batman animated series, but that character was without question the beyond-brilliantest. A really slick design, an instantly appealing personality, and a note-perfect “40′s gangster ditz” voice… man, just all around good stuff. I especially liked the way her presence managed to significantly lighten up the Joker character without making him feel any less, y’know, psychotically dangerous. Still not quite sure how they did that…
I think Harley Quinn might be the only Batman TV character to ever jump from television apocrypha to full-fledged printed-on-paper in-continuity comic book “canon.” Which is kind of neat. I mean, Louie the Lilac himself couldn’t even pull that one off.
Anyway, the cheerleader drawing up there is from that “Heroes” TV show, which I still haven’t seen because Netflix won’t send me whole box sets at once. (I can’t be tying up my whole queue for a month to see this stuff, you STINGIES! Southland Tales waits for no man!) The other drawing is obviously good ol’ Wonder Woman (well, hopefully obviously). Now, it always kind of bugs me when people draw Wonder Woman like she’s wearing some sort of shiny metal one-piece, so I made sure to break the outfit up a bit. I also didn’t put high heels on her, because I’m not an idiot.
If you would like to commission your very own commission, click rightabouts HERE. The price is $50 for one character and $30 for each additional character on the same page. No backgrounds for now, sadly… There’s Serenity en-paging to do!
And now I sleep and dream of flaming pom poms…
BLAWWWWGGGG! Enough of this crap, time to get down to some bloggin’! Blog it out, folks! BLAWG!
One of the very few and – as far as I can tell – totally unique creative downsides to being a comic book writer/artist is that the ratios are all wrong. On average, it takes about ten times as long to pencil, ink and tone a page as it takes to write it, which means only 10% of my time goes to develop my skills with the ol’ “written word.” This is frankly unacceptable. I could write some stream-of-consciousness short stories or compose haiku beneath the sakuranbo tree, but instead I’m going to blog. (BLAAAWWWWG!)
Unfortunately, it is a matter of public record that I often have trouble getting blog entries started. I just don’t know what to write about most of the time. (It feels oddly like trying to strike up a conversation with a total stranger.)
So I’m just going to go ahead and start listing the things that make me happy.
Thanks For Happy #1: JUNO (the movie)
I just saw this thing a couple days ago. I meant to go out and see it at the theater, but uh… didn’t! I did read lots of glowing reviews, though, which really got my hopes up, and then a lot of horrible backlash reviews, which really got my hopes down, so by the time that little red DVD envelope arrived, my hopes were just all out of whack. All I could be sure of was that the movie won two Oscars and the writer has a bikini girl tattoo. A bikini girl in bondage, even.
Now, I have to be honest, the first 10 minutes or so of this movie kinda worried me a little. “Honest to blog?” Really? All the forced quirk and made-up slangtalk in the dialogue just made my blood run… well, not cold. But tepid. Definitely tepid. (“Could that Something Awful spoof be right on the nose?” I tepidly wondered.) And look, I love Rainn Wilson. I love him like candy. But his whole character just seemed like it came staggering in from the darkest recesses of Napoleon Dynamite.
It was tough going, friends. “FUCK YOU, MOVIE!” shouted my couch-buddy over her math homework.
But then… it got better. It got LOTS better. I’m not sure if I just got used to the peculiar rhythms of the dialogue or if that first little chunk was an aberration (I’ll have to watch it again), but by the end I really loved this little movie. It really is one of the best bits of 2007.
A tremendous lot of the movie’s charm has to do with the way Diablo Cody’s script consistently turns left when you expect it to turn right. Very few things play out the way you expect them to, but that’s not just some stupid gimmick; it’s all completely believable, totally real, and very, very… human. I read a lot of websnark that said Juno was a ridiculous screenwriter’s fantasy version of a teenager, way too smart, way too cool, way too mature for someone so young, but I didn’t feel that way at all. She seemed totally real to me. I’ve MET teenage girls like Juno. I’ve gotten MAIL from teenage girls like Juno. Teenage girls like Juno have left COMMENTS ON MY BLOG POSTS. They definitely exist, Mr. Smartypants Internet Movie Reviewer Guy. In fact, I bet you could find at least two or three Junos in the little clique of artsy honor students behind that group of cheerleaders you’ve been ogling.
What I found most interesting about the character of Juno, though, was that she most definitely was not “mature beyond her years.” Far from it. Just look at the scene where she first meets Mark and Vanessa. She keeps up this running patter of sarcastic little jokes and comments throughout the whole meeting, and yeah, it’s meant to be funny (the “t-shirt gun” is maybe the best line in the movie), but there’s much more to it than that. Juno is nervous. She’s out of her element. She’s flailing around blasting witticisms shotgun-style every whichaway to make the Lorings think she’s cool and to cope with her own nerves. She’s not really even thinking about what she’s saying. At one point Juno tells the slightly desperate, infertile but “born to be a mom” Vanessa she ought to be “glad it isn’t you” who has to deal with being pregnant. It’s just a throwaway comment, not intended to hurt, just part of the patter, and the screenplay is smart enough not to dwell on the moment… but it speaks loads about Juno. No one “mature beyond her years” would’ve said something like that. It was brilliant.
But as great as the script is, I’m not sure the movie would be half as good without Ellen Page as Juno. It’s funny, when I first saw her in Hard Candy a couple years ago, I thought, “That girl would be a great Serenity… if, y’know, someone were mean enough to do Serenity Rose live action instead of with Balinese shadow puppets like I want.” I have to say, seeing Juno paired up with a loud, obnoxious red-haired best pal was… sort of surreal…
I really liked this Michael Cera guy as the boyfriend, too. I haven’t seen Superbad or Arrested Development, so this was pretty much my introduction to the future Scott Pilgrim. He’s not exactly how I pictured Scott Pilgrim in live action, but then… I’m not exactly sure what I was picturing anyway (BALINESE SHADOWN PUPPETS). He’s a funny actor, though, and about the right age, so it’ll work. And with Edgar Wright directing it should be… um…
Yeah, I should probably save all that for another post.
Anyway, if you haven’t seen Juno
BLAWWWWGGGG!
Guillermo, why did you sign up for The Hobbit?
Well, okay, I know why he wants to direct The Hobbit. He thinks it’ll be fun. And “it’ll be fun” is pretty much the best reason for any artist to do anything. (“I have something to say” is up there, too, of course… but honestly, if you don’t start with the fun it’s pretty much all over before frame one.) So good for him, really. All those dwarves and furry feets will probably make it easier for Guillermo to get big money for his personal projects down the line, too, so that’s cool.
But man… Hobbits, huh?
Two movies worth, even. Four years PLUS before we’ll see At the Mountains of Madness. Or that crazy-ass clockwork Monte Cristo thing. Or the “kid witnessing the apocalypse on his way to pick up milk” one. Or The Left Hand of Darkness, or Hellboy 3, or… anything, really. And all for hobbits.
I have to admit, I’m slightly depressed.
But this is “Thanks for HAPPY,” not “Dude, harshin’ my buzz,” so I shouldn’t dwell on my slight depression. Guillermo Del Toro without a doubt my favorite of all the directors to come flopping up out of the vast primordial director stew in the past decade, and that fact completely snuck up on me. (WordPress tells me “snuck” isn’t a word, but I’ll be damned if I write “sneaked” instead. We write like we talk on THIS blog, WordPress!) Let me explain…
Mimic (1997): I knew nothing of Guillermo Del Toro when I dragged my dad to see this one with me. I wanted to see Mimic on the basis that (A) it was a theatrically-released giant killer insect movie (a true rarity in those days), and (B) I had an enormous crush on Mira Sorvino. My dad took issue with the notion of an insect colony evolving so quickly over such a short amount of time (a solid, if not a little needlessly crabby, criticism), but I, for one, had great buckets of fun watching great buckets of insect guts go splattering all over the place. I was absolutely enthralled with the creature designs, the creepy dark atmosphere, the attention to detail in the locations, the weird kid with the spoons, all of it, really. But the thing that really grabbed me (and pretty much the only thing anyone remembers about that movie anymore) is when those two standard-issue plucky street urchin kids -exactly the sort of lovable moppets that live to save the day in the end- get horribly mauled to death by the monsters. “This Del Toro,” I thought, nodding sagely to my 19-year-old self, “is a fellow to watch.”
I haven’t seen the movie in years, though. Most people kind of hate it, it seems (including, well, Guillermo Del Toro), so maybe I should just let it sit there all cozy in my memory and never watch it again.
Cronos (1993): I rented this right after seeing Mimic. I’m pretty sure I got it at Blockbuster, but don’t quote me on that because I don’t quite believe it myself (A foreign film at Blockbuster? With subtitles? And it’s 4 years old? Didn’t they need that shelf space for While You Were Sleeping overstock?). It has Ron Perlman and a clockwork scarab that turns people into vampires, which sounds like a can’t-miss combination, but I remember being slightly disappointed by it. The premise just seemed to promise more craziness than the movie ended up giving me. That’s right: 10 years ago I was the guy who liked Mimic more than Cronos. This opinion is clearly psychotic and must be altered by new screenings of one or both films A.S.A.P.
I kind of forgot about Guillermo for a while.
The Devil’s Backbone (2001): In 2001, my friends and I went to see practically every art-house/foreign film available (usually at the Pasadena Playhouse 7, but if we happened to be in the mood for dilapidation and sadness, the Rialto). I distinctly remember seeing a movie about gay assassins in Colombia, and another one about Eskimos that run really, really fast. I’m pretty sure I knew The Devil’s Backbone was by the Mimic guy, but I probably wouldn’t have seen it theater-style if not for the arty binge we were on. I liked it quite a bit, but… oddly enough, the ghost was the thing I liked least. I loved the characters (especially the villain, all drippy with skeevy machismo), and the setting was fantastic. I didn’t know much about Civil War-era Spain, so seeing one little corner of that world so beautifully recreated was… well, one of the best reasons to go to the movies, really. (Maybe that’s why I was so drawn to the gay Colombian assassin scene, come to think of it.) But the ghost didn’t quite work for me. He certainly looked cool, what with his veiny skin and floaty blood-trail, but I never really felt scared of him. Visually, I mean; the staging, editing, backstory, etc., were all spot-on. Maybe he was just too “designed” looking or something. Too CG. I guess ghosts are scarier to me when they’re just sort of “people out of context.” Like in the Sixth Sense, you know, where all of a sudden there’s just someone walking around the house that should not be there. And they kind of fade out. Or just stare at you.
-Jesus, for some reason just typing that here in this dark room made me look over my shoulder. What a humongous weenie…. But the point is, typing that stuff about the Backbone ghost made me think “cool effect!” instead of “what was that behind my humongous weenie shoulder?”*
The movie definitely reminded me how cool Guillermo could be, though.
Blade 2 (2002): Being kind of iffy on the first Blade movie (Sunscreen? Seriously?), it was a little odd that I even went to see the sequel theatrically. But the same friend who dragged me to the Colombian assassin and young footballers in Irish prison pictures had this inexplicable soft spot for Blade, and had no one else to go with, so there I was. Enjoying it. I don’t even remember the story, but the thing was just bulging with amazing design work, crazy action scenes, and Ron Perlman galore, so I got what I paid for. I mean, those weird jaws on the super-vampires were worth the price of admission alone. I distinctly remember thinking “This isn’t all that great, but it sure is well-directed. Somebody CARED about this thing.” It seemed like Guillermo Del Toro was one movie away from being the best guy ever.
And then Hellboy came along.
Hellboy (2004): Hellboy is my favorite superhero movie. Nothing else is even close. It’s a big, roiling mass of gorgeous pulp silliness, and I love it all to pieces. I felt like Guillermo Del Toro had a schematic showing all the happy buttons in my brain and decided to carefully press all of them. A lot of it comes from the comics, yeah, but he brought it to life so vividly… The movie was like a humongous, Hollywood recreation of the kind of crazy, elaborate stories I’d make up for my action figures when I was a kid.
El Labertino del Fauno, or “Pan’s Labyrinth” for those of us in America who insist on having the names of Greek dieties wedged into film titles for no discernable reason, apparently (2006): Better than Hellboy. The best fantasy film since… well, let me think about that one. And my favorite kind of fantasy, too, full of strange worlds with strange rules intruding on our own. Genuinely scary worlds, too. The ghost in The Devil’s Backbone didn’t really work for me, but the Pale Man sure did. Maybe it’s the sheer “wrongness” of it all. I mean, who is this skeleton with the floppy skin sitting in this room waiting for somebody to eat his grapes? And why is that ceiling in the hallway so low? Why is a low ceiling so unsettling? There’s less “BOO!” to it than the Backbone ghost, I think, and much creepier for it. Amazing stuff, and good throughout. And heartbreaking. Not just at the end, but consistently, and with enough hope cut through to make it all the harder and more beautiful.
I would say Captain Vidal is the best villain of the past decade, but then Anton Chigurgh showed up the next year and take it away from him. Still amazing, though. Sort of the living embodiment of the total madness of crisp, pretty little uniforms.
So yeah, at this point, after several years of sort of half-assedly stumbling into every Guillermo Del Toro movie ever made, with the last two movies he’s become one of my very favorite directors. I was super excited to hear about all the stuff he had planned for the future. Hellboy 2 looked good, ridiculous fun, and everything beyond sounded even more amazing…
…
Then hobbits happened.
I didn’t really like The Lord of the Rings movies that much.
I mean, I have HUGE respect for them technically, and the actors are all great to watch, for sure. Gollum is an absolute landmark in the effects world. Peter Jackson will probably show up in his own “Thanks For Happy” one day, but man… all that wizard and sword and pointy hat faux-medievalism stuff, it just leaves me cold. The whole genre, I mean, not just LotR. The whole “High Fantasy” thing. The Middle Earth movies are actually my favorite of all that stuff… but I’d still sort of prefer they keep their distance.
It wasn’t always that way. When I was a kid, I liked The Hobbit so much I drew sketches of every single character in the book on construction paper. I had a whole stack if”Art of DragonLance” books, despite having no idea what “DragonLance” was (then or now, actually). At some point I just went sour on the whole Sword ‘N’ Sorcery thing, though. Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that the whole genre feels like a gussied-up, whimsified version of, frankly, the most horrendous era in all of human history. It’s like, when I’m looking into a fantasy world, I want to feel as though I could live there for a while, y’know? Wizardy worlds don’t do that for me. You can keep your dwarves and chain-mail. Give me airships and the scientific method.
And now one of my favorite guys is making one of these elf pictures.
Oh, come ON, Guillermo! At Comic-Con a few years back I heard you say Pan’s Labyrinth was the cinematic equivalent of your balls dropping. GUYS WITH DROPPED BALLS DO NOT PLAY IN MIDDLE EARTH, GUILLERMO. Guys with dropped balls do not go play in Peter Jackson’s sandbox, they make their own goddamn sandboxes and fill them with awesome clockwork demon pulp sand! Anyone could make a decent Hobbit movie with Peter Jackson and co. looking over their shoulder. It’s all there already. The style is set, the tone is set, Weta is ready to go and the two key actors have long since established their roles… God, Brett Ratner could make a passable Hobbit movie under those conditions!
…Okay, maybe not him, but, y’know, some up-and-coming kid itching to make a name for himself under Weta tutelage probably could. Give little Timmy a chance, Guillermo! Step aside and make us some Antarctican Elder Things!
BAAAAAAAHHHRG!
…
Aaaaaaand… scene.
Thank you, folks, for attending my one and only fanboy entitlement flailabout of the year. In all honesty, I’m sure this Hobbit movie will end up being really cool (how could it not be, with Misters Del Toro and Jackson all teamed up and stuff)? Will it be cool enough to make me like faux-medievalist wizard swordy dungeons, though? Cool enough to get me to play WoW, even?
No, probably not on that second one.
But I am looking forward to a GDT Smaug.
*”Humongous Weenie Shoulder” will be my first album.
I can’t believe I’ve never drawn Death before. I drew Delirium for the SDCC souvenir book a few years ago, but never Death. Or any of the other Endless, actually. It might be fun to do a whole lineup someday…
HORDES of commissions this time around, folks. I can’t thank you enough for all the requests. (But here’s one at least: THANK YOU!) I posted a couple of my favorites below, but you can see a few more in the commissions gallery (including, oddly enough, a drawing of noted action transvestite Eddie Izzard).
Black Canary came out best, I think. Surprised the hell out of me!
If you’d like to commission your own famous DC comic character sketch (or, y’know, something NOT owned by the Time/Warner corporation), send your requests to serenity@heartshapedskull.com. The base price is $50, and $30 for each additional character on the same page.
And since I’m shilling my wares…
Did you know nearly every page of Serenity Rose Vol. 2 is currently available in the Heart Shaped Shop? SR Vol. 2 pages are $50, the dwindling supply of SR Vol. 1 pages are $30 each, and all the Kimmie66 pages are $20 (they’re kinda small). There’s some other stuff in there, too, every stitch of it perfect for gift-giving. I’m sure some sort of holiday is coming up… In fact, it’s the Gofflin’s birthday on Friday. Why not buy my wife the gift of her husband’s artwork, to hang on the wall of the home we share? It’s gotta be better than the crap I bought!
BTW, we’re probably going to go watch Iron Man and have tapas. Consider that a sort of advance “twitter” in blog form.
Thanks again for all the great commission requests! I’ve already got some cool stuff lined up for next time, but don’t be afraid to send some more:
Aw, hang in there, Hellboy. You’ll catch a break someday, ya big lug!
I had very, very minor surgery the other day (finally got rid of that fetal twin that’s been yakking my ear off for 30 years), and the doctor gave me strict orders to lay off the long-winded blog posts for a couple of weeks. (Vigorous exercise and chronic wound-poking are fine, but gassing on for eighty paragraphs about Indiana Jones or whatever? Right out.) But I can still show you my favorite of the last batch of commissions:
Yes, it’s Sex and Violence month here at HSS Commissions Central (apparently!), courtesy of none other than Budd Root’s Cavewoman and Lusiphur the Poison Elf. To be honest, I wasn’t really familiar with either of these characters going in, but let me just say this: If you insist on carrying a gun AND a sword into battle… brother, you better find a use for both. (And if you insist on going naked in the jungle, you’d better befriend some dinosaurs. That’s my motto, anyway.)
As always, you can find more in the commissions gallery, including an Elektra, a Green Arrow, two Avatar folks and a veritable gaggle of pretty goth fellas – holy GOD I took on too much in May…
Anyway, if you’d like to commission your own merry little scribbling, send your request to serenity@heartshapedskull.com. The base price is $50, and $30 for each additional character on the same page. I’m hoping to get another batch done by the first week in July, but between nursing my newly en-Frankensteined body, taking on a new freelance job, and trying to keep up with SR pages, it might take me a bit longer… There will be a waiting list though, so don’t hesitate to shoot me your suggestions.
Also: Is somebody really trying to sell a first printing of SR Vol.1 for $63.93? You’re a MADMAN, Woody! A MADMAN.
DUDE!
Did you manage to secure passes to the San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC if you’re nasty) this year? I sure hope so, ’cause the whole stinking thing is completely sold out this time around. “Even SUNDAY, Aaron?” Yes, mysterious voice rattling around my skull, even Sunday.
Craziness!
Anyway, if you’ll be braving the teeming hordes next week and want to say hello, I’ll be at the SLG booth behind a big stack of freshly minted SR Vol. 1 SECOND PRINTINGS (hey, it’s a big deal to me) at the following times:
THURSDAY, July 24: 2:00 – 3:30
FRIDAY, July 25: 2:00 – 3:00
SATURDAY, July 26: 2:00 – 3:00
SUNDAY, July 27 (BIRFDAY!): 11:00 – 12:00
Come to my table and I will give you this single unit of cardboard:
…FREE OF CHARGE. I might even make a nice little picture on the back, if you want.
Hope to see you there and not forget your name for the millionth time. (Early-onset Alzheimer’s is no laughing matter, kids!)
Nah, that’s too dramatic… But I am going to take down all the original “Goodbye Crestfallen” pages at the end of the month. I just need to find a better way of drawing attention to the original art, maybe by making more of an event out of it (eBay?). I mean, dribbling the pages out week by week in small text links might seem like a winning sales strategy, but you know… even the greatest of mankind’s ideas are occasionally laid low (see: American Capitalism, 1776-2008).
Yeah, I definitely think periodic attacks of the eBay might be in my original art sales future…
But anyway, if you’d like to snag a page or two before I take them down on Nov. 1st, saunter right over HERE for the full list.
HERE AGAIN IS THE LINK TO BUY ORIGINAL ART!
LIKE THIS ONE:
Thanks in advance for buying the stuffs! Or, y’know, even if you don’t buy anything, thanks again for reading the stuffs.
(Man, I can’t wait for you guys to see the next six pages…)
Hooray for no brain cancer!
After nearly two months, one CAT scan, two MRI’s, an EEG, one failed “sleep study” and something called Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (which seems to involve the same technology used to determine the chemical composition of stars, only pointed right at my skull), I finally got word today that all my various sleep disorders and assorted headache troubles are not, thank god, the result of cancer in the brain.
How’s that for good news?
It’s not every day a guy gets to hear he doesn’t have brain cancer. (Have you heard you don’t have brain cancer today?)
The neurologists still aren’t sure exactly what’s been causing my assorted head problems… Scary words like “tumor” and “biopsy” originally came up when the first MRI showed my hippocampus lit up like Christmas and festooned with festive “little dots.” I’m not sure what that was all about, but it might have something to do with having the test done just a few days after the second-worst migraine of my life. But anyway, the second MRI showed my brain essentially back to normal. (As if it ever WAS! BWAHAHAHAHAHAohdeargodmakeitstop…) The “little dots” might actually be scar tissue from 20 years of chronic migraining, believe it or not. And if the notion of scar tissue on the brain freaks you out… well, join the club, buddy.
They put me on this new seizure medication to cut out the night terrors, and so far it seems to be working. The migraines I’m not as worried about, since they only hit me once a year or so (again, like Christmas). But I have some new meds for that, too, so with any luck this’ll be the end of any health-related blog posting for a long, long time.
Man, that was pretty scary. Not as scary as it would’ve been if I’d actually allowed myself to think about it much, but still… scary.
I have a disc right here filled to brimming with images of my brain, but they won’t open on my computer. So here’s an image of a bride and groom being impaled on Triceratops horns instead:
It’s about as good a look inside my head as anything else, to be honest.
Hooray for no brain cancer!
Wow, has it really been five months since I last did sketch commissions? Who stole all that time from me? Was it you, big freelance character design job? Or you, big horrible brain tumor scare? Or maybe it was you, big horrible Sarah Palin scare?
No, none of you? Well SOMEbody’s responsible around here…
Anyhow! I actually did a couple of wee tattoo designs for this batch of commissions. Never done that before. People send me photos of their Serenity Rose tattoos every now and then, but these are my first little stabs at made-to-order skin art. Turned out kind of okay, I think:
“Remember You Will Die” and “Remember to Live,” if you’re wondering.
More stuff all up in the commissions gallery.
Anyway, if you’d like to commission your own merry little scribbling (Christmas is coming, eh?), send your request to serenity@heartshapedskull.com. The base price is $50, and $30 for each additional character on the same page. Shipping is all kinds of free within the U.S., and a mere $3 to parts beyond.
Parts like Obama, Japan!
I really need to learn how to draw faster.
My art style has always been sort of cramped and fussy and sort of timid-looking, which I kind of like (the whole world’s a little to BOLD for me, thanks), but it’s not so good for getting stuff done, and getting it done quick. And being a really fabulous artist isn’t just about how well you can draw, but how quickly you can draw well. I mean, any half-decent artist can make something wonderful if they spend eighteen years on it. It’s the ones who spend eighteen minutes who really make an impression, get all the good jobs, etc., etc.
I’m bringing this up because I just spent most of November working on three little book pitches. I got most of the writing part done, but I only managed to draw ONE measly little bit of finished concept art. When I realized I was in danger of falling behind on the Serenity stuff, I had to put all the rest of it aside for a while. This is simply unacceptable.
Now, I worked in animation for a little while. I know how to scribble things out pretty quick if I have to. In fact, that’s the FUN part. Rough drawings are what I like. I can get four or five Serenity pages done in a day if I’m just scribbling out some rough layouts only I’m meant to see. It’s doing those finished, final, ready-to-present-to-the-public-and/or-potential-publishers artwork that’s like pulling teeth for me. I hate whittling things down to one solid line. I hate having to carefully figure out tones and perspective and three-dimensional rendering. Don’t even talk to me about color.
I find no joy in Photoshop.
It’s sort of like I’m addicted to that initial flare-up of beautiful, scribbley creativity, but then my brain quickly glazes over to the point where I’d rather just ditch it all and go refresh CHUD.com for the twentieth time that day.
I WILL PROVIDE AN EXAMPLE.
This is the extra-sketchy version of page 21 from Goodbye Crestfallen (final here):
At this point I have completely lost interest in the drawing process, and am quite possibly staring at my cat or thinking about John Carpenter’s The Thing. Maybe I’m eating a cookie.
This is indicative of a dangerous lack of what professionals call “followthrough.”
And I have the same problem with writing. I love making plot outlines and scene descriptions and little bits of dialogue and whatnot, but once I’ve come face to face with that vast expanse of horrible, soul-devouring blankness in MS Word… Hey, maybe I should check and see if Matt Yglesias has updated his blog!
Anybody else have this followthrough problem? Does EVERYone have this followthrough problem? How do you get over it? Or more importantly, how do you get over it without an employer breathing fire down the back of your neck to get things done faster?
Merry Muppmess from myself and the entire cast of Muppet Christmas Carol.*
And yes indeed, this was in fact a commission. I just figured I’d use it to make the site all nice for Christmas. So Happy various Holidays, folks! And remember: There’s no law against cranky atheists enjoying some lights, exchanging some gifts, and hugging their moms. You can even enjoy it!
*Except for Sir Michael Caine, whom I have vowed never to draw. (HE knows why.)
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
My resolution this year: cut my Death Note usage to just five names a day (and ALL CRIMINALS, AARON).
KInd of wriggling things around here at heartshapedskull.com at the moment, doing a little Almost Spring Cleaning and suchlike. (Man, how long was that radio thing dead?) I’ll probably be adding things (hey, banners!) and shifting bits around for a little while yet, but nothing too drastic. The next big site update won’t happen until Vol. 3 is ready to roll out.
I decided to ditch most of the Google ads and go with Project Wonderful instead, mostly because they let you pick and choose which ads to allow on the site (“Yes on 8?” No on Google). If any of you guys use the PW, advertising here is super-dirty-cheap at the moment, so by all means, let’s get something cooler than Amazon up there.
I’ve got a couple of other money-making schemes in the works here, too, all in pursuit of what I like to call “living the dream.” Which in this case means “sitting in my own home, at my own desk, getting all my bills paid doing nothing but drawing Serenity Rose comics (preferably two a week) and maybe a few fun little sketch commissions every month, and never having to worry about getting any freelance work ever again.” God, it’s so close… I only need like $600/month to live right now. It’s like the dream is just barely pokable right now, but juuuuuust out of grasping distance. You guys have been just amazingly supportive of me and the comic, but I need to come up with some more interesting stuff to offer and some new strategies for bringing in more eyes…
Grasping schemes (upcoming):
1) PRINTS. Goodbye Crestfallen will definitely be published in paper form as soon as it’s done, but will it have all the color intact? Yeah… pretty unlikely, at least for now. So I thought I might offer full-color, hi-res prints of individual pages either through this site or something like etsy. Some new color prints would be lot of fun, too, if I could carve out some time. God, that’d be awesome.
2) NEW ORIGINAL PAGES. Several decades ago I promised to auction off some of the new Goodbye Crestfallen pages on good ol’ ebay. THAT TIME HAS COME. By the end of the month I’ll have a batch of four or five pages up for any and all possible bids. Requests?
3) LOCKETS. Heart-shaped skull lockets. Metal ones. I would dearly love to make this happen, but I just haven’t the speckiest of a speck of an idea how. We’ve thought about making them ourselves, but man, there just isn’t enough time in the day. Anybody have an idea?
4) ADVERTISING. Did I mention I made proper, I’m-serious-about-this, grown-up web proprietor banners? IT IS SO. One of them even has a little animation tucked in. If the Project Wonderful thing works out okay, it’d probably be a good idea to throw that money back into advertising on other folk’s sites, too….
5) COMMISSIONS. Oh wait… I’m already doing those! And hey, I have some pictures, even!
More stuff all up in the commissions gallery.
Anyway, if you’d like to commission your own wee drawering, send your request to serenity@heartshapedskull.com. The base price is $50, and $30 for each additional character on the same page. Shipping is all kinds of free within the U.S., and a mere $3 to parts beyond.
You could even etch it on your body permanently:
AWESOME.
AS PROMISED.
Okay, this’ll be sort of a test run… I have four pages from Goodbye Crestfallen up for sale on eBay right now, with a minimum bid of a paltry $5. That’s right: FIVE AMERICAN DOLLARS. I’m expecting it to go slightly higher than that by the end, but if it doesn’t, no worries… I have a bottle of gin and a loaded revolver on hand just in case.
Here’s what we’ve got (clicks and such for the listing):
BIdding ends this Sunday, March 29th.
And thanks in advance for the bids… Even if we only get these pages up to $5.10, every thin dime helps to keep this whole endeavor alive for another month (I have a machine that converts dimes to hamburgers). And if you don’t have the money to bid, no problem. Thank you just for reading (my other machine converts site hits to a delicious fish slurry).
When Jamie “Bear” Smart came to me a few months ago and asked if I’d contribute something to his upcoming zombie comic anthology, I did what any red-blooded American comic artist would do: I laughed at his sickening un-American accent and stabbed him with the nearest bald eagle.
Then I thought about it a bit (while Jamie slowly dragged himself to “hospital”), and realized this could be an opportunity to satisy my life’s #1 greatest ambition: to draw people with flies stuck to their eyeballs, and have other people look at those drawings.
Today, that dream finally comes true.
FAT CHUNK Vol. 2: ZOMBIE lives!
Fat Chunk is an anthology of cool zombie bits by 60-some-odd comic artists, all of whom (judging just from the little icons here) make me look like a sad little rag doll hurled into the corner and covered with urine. God, there’s some cool stuff there.
Available at only the coolest comic shops right this very moment!
…
…Wait, your shop doesn’t have it? Jesus, why do you buy stuff there?? They have “Marvel Bromance” but not this?? GET OUT BEFORE THE INFECTION SPREADS!
(NOTE: The usual online suspects say the book isn’t out yet for some reason, but here are some links anyhow: Amazon, Things From Another World, and SLG direct.)
…For it does not have THESE:
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Yep, I have entered the magical world of PRINT-MAKING, and I’m hoping you folks will find these images worthy of your wall-space.
(Because if you don’t, this muscular behemoth of a printer I bought might just tear itself loose, wrench a wall off your home and print swear words all over grandma. This thing is BIG. I cannot STOP it.)
I spent WAAAYYYY more time than I should have fussing with these prints and making them just perfect, but I think it paid off… My little world is composed almost exclusively of rough sketches and (mostly greyscale) comic books, so I don’t often spend so much time working with color. Or at this SCALE… These images are printed on 13 x 19 inch Canon Photo Paper Plus (Semi-gloss), so they’ll take up a decent chunk of real estate on your wall. They seem almost ostentatious, you know?
DETAILS: The prints are selling for $18 each, or $50 for a set of all three. They’re signed, and they all come with the legendary “goblin doodle” I’ve been including for so many years. Every batch of prints comes delivered flat in a heavy-duty, rigid photo mailer (although if you prefer them rolled, we could probably work something out). Postage is $6 in the U.S. and Canada, $10 everywhere else.
Paypal is preferred, but personal checks and money orders are a possibility.
E-mail me at SERENITY@HEARTSHAPEDSKULL.COM to place your order or ask questions or verbally berate me or offer me real estate or what-have-you.
(And yeah, I should have prints for Comic Con.)
The prints’ permanent home is in the HSS store right here: http://www.heartshapedskull.com/store/
…And also in the brand new ETSY STORE:
Aside from the prints, in the Etsyplace you’ll find lots of original pages (with nice, see-able pictures, even!) from Serenity Rose, Kimmie66, and Blabbermouth, and before too long we’ll hopefully we’ll get some OTHER things in there, as well. Keep checking back!
THANK YOU to everyone who orders one of my fancy new art prints. They were a lot of fun to make, and I’m CERTAIN I’ll be making more.
Because the printer, it watches me.
The Humboldt Squid have invaded San Diego, and so will I. Tens of thousands of me, each with razor-sharp tentacles and a Slave Girl Leia outfit.
You can find at least one of me (the one WITHOUT the fearsome tentacles or golden bikini) encamped at the SLG booth (#1815, right next to the DC Compound) at the following times:
THURSDAY: 2:30 – 4:00
FRIDAY: 5:30 – 7:00
SATURDAY: 11:00 – 12:30, 2:00 – 3:30
SUNDAY: 10:00 – 11:00
That first one on Saturday has me sat right next to Jhonen, a particularly horrific curse detailed in great and terrible detail here: http://www.questionsleep.com/mindspill/?p=1003 I figure I’ll haul off and slug every person in line like that guy next to Robin Hood in Time Bandits.
(INSERT YOUTUBE CLIP HERE!)
Will the NEW PRINTS be available? INDEED THEY WILL.
See you in Squid Hell!
Huh. I seem to have a finished book here. 2 years of my life and 122 painfully pencil-rendered pages, all formatted, zipped-up and delivered to SLG Publishing. Should be some news about that before too long.
I feel like I should be more… jubilant right now, but honestly I just feel sort of… deflated. I’m really happy with how the book turned out – or, well, the book feels like ME at least, it feels RIGHT, which all I can really ask for – and I’m beyond excited to see it all printed up and proper… I just don’t have that “VICTORIOUS CONQUERING HERO” feeling I thought I’d have.
Postpartum depression, probably.
But HEY, nothing cures the old “nothin’ to do stomach churns” more than having stuff to do, right? I’m currently hovering over a couple of large-ish professional-type projects right now, among other things (planning Vol. 3), but I should have some time to reopen the art commissions queue for a while. I know a couple of you guys have been waiting a while… sorry about that. Your time has come!
COMMISSIONS! are $50 ($30 for each additional character on the page) for a pencil sketch on 9×12 Bristol. I’ll draw pretty much anything you’d like, from my characters to other people’s characters to your characters to YOU to your friends to your mom to your garbage man to your garbage man’s secret lover to your garbage man’s secret lover’s vengeful spouse in the act of walling them both up forever in the basement and cackling like a madwoman to what-have-you. Stuff like this:
More details (and examples) on the COMMISSIONS PAGE. Hey, pretty snazzy!
Please, won’t you help defeat the Ennui of Completion? Thank you kindly!
(I should probably also work up some new prints of some kind…. Any suggestions?)
(See how I didn’t bury all that good information in some long-winded paragraph with a million silly parentheticals like a usually do? Right up top and totally unambiguous this time. Nice job with the marketing, man!)
“When you’re a witch with night terrors, you might just start conjuring unspeakable monsters in your sleep. That’s what’s happening to Serenity Rose, noted witch, artist, and social-phobic, in the much-anticipated second volume of Serenity Rose by Aaron Alexovich (Kimmie66, Confessions of a Blabbermouth).
In Serenity Rose Volume Two: Goodbye, Crestfallen, due out from SLG Publishing in December 2009, Serenity is doing her best to stay awake, but if that’s not enough to make her crack, the government goons hassling her, the freaked-out tourists ogling her, and the sadistic blond witch that’s been following her will! Add into that some heavy friendship drama and the past coming back to haunt her, and it’s no wonder the stress is just about killing Sera. Can she get her head on straight before she brings the whole town down with her?
‘I wanted to seriously push myself art-wise, and tell a tight, focused, very personal story with a lot of heavy horror atmosphere and some intense, bizarre action scenes,’ said Alexovich. ‘I think people who liked the first book will be really surprised by this one. It’s the best stuff I’ve ever done, and I’m beyond excited that SLG decided to let everyone see it in full, bloody, ectoplasmicky color. I promise not to make them wait 78 years for the next one.’
Serenity Rose Volume Two: Goodbye, Crestfallen is a 144-page, full-color graphic novel full of horror, turmoil — and monsters as only Alexovich can draw them. Its ISBN is 978-1-59362-181-0 and it can be PRE-ORDERED AT COMIC BOOK STORES NOW with the DIAMOND CODE OCT090665.
Established in 1986, SLG Publishing is a San Jose, California based publisher of comic books, graphic novels and related merchandise. Some of SLG’s more notable comics and creators have included Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez, Milk and Cheese by Evan Dorkin and Zombies Calling by Faith Erin Hicks. For more information, visit the SLG Publishing website, WWW.SLGCOMIC.COM.”
PLEASE, SHIELD YOUR EYES AND PRESERVE YOUR SANITY!
Some years ago, on a suffocating August night here in Ol’ Virginny, my good friend Jhonen V. and I, having recently eaten our fill of filthy meat and raw terbacky, retired to the porch of my crumbling Antebellum mansion to watch mosquitoes drain our blood and reminisce about the old times. Between puffs on our corn-cob pipes we spoke of many things, but, as was our custom, the conversation soon turned to our mutual friend Rikki S., and his terrible ways with Ham.
HERE IS THAT CONVERSATION IN FULL.
Soon after that fateful night, Jhonen began to fill a FLICKR SET with etchings of the Unspeakable Thing, as if by forcing strangers to render the hateful image again and again he could somehow exorcize it from his agonized mind. (As to his ultimate success or failure I cannot say, as the coroner’s document remains painfully elusive on all matters immaterial.) I, for my part, returned to the darkest corner of my decaying ancestral home and crouched there in the stultifying shadows, swaying and staring, staring, EVER STARING, and thinking only of the Hams and the Furnace and the hateful Thing that would one day bring both of them to me.
I crouched there for 2 years, 10 months, 3 days and 13 hours… then someone commissioned me to do this drawing for fifty bucks.
“WHATEVER,” I said.
And then Rikki colored it, it being HIS Ham Chamber and all. I think we can all agree it’s pretty hideous and disturbing and you wouldn’t want to be stuck sitting next to it on a bus or anything, but man… Not sure it was worth dying in a madhouse over or anything. But ha! I guess that’s just how it goes sometimes.
Crazy stuff, man!
Get your own HAM DEMON PRINT, signed by me and the Mr. Ham Demon himself, Rikki Simons, right about here:
Why yes, that IS Sonic the Hedgehog’s pal Tails menacing a Warhammer 40K Space Marine with a “chainsaw sword” while Frank Zappa saunters by in the background with a disapproving look on his face. What of it?
Bunches more, including one (1) image of two (2) David Byrnes, in the COMMISSIONS GALLERY. That place is getting to be the coolest gallery on my site, actually… If only my whole professional life could be nothing but Serenity Rose and peculiar commissions.
If you’d like to request your OWN rendering of Frank Zappa (or anything else) send your demands to SERENITY@HEARTSHAPEDSKULL.COM. The base price is $50, and $30 for each additional character on the same page. Shipping is all kinds of free within the U.S., and a mere $3 to parts beyond.
I probably won’t be able to dig into any new commissions until around December 1st, so this is pretty much THE call for CHRISTMAS REQUESTS right here… And I already have a few folks in the queue, so if you were hoping for a sketch of mine to wad up in somebody’s stocking this year, NOW IS YOUR TIME!
HERE ARE SUPERHEROES:
One of these guys is called “Wiccan.” Not to be confused with Brendan “BAD ASS” Li’s immortal character of the same name. (COMIX: Not just for kids anymore!)
Wow, has it really been EIGHT MONTHS since my last eBay auction? Doesn’t seem possible… You, my friends, have been woefully under-served! Sorry about that.
BUT ANY-WHO. I have FOUR new pages from Serenity Rose Volume 2: Goodbye, Crestfallen
HERE ARE THE THINGS (clicks and such for the listing):
BIdding ends this Monday, November 30th.
Thank you in advance for the biddery! I’m not quite sure when the next set will go up for auction, but I suspect it won’t take another EIGHT MONTHS. And, of course, let me know if there’s a page you’re particularly interested in… I’ll try to include it in the next batch.
I’m sorry, Corpse Kid. I wanted Goodbye, Crestfallen! to be out in time for Christmas, too, but it’s just not going to happen. In fact, it turns out the book won’t even be out on the shelves until late January. Ish.
So no new Serenity Rose book for Christmas this year.
What’s that, Corpse Kid? You want to know what went wrong? Well, it’s complicated… It’s a COLOR book this time, y’see, and a color book means working with a new printer in China, and working with a printer in China means shipping via boat across the Pacific, and shipping via boat across the- Yeah, you’re already glazing over a bit there, aren’t you? It’s okay, I don’t really get it, either. It’s just COMPLICATED, right?
What I DO know, however, from this ADVANCE COPY sitting right here in front of me right now, is that the final book will be ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS. SLG has done a tremendous job in putting this one together, and I honestly couldn’t be happier. The colors are stunning, the tones are perfect, all the detail is crystal clear, and the binding -because I know you’ve been wondering- appears STURDY ENOUGH TO WITHSTAND THE FURY OF A LUMBERJACK. (Provided said lumberjack expresses his fury by re-reading comic book compilations, in a normal manner, every few weeks for a reasonable number of years.)
The thing is NICE, Corpse Kid. Very much worth the extra wait. (Now please call off the Halloween Town invasion of China. The Ghost Festival does not need any “gothing up” today, thank you.)
For the rest of you guys…
I’m really sorry about the delay… I know a lot of you were hoping to give someone the book as a gift this year, so this really sucks. One day I will have my own personal armada of ocean-going comic-delivery warships, but, sadly, that day has not yet arrived.
But I CAN offer you this tiny thing:
SEND ME AN E-MAIL, and I’ll put your name on the list to get a SIGNED copy of SR Vol. 2 as soon as they arrive here in the U.S…. And I’ll even include a little goblin sketch with every book. The price will be $19.95 (cover price), plus shipping… but we won’t worry about that until the books are actually here. (And yeah, all you guys outside the U.S. are eligible.)
After you’ve contacted me, I’ll send you a link to a higher-res version of the image above (300 dpi TIF file, 5 x 7.66″) so that you can print it out and, y’know, put it in a card, tuck it in with another gift, whatever you need.
Does that sound okay? I know it’s not quite the same thing as a real, live book, but it’s SOME thing, right? And like I was telling the Corpse Kid up there… all this extra hassle for color printing will most DEFINITELY be worth it come January. (Trust me.)
“See how I transform this old rat inTO a most deLIGHTful hat!”
Happy Holidays!
Would you believe me if I told you that Snowman right there is the very first Invader Zim-related art commission I’ve ever done? IT IS TRUE.
For additional curiosities, including a sketch of something called a “Jacob’s Ladderlope,” kindly consult the COMMISSIONS GALLERY.
And, as always, if you’d like to request your OWN crime against nature, please send all of your plaintive howls for acceptance to SERENITY@HEARTSHAPEDSKULL.COM. The base price for art commissions is $50, and $30 for each additional character on the same page. Shipping is all kinds of free within the U.S., and a mere $3 to parts beyond.
The Slow Boat from China has arrived, and Serenity Rose Vol. 2: Goodbye, Crestfallen! will finally (finally!) be set loose upon the comic shops THIS WEEK.
To celebrate, what do you say we get down and do a good old-fashioned BOOK SIGNING, comic-style.
The kindly prestidigitators at ALAKAZAM COMICS in Irvine, CA have invited me to come sully the reputation of their fine establishment this SATURDAY, JANUARY 30th, from 4-6 PM. I’ll be chatting with fans, doing sketches, selling original pages, and pulling rabbit after rabbit out of my wee little tophat until we all suffocate under 60,000 lbs. of luxurious angora fur. (Or until 6 PM, whichever comes first.)
Irvine is about an hour down the coast from Los Angeles, so hopefully a lot of you Southern California types will be able to make it. Check out the Alakazam site for more specific directions and so forth.
I think the last time I did a book signing outside of the San Diego Comic-Con was… never? Was it never? Might’ve been never. Wait… No, I did a couple of Alternative Press Expos a long, loooong, lllllooooooooonnnnngg time ago. ENORMOUS THANKS to Holly at Alakazam for her concerted efforts to get me out of my house and down to Irvine over the past few years. (And if anyone else out there happens to own/manage a comic book store in a (especially in the NON Southern California-ish parts of the country) and wants to set up a similar event, it could very well be possible.)
See you in Irvine!
I’ll be signing fresh new copies of Serenity Rose Vol. 2 at Alakazam Comics here in sunshiney Southern California TOMORROW, January 30th, from 4-6 PM. (Tell all your Facebooks!)
Will Sera get pulled out of a hat, BUNNYSTYLE?
IT COULD HAPPEN!
THANK YOU to everyone who showed up for Big Fun Signy-Time Goodness yesterday. It went even better than I hoped, and the time sort of just zipped on by. (Was it really two hours? It couldn’t have been two hours….)
Photographic evidence of my existence (and that of Ms. Gofflin and her big pillowy home-made troll doll, Toofus) can be found on Alakazam’s Facebook thingee RIGHT ABOUT HERE.
And thanks again to Holly, Will and Marco at Alakazam for organizing the event! God, that store is just BLEEDING cool… Nicely designed, well-stocked, not a single CHUD hiding in the corners… Honestly, if everyone in the comic industry had the same enthusiasm, creativity and commitment to detail these Alakazamians have, our business would be bigger than Moving Pictures. We need loads more people like that, so please, if you live in the SoCally-type area, show your support! (I hear they might have some extra signed copies of my books, if you’re into that sort of thing…)
And now a small story…
The first time I ever approached someone with the specific intention of obtaining their autograph was when I spotted Siouxsie Sioux at O’Hare Airport in Chicago eight years ago. We were both waiting for the same flight to San Francisco, and we had a LONG time to wait, so I had PLENTY of time to sit and squirm and just generally work my stomach into thick, twitchy emotional knots over whether or not approaching her would be “the thing to do.”
As we were about to board the plane, I sprang into action:
“Excuse me, I’m, uh… I’m a big fan of, uh, yours… Would you, uh… would you mind, uh, signing… uh, something… for me?” (12 additional “uh’s” removed for clarity.)
“Well I don’t know. What do you have for me?”
NOW. One way of interpreting this question -the normal, not-insane-person kind of way- is that she’s asking me for some specific object upon which to write her name. A sheet of paper, say. Or a Compact Disc. Perhaps even a boob.
I, however, chose to interpret the question as a request for a trade: “I will give you my autograph, strange twitchy kid who’s been gawking at me for the past hour while I discussed Coen Brothers movies with my fellow Banshees, provided you have something of equivalent value for ME.”
I glanced down at my clipboard (the VERY ONE YOU SAW YESTERDAY, assuming you were at the Alakazam signing, which you were because you’re awesome-sauce).
“I um… I could give you this, um, lovely… drawing here.”
She took the clipboard from me and did her swirly little name thing right under the top-most drawing.
“THANK YOU!” I said (probably). She smiled and turned to get back in line.
“THE TRADE, YOU FOOL!” my brain shrieked at me, in the style of Ralphie from A Christmas Story. “YOU’VE FORGOTTEN THE TRADE!”
Thinking fast, I unclipped the drawing -the very one she had JUST SIGNED- and tried to hand it to her. “I was serious, you know! You, uh, you can seriously have this drawing!”
She didn’t even look confused. She just smiled again, said “Not with my name on it,” and strolled onto the plane. I got on a few minutes later and tried not to make eye contact as I looked for my seat.
NO, THIS STORY DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE.
But it does explain why I have, on my wall right at this moment, a framed printout of Mary Ann Mirolette signed by Siouxsie Sioux:
Why did I tell that story? Well, if you are a fan of Serenity Rose or my stuff in general, there is a greater than 50% chance that you are sort of introverted. You’re a shy person, like me. Not the type to go up and talk to one of your favorite artists at a book signing or a comic convention or, y’know, just out on the street. Maybe you’d really LIKE to do that kind of thing from time to time, but you just feel too… I don’t know, intimidated or whatever.
But you shouldn’t feel that way.
I’m the guy who tried to pay Siouxsie Sioux for her autograph… WITH HER OWN AUTOGRAPH.
And I’m not the only artist with a story like that, either.
I’ll see you at the next signing!
CHARACTER ones, even! For the first time ever!*
Vicious is available RIGHT THIS VERY MOMENT at the SLG store…
…And Serenity should be there by the end of the month:
I’ll post another link as soon as they’re available!
And thank you very much to Squeek on our own Bubblegum Noir forum for suggesting I turn that old Vicious print into a t-shirt design. (She did a mock-up and everything!) Looks snazzy, even in grey.
BURN YOUR HEART-SHAPED-SKULL SHIRTS AND BURY THE ASHES FOREVER! There’s a new sheriff in town, and his shirts have CHARACTERS!
*Wow… Ever? Jeez… Sorry about that. What the hell?
Every so often I mention doing various “freelance” jobs here and there, just to get the bills paid and so forth. This might strike some of you as somewhat mysterious, since I never post any examples of this so-called “freelance” work. “Is he ASHAMED of this work?” you might ask. “Is it nothing but Smurf pornography and ‘peeing Calvin’ decals?”
The answer is no, it’s not ALL “peeing Calvins.” In fact, there’s some really cool stuff in there! I just don’t do a tremendous LOT of this kind of stuff, is all (I should do more, but I don’t). And quite a bit of the work I DO take on is concept design for various animated projects that don’t end up getting, y’know, made, and are therefore relegated to The Island of Misfit Copyrights forevermore. It’s sort of frustrating, actually. There’s a lot of work piled up on my hard drive I’d like to dust off and put on the site.
Not EVERYTHING gets locked away in the development basement, though. For example…
This here is a series of webcomics I wrote, penciled, finished, and colored as sort of a promotional tie-in for a PC game currently in production (check out the cool trailer dealie on the site). Lylian is about a wee kid trapped in a filthy, monster-filled insane asylum with nothing but the whippy arms of her straightjacket to protect her. Each page I’m working on has to do with a different hospital inhabitant and how they may (or may not) have gotten there. Not sure how many of these things we’ll do, but the plan is to put one out every other week or so for a little while, at least. There are two up there right now.
Go check ‘em out, eh? (Lower right hand corner, innit.) They’ve been lots of fun to work on so far.
Three cheers for projects you’re allowed to see!
Just like you always wanted!
As promised, the Sera t-shirts are up in the SLG store right now. Click the image and prepare your eyes to enter paradise:
And of course, the Vicious ones are still available right HERE. In all the sizes of the rainbow.
Thanks for looking and hopefully buying several dozen!
All right, guys, it’s a new month, so let’s take a look at February’s The Remains of the Day chart:
As those of you who follow my twitter feed will no doubt recall, I finally saw the 1993 Merchant Ivory production The Remains of the Day (starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson) early last month, enjoyed it tremendously, and then began weighing every movie I saw from that point on against the The Remains of the Day Scale (TROTDS).
As you can see, among all the movies I saw from start to finish in the month of February, not one of them successfully reached TROTDL. Among the contenders, only current Oscar hopeful The Hurt Locker, Yasujiro Ozu’s elegiac Tokyo Story, and 1950′s “camp” classic Sunset Boulevard came anywhere near TROTDL (although Boris Karloff’s 1968 swan song Targets did make an unexpectedly strong showing, due partly to its surprisingly realistic tone, partly to the undeniable KARLOFF-ness of Boris Karloff, and partly to a murderer who remains terrifying not despite his ill-fitting pants, but because of his ill-fitting pants).
I should note here that I DID, in fact, see the Lon Chaney version of Phantom of the Opera in February, as well, but as I saw it BEFORE The Remains of the Day, its proper place on the scale would be purely conjectural and, therefore, not within the purview of this experiment. It was real bad-ass, though.
Roger Ebert wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. For more information on Roger Ebert, go here.
I don’t know why I let so much time go by between these things. If another month goes by and I still haven’t given you guys a crack at the next set of pages, will someone please give me a quick kick?*
HERE ARE THE GOODS… Five of them this time, including CRAZY AIRBORNE WITCH ACTION!
BIdding ends on Sunday, March 7th. Roundabout Six-ish, California time.
Good luck, everybody, and thanks in advance for helping support the impending existence of Serenity Rose Vol. 3!
TREMBLE, PUNY MORTALS, FOR YOU ARE IN THE PRESENCE OF DOOM!
Man, I sure do love DOOM. He’s been my favorite Marvel guy for as long as I can remember. Well, except for that brief period between the ages of 4 and 5 when I was obsessed with The Incredible Hulk, but nuts to that… Dr. Victor von Doom is a big, BOOMING asshole with a metal plate welded to his face, a spooky castle full of spooky super-science, and an old-fashioned (almost quaint) devotion to Total World Domination. How could you not love the guy? He OWNS HIS OWN COUNTRY, for god’s sake! “Latveria,” it’s called, pop. 50,000… Capital city: Doomstadt… Airport: Doomsport… National holiday: Doom’s Day… Citizens: currently living in the manner of medieval peasantry – FOR SO DOOM DEMANDS.
My ardor for The Incredible Hulk has cooled quite a bit over the past 27 years, but Doom… the Doom abides.
Above, we see Dr. Doom depicted in mortal combat with a dapper be-scarfed gentleman wielding a giant spoon.
And here we have one image of Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender and one image of Snow White from Fables giving Bigby Wolf the ol’ “Flamenco Dip.”
For more oddities, including an image of a man holding an image of himself (OR IS HE?), might I direct your attention to the COMMISSIONS GALLERY?
And, as always, if you’d like to request your OWN image of a man holding an image of himself (or super-hero, fire-bender, fairy tale character, Frank Zappa, naked Frank Zappa, naked fox girl, naked rutabaga, favorite bit of fishing tackle, etc, etc, etc.) e-mail me at SERENITY@HEARTSHAPEDSKULL.COM. The base price for art commissions is $50, and $30 for each additional character on the same page. Shipping is all kinds of free within the U.S., and a measly $3 to parts beyond.
Hope to hear from you soon, Doom-lovers!
…Or, actually, ONE new print and TWO new units of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder:
Yep, the ones on the right and left are exactly what they seem” Every single story page from Serenity Rose Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, shrunk down, meticulously arranged in grid form (taking way longer than I thought it would), and printed out on 13×19 sheets of Canon Premium Matte Fine Art paper. Why? BECAUSE IT’S COOL, that’s why!
“Sharing your mental illness with others is the very essence of art-making.”
The resolution of the wee tiny images is just astonishing (jpegs just can’t do them justice). The text isn’t legible, of course, but the images… SUCH PRETTINESS. Thank you, Canon PIXMA Pro9000 Mk. II! Never again will I question you insatiable hunger for ink and virgins!
I’ve gotten a few requests to make THIS particular image available in print form, too:
So there it is! Available in two sizes: GIANT SIZE (13×19 inch) or smallish (8.5×11 inch), pretty as a peach either way. I think this one might be my favorite print of the lot, as a matter of fact. (Hooray for simplicity!)
All these prints are waiting patiently for your love in the Heart-Shaped-Shop etsy store right now.
The original Serenity-Vicious-Tess triptych is still there, too, but who knows for how much longer… A NEW ERA OF PRINTMAKING is upon us, my friends, and the old gods must soon make way!
Thanks again for all your support!
I HAVE A NEW COMIC BOOK FOR YOU.
Their book is called ELDRITCH! (with an exclamation point!), a comic action horror sci-fi adventure drama that injects a big fat gob of decaying Lovecraftian awfulness straight into the oily face of sunny Botoxed California, and you can read the first eight pages on DC’s ZUDA site right now. To see the rest, you’ll have to VOTE. (Yeah, it’s that kind of thing.) There are a lot of great competitors this month, so we could really use your help!
ELDRITCH! is a collaboration between me and the grotesquely talented Drew Rausch, co-creator of Sullengrey and Batman.* I wrote the thing, we worked together on the character designs and layouts, Drew penciled, inked, and (beautifully!) colored the whole deal, and, finally, I dropped in a bunch of word balloons and slaughtered a whole mess of baby chicks – AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE COMIC-MAKING PROCESS.
Here’s a sweet banner thing that Drew made:
I’ve been waiting many a year to unleash the Sobczek siblings upon you. But the day has finally arrived. With your help, hopefully we’ll get to make the NEXT 50+ pages.
OFFICIAL SYNOPTICUS:
NEW ELDRITCH, CA: A decaying former tourist haven on the Pacific coast.
Anya Sobczek (SUB-CHECK): A restless but committed scientific rationalist with a hair-trigger temper and an arm full of Charles Darwin tattoos. She will do violence in the name of science, oh yes she will.
Owen Sobczek (SUB-CHECK): A sensitive, poetic lad drawn to all things unexplainable, mystic, and obscure. “Magick” is the word of his day, every day, no matter what his irritable sister might say about it.
Ever since grade school, the preternaturally brilliant Anya and Owen Sobczek have been waging the bloodiest war in the history of sibling rivalries. And up until now, Owen’s been on the losing end of nearly every pound of ordnance. It was fun for a while, sure, but at this point little brother’s getting tired of life in big sister’s overachieving shadow. Owen would give his right hand to show her up once and for all…
…And now he has a new trick.
ELDRITCH is the story of Anya’s bull-headed quest to find the source of her brother’s hideous, near-uncontrollable new “demonic” powers, a quest that pits her up against a pretentious coven of super-powered teenage witches, a gibbering tentacled maneater of a baby, a hidden laboratory of atrocities, and one pop-collared, spray-tanned, walking midlife-crisis named Ted Newbarn… who could very well be the most dangerous living thing on earth.
SCIENCE VS. SUPERSTITION and a bubbling infection about to crush California with a thousand quivering tentacles…. It is ELDRITCH!
*Note: Drew may not have created Batman. Pretty sure he made Speedball, though. PRETTY SURE.
GREAT THANK YOUS to every one of you who took the time out to vote for my new comic, ELDRITCH! on DC’s Zuda site thus far. Artist “Devilish” Drew Rausch and I* really appreciate you guys braving the Zuda sign-up gauntlet to show your support for our hard work. Because of you, we’re already up at #2 in this month’s rankings, which is sort of shocking, considering all the rough competition this time around.
But we can do better! ONE better, to be exact. We need your help, guys, and lots of it. The prize for reaching #1 by the end of the month is pretty significant (enough to finance SRV3, in fact), and the prize for staying at #2 is… nothing. Nothing at all. TERRIFYING.
If you’ve already VOTED, awesome! Thanks again. If you could help spread the word, you know, Twitter-Facebook-bloggy-whatever-style, that’d be even awesomer. If you HAVEN’T voted yet, all you need is a ZUDA ACCOUNT (it’s a free, quick, no-strings-attached sort of thing) and you’re ready to vote.
ALSO: Through a little Sam Spadian sleuthing, Drew discovered there are actually THREE things that count toward our ranking, so be sure to hit them all. They’re not immediately obvious (I sure as heck wouldn’t have noticed all of them), so here’s a little scribble:
VOTE, RATE, and FAVORITE. It turns out all three matter. Who knew? I certainly didn’t!
(And I guess comments come into play somehow, too, so please leave a little feedback if you can!)
Thanks again, everybody. You’ve all been awesome so far, and with your help, we can not only get the other 52 pages of ELDRITCH! made, but raise the funds for Serenity Rose Vol. 3 at the same time. WINS ALL AROUND.
It’s all pretty much in your hands. Go team and so on!
* “Agonizin’” Aaron A?
Over at his BLOG, ELDRITCH! art-lord “Dolby-Lovin’” Drew Rausch recently posted his first sketch of our fire-breathing main character, Anya.
So here’s mine:
Scanned directly from the original crumbling, yellowed papyrus dated ca. October, 2005. Believe it or not, ELDRITCH! (then called “FESTER”) began life as a pitch for DC’s dearly departed MINX line of books for teenage girls. Will it shock you to learn the book didn’t exactly fit the “real girls in the real world” vibe they were going for at the time? (I still say “magic tentacle infections” are a REAL PROBLEM, DC. LOOK IT UP.)
ELDRITCH! kind of took a backseat for a few years while I worked on Blabbermouth, Fables, and Serenity Rose Vol. 2 (among other things), but it never stopped rattling around in my brainparts. When Drew suggested we collaborate on something, it seemed like a natural.
But back to Anya… “Ol’ Darwin Tats” here is the one part of ELDRITCH! that hasn’t changed much over the past five years of brain rattling and collaboratory re-jiggering. After Sera and Vicious, Anya is my favorite of my own little creatures, so I’m beyond 0happy to FINALLY be able to introduce her to you all. Drew has a wee character bio on his blog, but I’d rather let you learn about her in the next 52+ pages of ELDRITCH! (FINGERCROSS.) For now, let’s just say she’s a combination of “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Huxley, Harry Houdini, and Warrior Queen Boudica.
Maybe a bit of The Lord Humungus, too.
The Ayatollah of Rock n’ Rollah VOTE FOR ELDRITCH! RIGHT NOW.
Thank you very much to everyone who’s voted so far! At last count, we’re up to 127 “favorites,”, our star rating is brilliant, and we have quite a lot of nice comments, but we still very much need your help, so please SIGN UP and vote! WE CAN DO THIS! The gasoline will be ours! Then you shall have your revenge!
Collaboration can be a good thing, folks.
Maybe not always. Maybe not even “usually,” but in the case of ELDRITCH! it definitely has been.
Now, most of the time (MOST of the time), I tend to be drawn more to “single artist” types of projects, on the general principle that the closer we get to an artist’s unfiltered personal brainspew, the more unique the experience will be. Collaboration has a tendency to smooth out all those strangely fascinating chunks of ragged mindchunk into shiny (but familiar) little pebbles of sanity.
Sometimes, however, those chunks NEED smoothing. Not everything that tumbles out of your head should necessarily be seen by humans.
Over at his BLOG, ELDRITCH! artist “Diamond” Drew Rausch (Van Halen, 1973-1985) recently posted his original drawings of our SECOND-most important character, Anya’s resentful “occultist” little brother, Owen. Drew’s already written a lot of good stuff about how Owen developed, so I won’t get all repeaty… Let’s just say my original, un-smoothed take on the character was more “smug” than “smoldering…”
Oh… Oh dear god no. NO. Nooooooooooooooowith the Morrissey flowers and the elevator shoes and the BELT BUCKLE* and that string of, um… of… what the hell is that, a string of PEARLS attached to his waist?
NO. Just… no.
Let’s wash the taste of THAT out of our brains with more old sketches of Anya:
Ahhhhh…. MUCH better. Let’s all thank the heavens we have Drew around to shape Owen into something a human being can actually look at without injury.
Thanks again to all of you who took the time to vote (and rate and “favorite” and leave a comment for) ELDRITCH! so far. Still hovering at #2 at the moment, but with your help, #1 IS TANTALIZINGLY WITHIN REACH. Please SIGN UP NOW and be a part of unleashing unspeakable horrors upon the earth! We can do this!
* “COWBOY.” I put “COWBOY” on his belt buckle.
“We begin, as ALL good stories do, with Charles Darwin traveling through time in a bathysphere.”
Mr. Darwin’s submersible begins its voyage as a “shoulder cap” at the dawn of life, partially obscured in a big flubber of bubbles. He observes the entire history of human evolution as it ribbons its merry way along the “arm of time,” beginning with a formless glob of chemistry and continuing through unicellular life, sponges, flatworms, fish, reptiles, mammals… Lemur, proconsul, australopithecine, homo erectus, and, ultimately, homo sapiens, US, wielding a torch to ignite a forearm-mounted ROCKETSHIP TO THE STARS. (The stars in question being knuckles. Knuckles on their way to split your damn fool lip if you talk smack about my man Chuck D(arwin).)
(NOTE: I just finished reading The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins, and it turns out that Pikaia creature might not be as important to our evolutionary story as Anya thinks it is. THAT ought to cost us a few votes at Zuda!)
Designing Anya’s tattoo was one of the funnerer parts of making ELDRITCH! The whole goth/punk/whateveryouwannacallit scene is just FILTHY with hard-core scientific rationalists like Anya, and it was fun to design a character to reflect that subculture within a subculture.
It ain’t ALL Tarot and vampires, Hollywood.
At the moment we’re still tenuously (TENUOUSLY) clinging to 1st Place at Zuda, but our competitors are charging up FAST, and there’s still more than a week to go. So if you haven’t yet, please SIGN UP and vote ELDRITCH! And remember to give us a star rating and add us to your “favorites,” too… It doesn’t happen automatically when you vote.
(Drew has the straight dope HERE.)
BIG HAPPIES to everyone who’s come out to support our book so far. Your votes are helping to bring Snarlin’ Anya Sobczek and her fresh new perspective to the comics scene, and Drew and I can’t thank you enough!
Ted Newbarn: NAKED HE DARES.
If you’ve read page eight of our new comic, ELDRITCH! one question is no doubt burning a hole through your brain as we speak: “Just who IS this mysterious pear-lifter with a beach-hunger for cool cars and hot lix?”
Well, his name is Ted, he sells real estate, and he is the most dangerous living thing on planet Earth. If you want to know more, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to VOTE it out of me. (Or read slightly more information at Drew’s blog right HERE. Say hi to Christopher McDonald!)
The latest Zuda rankings went up yesterday, and, despite HUGE levels of support from all you guys, ELDRITCH! somehow dropped to second place again. We seem to be engaging in some Anya Sobczek-level ass-kickery in the “favorites” and page views, and we seem to have a slightly better rating than anyone else… but I guess we just aren’t getting the VOTES. So, PLEASE, if you’re really liking the eldritch horrors we’ve unleashed and would like to see further unleashing, please help get the word out! Tell your friends, your parents, your co-workers, your little sister, the dogcatcher, that creepy guy in the windowless van at the end of the block, EVERYONE.
And thanks again for all your help so far! ONE MORE WEEK.
If you happen to be around Los Angeles this Saturday, Drew and I will BOTH be appearing at the L.A. TIMES FESTIVAL OF BOOKS at the UCLA campus from 1-4 PM, right under the glorious SLG Big Top. I’ll mostly be there to sign Serenity Rose stuff, but if you want to print out some of your favorite ELDRITCH! pages for us to sign, that’d be all kinds of cool, too. The more pixellated the jpeg, the better. Hope to see you there!
Hello and welcome to the (possible) future of ELDRITCH!
For the next 6 days leading up to the FINAL VOTE (aw gawd!), I’ll be posting character sketches I did for the original ELDRITCH! pitch way back in 2005. None of these guys appear in the Zuda eight-pager, and they’ll all be in line for a MAJOR design overhaul if we manage to pull this off, but I thought it’d be fun to show them off just the same. Also: If we can’t dig up enough VOTES, this might be the only chance you have to see them, ever.
(Seriously. Second place gets THE ZILCH.)
I’m starting the week off with a character that will DEFINITELY get a major makeover if our story goes forward…
I love Daizee. The notion of a massive, muscular behemoth of a woman who dresses in the most elegant of high-GAWTH finery tickles me for some reason. I imagine she’d be the strong silent type, too, sort of standing there in the background, still as stone, eyes obscured, never speaking, just creeping everyone right the hell out.
Unfortunately, I loved the design so much that I sort of kind of used it in 2007′s Confessions of a Blabbermouth (for DC/MINX):
Oh well. Works just as well there. You’ll just have to VOTE ELDRITCH! to see how Drew and I warp this design for a bold new decade.
New Zuda rankings go up tomorrow! Please vote if you haven’t, and spread the word to all your friends if you can… We really do need YOUR help (you!) to get this done and start covering the earth in awesomeness. I really appreciate all the work you guys have done for us so far. Only five days left to go!
Hello and welcome again to a vision of ELDRITCH! YET TO COME. A little peek at the glorious and terrible things you might see if our comic, ELDRITCH! wins enough votes to conjure itself into existence.
Yesterday we met Goth-Lolita Powerhouse DAIZEE. Today, it’s CHASTON’s turn.
Chaston August Willoughby III is the most important ELDRITCH! character yet to appear in ELDRITCH!, but I’m not going to spoil everything by telling you all about him BEFORE you vote… For now, let’s just call him “Richie Rich with the soul of Aleister Crowley,” and leave it at that. (Or… should it be the other way around?)
I’m guessing Chaston’s design won’t change TOO much if Drew and I get a chance to do the full book. That sweet emo hair is simply not for our mortal hands to touch. Maybe he could be wearing one spoooooooky Manson-style contact lens, though. Perhaps a goat eye!
Suckers are TERRIFYING.
ZUDA UPDATINGS! With the help of your mighty steel, we’ve successfully scaled the battlements and flooded into FORTRESS FIRST PLACE. But now the final battle begins… I’ve noticed there’s often a severe backlash against the comics holding first, and that -combined with our competitors’ continuing SURGE- could easily send us home with nothing. That’s right, guys, the prize for second place is nothing at all. No Anya, no Owen, no tentacles, no nothing. PLEASE keep up the pressure, tell all your friends, blog-twitter-facebook, every message board in sight, call in a favor from grandm… anything you can think of! We need your help now more than ever!
We can do this!
VOTING ENDS THIS FRIDAY AT NOON (EST).
I’ve got another old sketch for you today, but first, let’s talk…
Guys… ELDRITCH! wants favorites. ELDRITCH! HUNGERS for them.
It wants 500 favorites by midnight tonight (PST), and has demanded we get them by any means necessary. If we fail to provide its dark smorgasbord, it will be forced to take its sustenance where it may (THE CATS ARE IN DANGER). And so Drew and I are having a contest:
Go to the Zuda site, VOTE for us, FAVORITE us, give us a STAR RATING, then leave a comment saying you want in on the contest. If we reach 500 favorites by THE WITCHING HOUR (12 AM, PST), we’ll randomly select a winner from the comments and send you the following:
…
1) One copy of SERENITY ROSE VOL. 2, signed by me.
2) One copy of SULLENGREY VOL. 2, signed by Drew Rausch.
3) One SKETCH by me of any character from ELDRITCH!
4) One SKETCH by Drew Rausch of any character from ELDRITCH!
…
500 BY MIDNIGHT, and all this could be yours! (If you’ve already voted, you ARE eligible… just make sure to leave a new comment so we can see you there!)
And please, make sure you guys hit the big green VOTE button before adding us to your favorites. Everything counts, but your VOTE counts most of all.
TIME GROWS SHORT. Our nearest competitor has amassed ALL OF BRAZIL and is hurling it against us even as we speak, narrowing the gap moment by moment. The situation could not be more grave… ELDRITCH! needs your votes… or it all goes up in smoke.
Anyway, here’s Skrew-Tape. He’s got himself a gas mask.
Who is he? You’ll never find out if you don’t vote… Please keep spreading the word!
500 BY MIDNIGHT!
These days, I’m feeling just like Chaston.
Except without the smile.
Friends, we are in TROUBLE.
ELDRITCH! is officially losing this thing (well, SEMI-officially, anyway). Our chief competitor got into the contest business this morning, and we’ve fallen far, far behind. At this point, despite all your hard work, it looks likely that ELDRITCH! just isn’t going to happen. Dissolved to a sad pile of dust.
BUT WE MUST NOT GIVE UP.
If “contest” is to be the final battlefield, we can certainly bring some serious armaments. So here’s the NEW contest…
Go to the Zuda site, VOTE for us, FAVORITE us, give us a STAR RATING, then leave a comment saying you want in on the contest. Get us to 700 FAVORITES by midnight tonight (PST), and here’s what you win…
…
1) One copy of SERENITY ROSE VOL. 2, signed by me.
2) One copy of SULLENGREY VOL. 2, signed by Drew Rausch.
3) One SKETCH by me of any character from ELDRITCH!
4) One SKETCH by Drew Rausch of any character from ELDRITCH!
AND…
5) If we end up WINNING this thing on Friday morning, Drew will randomly select 5 voters and DRAW THEM INTO ELDRITCH! Yes, your own face, Rauschified and covered in tentacled horror (just as you always dreamed)!
…
Of course, we need to WIN for that last one to happen, and at the moment it’s looking pretty desperate. BUT WE CAN STILL DO THIS! Rally your troops, call in every favor you’re owed, rustle up some votes from Aunt Edna, whatever you can! We appreciate all the help you’ve given us this month (seriously… more than you’ll ever know), but we need to keep up the pressure!
THIS IS STILL WITHIN OUR GRASP.
700 BY MIDNIGHT (If you’ve already voted, you ARE eligible. Just make sure to leave a new comment so we can see you there!)
Guys, Little Skyler wants to live.
Just look at that face. Lonely. Sad. Wall-eyed. Sitting in a puddle of his own twitching black ferrofluids. All little Skyler wants… is to LIVE. Can’t you help him? Please vote ELDRITCH! and let’s see if we can’t at least clean him up a little. If you don’t vote, he’ll be like that forever.
Coming up on the final push for VOTES here, Eldritch Things… I think we’ve done just about everything we can here, and now it’s all up to YOU, your VOTES, and your WORD-SPREADING MAGIC. Did you ask your mom? Your boyfriend? That cousin you haven’t spoken to in 13 years but would really like to get back in touch? That shadowy figure hiding behind the television? ALL are eligible to vote!
(Get their permission and sign up FOR them, even. All they need to do is respond to the confirmation e-mail to make sure it’s all kosher. Easy as PIE. KOSHER PIE.)
And if you haven’t voted yet, PLEASE HELP US! We’re SO close here, but if we don’t end STRONG, the whole project will dissolve into nothing come Friday morning (2nd place = NOTHING). There are several thousand dollars at stake here… dollars that could make Serenity Rose Vol. 3 happen a whole lot sooner. Turns out if you vote, we ALL win. (Clicky here!)
We’re running our LAST CONTEST now, and this time we’re looking for 950 “favorites” by Midnight (PST). The prize is the same as before: One signed copy of SR Vol. 2, one signed copy of Sullengrey Vol. 2, a sketch by me (your choice of character) and a sketch by Drew (your choice of character). We’re 103 “favs” away with eight hours to go, so we can TOTALLY do it. (And REMEMBER: If we win this thing, Drew is going to pick 5 random commenters to draw into the final book! Your mug – ELDRITCH!ized!)
VOTE and leave a comment right now!
VOTING ENDS AT 9AM TOMORROW (Pacific Time).
Do it for Little Skyler!
We did it! YOU did it! ELDRITCH! is the latest (and, wow… LAST?) Zuda competition winner, and this is all YOUR doing, folks… The amount of support Drew and I have gotten for our wee little 8-pager has been flat-out MIND-BLOWING this month. Thank you so, so much for that. (I’ll admit it – I was tearing up a bit there toward the end)
(Jesus, I feel like I just went through a WAR with you guys…. The Battle of a Thousand Tweets (6 AM, April 30, 2010) will certainly go down in SOME sort of history book.)
I am officially sick to GRIM DEATH of looking at this computer, but I just wanted to pop on to leave one last THANK YOU and invite you all to COMICS UNLIMITED for Free Comic Book Day tomorrow. Drew and I will BOTH be there signing books and meeting folks from 11AM to 1PM – Hope you can be part of the big celebration. (Bring your computer for us to sign!)
Thanks again for ALL your votes and hard work, everyone…
If I told you that’s only the second Zim-related commission I’ve done, would you call me a madman? You would? Well, that’s pretty mean! I’m only trying to tell you some hard truths about Zim commission enthusiasm levels here. Knowledge is power, folks!
By the way, I don’t know what Dib’s little rocket-cone thing is supposed to be doing there… As far as I can tell, Dib’s combat strategy is “ram Zim with a big glass ball that I myself am sitting inside.” Dunno why I drew it that way, but I STAND BY MY CHOICE.
I also stand by these two Vicious Whisper tattoo commissions (pin-up style!):
For more commissioned loveliness, including one of a very lovely Gir suckin’ on a very lovely Squishy, connect your peepers to the COMMISSIONS GALLERY.
And to get your own saucy Zim or cone-fightin’ Vicious, e-mail me at SERENITY@HEARTSHAPEDSKULL.COM. The base price for art commissions is $50, and $30 for each additional character on the same page. Shipping is all kinds of free within the U.S., and a measly $3 to parts beyond.
Now I’m gonna go look at some Iron Men. Bet THEY won’t have cones.
Oh my god, it’s been a year since I put anything on eBay… I am a cruel and heartless busyperson indeed. Let’s start healing the wounds NOW:
FOUR Serenity Rose Vol. 2 pages up for bidding this time, including the first appearance of Chester Merrick, a conversation with Ms. Vicious Whisper, a wee little magic trick with a spoon and a CAR-DELIVERED PUNCH TO THE JAW.
KRUNCH.
All pages are 8.5″ x 11″, mostly pencil and marker, all of them signed. Shipping is $4, no matter where you live on planet earth. (Although I will be very cross if you live in Antarctica. Very cross, and vaguely jealous.)
The bid-krunch ends one week from now, on WEDNESDAY, FEB. 16th, roundabout 1:30 PM, California time.
(And if you’re not into the whole “competitive bidding scene,” take a peep to the ORIGINAL ART STORE. Still a few nice pages left in there, including one of Kelton observing Sera’s massive stitched-beastiestack.)
Good luck, everybody! And thank you all so much for helping bring Serenity Rose a little love this spring. It’s gonna be a tough year… ONWARD TO VOLUME 3!
VICIOUS supports her (partial) homeland!
Two Vicious Whisper original pages are up for auction on eBay, with all proceeds going to The Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund – A GlobalGiving Project. Each original sketch comes with a high-res print of the cartoon.
Thanks to Ross Campbell for the idea. Check out his auctions HERE.
Hope you guys can help!
And if you’d like to make a direct, non-artwork-related donation to the relief efforts, you can do that RIGHT HERE. Or just text JAPAN to 50555 to give $10.
Bidding ends next Wednesday, around 5 PM, California time. Thanks so much, everyone, and good luck!
IT’S SPRING, YOU GUYS!
Spring is here, hot, and furiously demanding I upgrade to a slick new webstore immediately. (I HEAR YOU, SPRING.) So next Friday, May 20th, I’ll be launching a brand-new store here at Heart-Shaped-Skull, a store full of such exquisite, otherworldly wonders your HUMAN mind will scarcely be able to handle the delight. It will be a Palace of Gods, this store.
A small palace, though. I’ve got to clear some space!
For ONE WEEK ONLY I’ve reduced the price on the 13×19″ TRIPTYCH prints to $15 each, and cut the remaining Serenity Vol. 1, Kimmie66, and Blabbermouth original pages to $25. Grab them while you can, because once the new store launches, none of them will be available ever again.*
Yes, we can take credit cards. Nope, you don’t have to have a Paypal account. And yes, I will ship to basically any point on the globe (for a reasonable price now, too).
Thank you for your support, everyone! And as to the subject of Serenity Rose Volume Three… well, we will have much to discuss at the end of next week. See you then!
*Or at least until after my death, at age 71, in a freak Nyarlathotep-summoning mishap.
So by now you’ve seen the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT, you’ve wandered about marveling at the new site flashiness, and, of course, you’ve visited ELDRITCH!’s unholy new home on the net… so what else? Could there be MORE?
THERE IS.
There is a slick new STORE to go with my slick new website, and it’s FILLED TO BURSTING with new print LOVELINESS. OBSERVE:
That’s the new HEARTBREAKERS triptych up there. You can get them individually or in one print, poster-sized or letter-sized. Custom sizing is also available; just ask! A few of the classic prints are still around, too.
AND THAT IS NOT ALL. We’ve also got NEW original art (including four Vicious Whispers cartoons):
AND… for the first time, you can buy signed books and t-shirts DIRECT FROM ME:
Yes: I have got plenty of Babydoll sizes. (Shirts, not books. Babydoll books are hard to come by.) I also found a box full of that issue of FABLES I illustrated a while back. Happy to sign those for anybody, too… But when those are gone, they are gone forever.
Hope you guys like the new store! I had a LOT of fun putting this thing together, and, needless to say, buying art is the BEST way to show your support for Serenity Rose and keep Volume 3 humming along. Although, of course, you can also DONATE or SUBSCRIBE at $1 a month. (E-mail me if you do, and I’ll send you a goblin – FOR SERIOUS.)
Thanks so much, everyone! Now it’s time for me to go Break some Stupid Hearts…
