illustration friday-superstition

don't let this guy cross your path!

illustration friday-scale

another fishy sketch for our scale theme...

illustration friday-hats

good ol' dr. suesss...

sfg blue

the theme for this week over at sugar frosted goodness is blue. it reminded me that my cartoon pal and kubert school roomie, mike kraiger, came up with a great name for his big blue cat character, blue henry. way to go squarehead!

illustration friday-blues

Here's a sketch of an old character, Blind Puppy Dogg, that I thought would be great for our blues theme. I drew a 2 page comic with him way back in '85 that was published in Spin Magazine. One of my "big breaks".

old comix 3

continuing our posting of old comix. these 2 "monster kids" page were done for mike manley's monsterman book way back in 1996. back then we were "old skool" with our gray tones, cutting this stuff called zipatone onto our art! th' good ol' days!! I liked the idea of making a gang of these cute, but monsterous little kiddies. I tried to have fun with the verbage on the "uno" strip like basil wolverton did on his strips...

old comix 2

Continuing with some old comic stuff:
"beatsville" was done after I saw Gene Deitch's "Cat" cartoons (and cool 2 color covers) for the record changer. This might be one of my earlier comix in this style. I don't think it was printed anywhere except in a small cartooning club I'm in. I probably experimented previously in this same kind of style after seeing Cliff Roberts' beatnik illos in Langston Hughes' First Book of Jazz. Just some spot illos, no sequential stuff...
I think "Brainpan & Cheesy" was done after I came up with different characters of the same name. If my bad memory remembers correctly, Marvel was finishing up their Nickelodeon books because of licensing fees. The game plan was to see if the freelancers who worked on that stuff had any "Nickelodeon" type of work Marvel would print (and avoid any fees). Guys like Mike Kazaleh, Dan Slott, Darren Auck, me and some others I forgot drew up some ideas and then it went away. Oh well. Marvel was never really into the funny stuff anyway, which was too bad. I always heard how the industry was concerned about losing the younger reader demographic, yet they never seemed to do too much about it. DC did start the Hanna-Barbera/Cartoon Network books around this time and thankfully they're still around. "Cheesy" looks too much like "Stimpy" anyway...