Behind the Scenes: Do You Really Want To Know?

You know what my favorite mantra has been for the last 7 or 8 years? No spoilers. Even before Riversong started that mantra on Doctor Who, I find that I've moved from wanting to know all the behind the scenes info, all the gossip, to wanting to move back to the old days, days when i would pick up the comic, go to see the movie, read the book, and be entertained, surprised, delighted by the cleverness of the author, director, artist.

Two Morrows Publishing has started a new publication with Jon Cooke at the helm, Comic Book Creator, and its got all sorts of stuff on the torrid beginnings of comic books from the writer and artists.

Well, yes, it kinda does. However, they killed a Kupperberg piece that 20th Century Danny Boy prints that shows the DC production department and editorial in all their ugly, backstabbing glory. of course, its their right to kill anything that they don't want in their magazine, fair enough.

But it reminded me that most people don't really want to know the people who create their fantasy entertainment. They don't want to see the artist as he was: a chain-smoking, anti-semetic skirt chaser who cheated on his first two wives, and didn't cheat on this third only because he couldn't get it up, and who happened to draw pictures to support his bar bill. They want to read an article about their favorite old time artist who, it turns out, was a slightly quirky individual who loved fishing and classic cars. Well, there you go, you don't want to read the truth. Because, the truth is, comics paid terribly, the men who did them spent hours working their asses of drawing pictures that no one looked at twice, not their wives, not their mistresses, not even many themselves. Its not a pretty picture.

So, yes, while we've continued to mine the drek for diamonds, you have to ask yourself, do you really want to know?

Crimson Empire Cover by Dorman & Yoakum

Finished up a great piece tonight, inks over the Dave Dorman rough for a Crimson Empire cover. Oddly enough, the interior was drawn by Paul Gulacy, who I worked with many times. I should have been inking the interior on that one!

Brush, technical pen, Copic marker on bristol

Thumbnails from The Carnival #2

Thumbnails on a two page sequence from the second issue of The Carnival: One Last Note Before I Go. I had changed this from a single page where i thought that the story had become too compressed. I was worried that I needed to keep pressing more information into the reader, and i realized that there needed to be a little... more space. Because my dialogue is so brilliant that it needed more pages. I love the way the action sets up, now we'll see how it looks full size...

In Process: The Avengers by Granov & Yoakum

Posted this "in process" piece, simply to blow Alex Sheikman's mind, since we approach inking completely differently.

This one is coming along I think.

In Progress: Star Wars by Dorman & Yoakum

Not sure where this piece was used, but here are inks, in process, with Copic Markers for tones.

just a li'l something for a sunday night...

Making the Perfect Haggadah: 1982 or 2013

So I sit here, in my studio, with a drawing table equipped with a state of the art LED light board affixed, over a terabyte of memory available on the tower at my feet, a tabloid scanner capable of scanning at 1200 dpi in 24 bit color and downloading into Adobe's Photoshop CS suite, shown on a HD flat screen monitor and manipulated by a Intuos 3 pressure sensitive tablet... and i'm creating a personalized Haggadah for tomorrow night's seder using a photocopier, an X-acto knife and roll of scotch tape. And i'm then going to photocopy the whole thing, en mass, for over 30 people.

Oh yes I am.

Anyone have a band they want me to promote?

Alien by Dorman & Yoakum

A new commission piece, and an interesting one to interpret, since i have no idea if the pencils that i was working off of were going to be inked, or were the basis for a painted piece. It meant that the values of the piece could have been changed significantly by having Dave separate the planes on the art by color, as opposed to line weight. I went in and did... well, what looked right to my eye, that's what. I've never drawn the Alien, even though I've seen it a million times in my nightmares.

Don't get me started on the first two films of the Alien franchise, they're both so utterly brilliant that its hard to start talking about them.

Click the image to embiggen.