My Goon Pages...

For those of you who didn't want to click over to Dark Horse's DHP MySpace to see my take on Eric Powell's The Goon, here are my two concluding pages of the serial that ran there. They make no sense without the preceding pages, so don't feel bad if you read them and go WTF? They wanted a riff on The Maltese Falcon for the punchline. This thing was done "Exquisite Corpse" style, so I was brought in to deliver the punch line. Several lines of dialogue are directly from The Maltese Falcon. Whee.

Dog

I’m in the final stages of completing Connective Tissue. I don’t want to ruin any of the story, so I won’t explain what the dog is eating here, but I wanted this cartoon pooch to be grotesque and somewhat monstrous (yet still somewhat “cute”). I started off drawing a more realistic dog to work out the anatomy, and then moved on to deforming him.

Normal pooch.

Monster pooch (version in book).

Rejected version. I like the face, but the body is bad, especially the forepaws. It looks like Clifford the Big Red Dog after huffing a snootful of speed.

Final version. (Thanks to my friend Mikey P. for sending me pix of his pit bull, Hiro.)

Tush

Spot illo for Connective Tissue. What can I say? I like tush. Nuff said.

Connective Tissue Update

It's official: Connective Tissue will be released (in hardcover) by Fantagraphics Books next spring.

For an Atheist...

...I think about Hell a lot. Not as a reality. I just like the concept. What can I say? I liked the Inferno portion of Dante's Divine Comedy. Lot of good art's been inspired by Hell. I still hope that someday I'll do my epic set there, be it a prose novel, or graphic one. Something. I'd really like to do it. Here's a drawing I did a while ago, just playing with demons, etc.

Really, though, what kind of "artist" would I be if I didn't think about demons?

Girls and Demons

Two great tastes that taste great together. Or something like that. I love drawing this stuff. Maybe I'm a bad person.

Connective Tissue: Coming (Relatively) Soon...

It's been a while since I've had any publishing news to announce, but unless the contract stuff goes horribly awry (an unlikelihood), Fantagraphics Books will be publishing my oddball stream of consciousness (or in this case, unconsciousness) epic, Connective Tissue, sometime early spring 2009. What's more, publisher Gary Groth became aware of and interested in the project because of the previous Connective Tissue drawings I'd posted here. So, this blog has already more than justified its existence (at least to me). Neat.

Connective Tissue is my reverse-engineering experiment in art and prose. Instead of a normal illustrated book, in which the pictures illustrate (duh) the text, this time around I'm doing the art first, then supplying the prose. To ensure it flows well, I'll likely add some art at the end of the writing stage (the titular connective tissue). Here's a recent drawing: