Wolverine Sketch

Step by step.

Day by day.

Silent Night...YO JOE!

Here's a holiday special Canuckleheads comic I did for the Joe Canuck newsletter.
Silent Night

Have yourself a Merry Christmas!

The World of Comic Strips

I recently was (very kindly) given the Doonesbury 40-year retrospective book, which was an amazing surprise. I used to follow Doonesbury pretty ferociously when I was a kid, back when I followed comic strips. I used to save the comic sections of the paper in a banker's box, and re-read the Doonesbury strips pretty regularly, trying to keep track of the ever-expanding cast. I don't think, at that point, I realized it was a liberal satire of conservative America. I just liked the drawings, mostly. Really dug how Garry Trudeau drew eyes.

But his recent interview with Stephen Colbert made me really excited about this retrospective book. He's been doing the daily strip for 40 years! I get bored of my comic work after an issue or two. And I remember how much a struggle it was to do weekly strips of the time-traveling comic adventures of Mort 'n' Newton for my student paper, Imprint, when I was in university. Forty years of daily comic strips is immense!

The book is pretty immense, too, at about 10 lbs! I had a hard time carrying it home. And it's structured interestingly, too, set up by character, rather than chronologically. The coolest part is a big fold-out in the centre that tracks all the characters, their relationships, their histories. It's crazy!

I'm looking forward to delving into the monster book and re-reading some Doonesbury. And now I'll probably understand more of the politics. Anyone else read Doonesbury? Or anyone read comic strips? I used to love them, but haven't read them for years. Any recommendations?

Doonesbury has a good website, too.

Old Journal/Sketchbook Entries

I recently turned 30 and I decided to look through some old sketchbooks and journals of mine to see how far I have come. So many memories come floating back. Some of these entries were pretty entertaining so I thought I'd share a few of them with you.

An entry made around my "clubbing" phase during Illustration year 1:

In college/university, I became well acquainted with the notion of sleep loss:

One time I dressed up as a woman.

Back in grade 9 I used to give girls notes with a secret code. I also used that code to write a secret journal entitled "Do Not Read." Only certain people were allowed to read the secret decoder wheel that I made in ceramics class.

I translated a few of these entries and it turns out my head was in a strange goth phase. A potent combination of listening to too much Marilyn Manson and not getting laid.

An entry I made when my friend Stan got hit by a car. Dark times come swirling back.

A few more "emo-ish" entries.

I kept a newspaper article when I was in my grade 8 poo poo humor phase. I thought it was funny at the time. Now that I read it and think about how sick and screwed up this guys was.

Some notions I sometimes subscribe to, even today.

In Art Fundamentals I made some friends that I still hold dear today. We used to make our own fun when everything got too expensive.

Some strange dream-based character design.

I think I drew this when I was intoxicated. I am not sure.

I was, and still am, hypnotized by Christopher. Some things never change. The wheel is turnable.

The adventure continues for the Canuckleheads!

Last summer I got to work on the exclusive comic for the Canadian GI Joe Convention. You can find copies sold here at a special holiday price, or at the Silver Snail in Toronto. It's a pretty fun project considering the fact that I've been a fan of the GI Joe brand since I was three and a half years old. I'm still busy working on comic shorts to the Canadian GI Joe series for the Joe Canuck newsletter. The new editions will later be collected into another comic exclusive for the 2011 CanJoeCon.

Here's the further adventures of the Canuckleheads featured at the end of every Joe Canuck newsletter:

Slaughter makes a cameo in...Exclusive Training

Spot all the other cameos in ...Uninvited Guests

Zombies!!!...The Osiris Egg - Part I
The Osiris Egg - Part II


For those wondering what's happening with AWOL'd, stay tuned for updates....

Sweet Caroline!

Sweet Caroline, it's been a long time since we've updated this blog. But the SketchKrieg crew and I are getting back into the swing of things, and we'll be updating it more and more often in the coming weeks and months. Also, exclaiming 'Sweet Caroline!' gave me an excuse to post this sweet sketch of Neil Diamond, the Jewish Elvis himself:



The remainder of my post is tied to my forthcoming young adult book, The Dead Kid Detective Agency. It's set to hit bookstores in Fall 2011 (I'm still mid-edit). The book is primarily text, but I've been working on some spot illustrations for here and there. I'll post some of those later, but first, some character designs for all the dead kids.

There's Cyril, the dead United-Empire-Loyalist kid:



Tabetha, the dead former-slave kid who came to Canada via the underground railroad:



Morna, the dead, recent-Scottish-immigrant kid (circa 1910):



Kirby, the dead quintuplet:



And Derek, the dead, almost-modern-age First Nations kid:



There's also, of course, our living protagonist, October Schwartz:



Any suggestions? It's not too late to change things up a bit. I feel like Derek may need something more distinct to his design. He looks very generic to me at the moment, even with a severed head.

Facebook!

We haven't been active on the blogger...because we've switched to Facebook! Keep updated about our latest works and upcoming shows on the Sketchkrieg fan page!

www.facebook.com/sketchkrieg

More male erotica than you can handle!

I think I may have found my true calling. I can't decide if I should have included more in the way of background, or just kept them sort of floating in space (as they are now). But I'm pretty happy with how these ones turned out.

This 'n That ...

Hey ... Happy New Year! Here are some illustrations that got published during the tail end of last year. What's different about these, is that they are all completely digital. I've been moving myself away from paper and doing everything lately on the computer. It just saves me time. So check 'em out.





These four were for "French Homework" a textbook by Scholastic.

And this one was for The Canadian Sportsman. The article was about how horses that harness race have to retire after a couple of years.

Also remember to check out my webcomic "Corporate Life" with writer Apollo. A new strip is released every Wednesday, check it out: http://ninjacat.ca/Corporate_Life.html

CanAgitprop!

It's been a while since I've tried my hand at anything overtly political, but with the recent proroguing of Parliament (the second time in as many years), I really felt the need to make an illustration encapsulating (most) Canadians' disappointment with the guy at the top. Something really simple and easy ... that would make a good T-shirt or whatever.



Obviously, this explicitly references Shepard Fairey's iconic Obama illustration. And after I whipped it up this weekend, I realized someone had beaten me to the punch: Darrin White made this 'Nope' poster over a year ago.

While I think White's illustration is great (and probably a better representation of the Prime Minister than my drawing), I think my one's a bit harsher (and more T-shirt-worthy). And I like that I stuck to the colours of the Canadian flag.

Supervillains get me hot

Another project I've been working while taking a brief Quarter-Life Crisis hiatus is supervillain erotica. That's right. You heard me.

I'm working with poet Natalie Zina Walschots, who is composing a collection of poems – romantic/erotic odes to various comic book supervillains. As with Elyse Friedman's project, I offered to do some sample illustrations to include with her manuscript submission. Some of the results are below.





I'm not sure how I feel about the results. The finished illustrations look more comical than actually sexy. But maybe that's what I wanted? It's hard to say. The Darkseid one isn't even sexy. More creepy. (Clearly I need to do more research in the world of male erotica.)

The Laws of Motion

I've been taking a break from working on the second book of Quarter-Life Crisis to work on a couple other projects. One of those projects is collaborating with author Elyse Friedman on a graphic novel project called The Laws of Motion.

Friedman wrote a screenplay called 'The Laws of Motion,' and it did get made into a film (starring Matthew Perry, even!) with a different title. But the final project deviates pretty widely from the original script. She got in touch with me about working on making the screenplay into a graphic novel. So I did thirteen sample pages that Elyse will be submitting with the script to publishers.







It's interesting working on someone else's script. I think it exercises different drawing muscles (for lack of a better term) than drawing your own work. Most notably, it doesn't allow you to 'cheat'. Working on my own stuff, I'll plan layouts and scripts in ways that work with my drawing strengths, but I don't have the same luxury when working on someone else's script. Does anyone else feel the same way?