Culled...

This week I've been going over the final guts of Connective Tissue with the designer (Jacob Covey) at Fantagraphics. He's doing a great job and the book's going to look terrific. Seeing all the art put into a layout with the text highlighted that a couple of the drawings were superfluous, so I cut them and did new ones for the book. I liked the drawings I cut, but they didn't make the grade. Anyway, waste not want not, here they are.

Byrons!

Here are some pages of me working out the character Byron, from the forthcoming From the Ashes.

Cerberus

Not much to say. Three-headed dog. Angry. 'Nuff said.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!

It's official: IDW Publishing will be releasing my satirical post-apocalyptic saga From the Ashes next spring. It will be a six-issue series and stars Michele (my wife) and I in the radioactive wastelands of New York City. I'm dubbing it a "speculative memoir" (can I trademark that?). Consider it the antidote to the seriousness of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (which I haven't read, but it's on my list; suffice it to say, though, I'm sure there's nary a chuckle to be found between its covers).

Some of the prep art can be found here, in older posts. But now, I'm so deliriously delighted to say, this dream project has found a home, thanks to my editor/friend Scott Dunbier and publisher Ted Adams. The first issue will hit the racks in May, so between Connective Tissue in April, and this, 2009 is shaping up to be the big comeback!

Here's a sample page from the first issue.

CONNECTIVE TISSUE cover art

Here's the cover art for Connective Tissue (out Spring '09).

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:

Papa Bear

Here's a quick sketch (about five minutes) I did today of one of my personal Top Ten Most Loathesome People in America: Bill O'Reilly. He came out oddly sweet-faced, which is troubling, considering what a toxic personage he is. More on why I drew him when the opportune moment presents itself.

Michele, My Belle...

Sorry about the gap between posts. I've been bedeviled by my computers since early December. Here's a drawing of my wife, Michele, when she was very sleepy.

Hey, though my computer's working fine, Blogger seems a bit off. I couldn't sign in using my own account. I had to do so while commenting on someone else's blog. I hope this is a Blogger thing and not a "Bob is Cursed by the God of Computers" thing. Anyone else have this problem signing into their Blogger account?

GOON LINK

Here's my Goon chapter on the Dark Horse Comics DHP MySpace. Check out the preceding chapters if you want mine to make a lick of sense. Sort of.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

Happy New Year, all. Here's the last piece of art I did in 2007: new cover for the Spanish edition of my graphic novel, Beg the Question. The title will be different, though. BTQ, already idiomatic, doesn't translate well. It might revert to the original series title, Minimum Wage. We'll see. At any rate, here's the drawing and final color version.