The Toby Keith Project: Gulacy, Yoakum & Mounts

Finished panels from the Toby Keith project with the astonishingly talented Paul Mounts doing the colors.

Wow. Paul and I never had it so good.

The animated piece is for the song "Beer for my horses", and is playing, so I understand, at a Toby Keith concert near you. If anyone goes and sees it at the show, I'd love to hear from them how it was presented.

Quick Peek: Gulacy & Yoakum Storyboards

As you can see, i've been gone from the blogging world for over a month, pretty sketchy even with my history. Paul Gulacy and I have been hard at work on storyboards for an animated piece for Country and Western singer Toby Keith. Just wanted to share a few of the panels before the esteemed Paul Mounts gets his hands on them and makes them look 10 kinds of incredible.

edited to add: for color versions, click here!

yes, it was impossible to keep up my sketch a day with the addition of the freelance work that i picked up. sorry for any of you who were actually entertained by the drawings. they will resume tomorrow!

Yoakum Interview on Comic Book Resources

I'm showing up in the press a bit more these days, and here are a few links. Comic Book Resources did a mini-interview that appeared yesterday, along with the cover of The Human Hourglass, which them for including! When I was writing this story and thumbnailing it out in one 7 hour stretch on a plane flight from Paris to Chicago, I don't think that i would have imagined not only having it out int he world, but the cover showing up on CBR's site.

But that's why we create things. To get them out there.

Also a review of Time Bomb #1 & 2, which is the first one to note that I did ink on issue #1 and include me in the review, for which I thank them kindly. Its the first time that I've inked Gulacy in about 10 years outside of some sketches, so doing the work was fun. I'm enjoying the story as well. I have no idea how it all ends, so I'm waiting for issue #3 to show up so that i can find out the ending along with the rest of you.

And lastly, but by no means least, Enter The Dark, Todd Miro's killer short horror film that I co-star in, is up for three awards at the Dark Carnival Film Festival: Best Short, Best Editing and Best Supporting Actor (my co-lead, Rob Sandusky). We had a great California premier at Sacramento's Horror Fest with family and some of the crew in attendance as well, so we had someone to laugh at our jokes during the Q & A.

Batgirl by Timm and Yoakum

Bruce Timm. Love his stuff.

Was given a couple of his pieces to ink over for commission. Had no idea how hard it would be to get something that i liked.

How about 5 tries?

I ended up doing this Batgirl 5 times before i was happy with the result. The commissioner of the piece has been extremely patient what i fiddled with them to my satisfaction, and had to delay finishing the work while i took on the Gulacy job.

And then I came back to them and hated them again. So I redid this piece, and the JLA piece that i'll post tomorrow, again.

So what was the problem? Well, Timm's stuff has its own cartoony logic to it, and if you don't nail the line thickness right off the bat, then you're basically dead in the water. There are no little rendering line that might take you eye away from the holding line, nothing to distract you. And maybe i'm being overly picky with my work, and no one else would have had a problem with them, but i did, and since there is no deadline on these, i continued to work them again and again.

And now i need to get them out of my studio before i start to harsh on them again.

BTW - saw some of Rain's colors for Timebomb over my inks and was totally blown away. TIMEBOMB will likley be the best looking book color and production wise that i've ever been involved with and I'm really psyched to see how it all looks in print.

New Project! TIMEBOMB by Palmiotti, Gulacy and Yoakum

Hey there folks, wanted to let you know that I'm hard at work on 20 pages of TIMEBOMB, a new three issue series for Radical Comics. Here is the press release:

From comic superstar Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray comes a time travelling adventure!

A group of international scientists and archaeologists on a publicly funded dig discover a hidden city beneath the streets of Berlin. Constructed as a failsafe option for the Nazi party should they lose the war, the city is also home to Hitler’s ultimate doomsday weapon- an Omega bomb designed to wipe out the human race- and it’s just been activated. Now, crews of scientists with state-of-the-art weapons and equipment must travel back in time to 24 hours before the disaster to stop the bomb from going off. However, they soon discover that, rather than going back in time for 24 hours as intended, they’ve been sent back 65 years to the height of Hitler’s Germany.

Please note that I do not resemble a "comic book superstar", but i have played one on TV.

Can't show you any artwork yet, but its cool stuff, and I'll be curious to see what the pages look like with the full process color that Radical uses. More updates as the project moves along!

Stalking the 70's Artists

Steven Grant writes today one of the finest overviews of the 1970's comics art scene that I've ever run across, and its worth your time to read it both if you were there, and if you came along later and want a little history behind the 1980's. A couple of thoughts on his post:

Steven posits that its an oddity that the early 1970's rush of talent resulted in such a meager showing of great comic art from those involved, even though they laid the groundwork for the 1980's. I think that while he talks later in the article about how this is partly because it is easier to make a living in comics by imitating another's style, it also misses the point about those involved being either driven out by the deadlines, or the editorial style or simply having already given their world the initial gift of their art.

I've made the case in an earlier post that without the '70's groundwork, there would be no '80's comics. There would be no "All New, All Different X-Men" by Cockrum to make a Billion dollars at the box office, no Englehart/Rogers Batman to rip off, without Starlin, there would be no Marvel Sci-Fi comic universe to surf outside of the one that Kirby invented. Many of the creators that Grant talks about had no other choice, business-wise, but to conform to what was being offered to them. Either make those deadlines and conform or leave. Steranko left, Gulacy stayed, Starlin kept trying to leave and coming back, Adams left and found more money in advertising while keeping a toe in comics, Weiss stayed but turned in relatively small amounts of art. Smith left, Kaluta kinda left but only somewhat.

And yet this storied group left a great mass of artwork out there. It may not seem like it given the amount of dross that those pages are surrounded by, but that doesn't take into account the selective memory of their work. I've long since forgotten the other comics that I bought the same day as the Kaluta Shadow, perhaps an Ernie Chan Batman, perhaps something by Irv Novick, but I remember almost every panel in the Shadow book. God knows what other issues I bought the day that I picked up Captain Marvel #30, but I can quote almost every panel by heart from that Starlin comic. As Lou Reed once said, only 1,000 people ever listened to the Velvet Underground, but all 1,000 of them started bands. You didn't need to have Kaluta or Smith or Steranko produce like Kirby and Kane for them to galvanize another generation of comic artists to get drawing. Those pages have been burned into the memory of every reader of that time period.

And it set the stage for Chaykin to move on and produce American Flagg! later on for First. I wouldn't have wanted to see him try that series any earlier. He wasn't ready for it, and neither was the market. Steranko had to go out and produce "Red Tide" for Preiss and fail miserably to put a crack or two in the wall. Eventually the wall would fall, but it would take repeated efforts to bring it down, and, as usual, the pioneers are the ones that suffer.

Peaks? You could argue that Adams was never better after 1971, or Starlin after 1975, but Chaykin was at his best in 1982, and Gulacy in 1976 or 1980 depending. Different artists peak at different times. And their influence will extend differently because of that. There mass of Americans in the 1970's did produce fascinating work, and did so under the guise of mainstream comics, which, in itself, is a trick.

And, since I don't believe that the decades meet perfectly on the calendar either, I say that the 1980's comics started with the first issue of John Byrne on the X-Men: #108.

I agree with Grant on the Filipino artists, whose work, while many times technically more accomplished than the Americans was also claustrophobic when printed, and more "illustrat-y" and inhibited the readability of the comic story.

What Do You Do: the Holy Grail Artwork

I just had the interesting experience of being offered a piece of artwork via email.

No, not just a piece of artwork. One of those "grail" pieces. You know the kind, the ones that you've stared at the printed page at for so many years that you've memorized the very contours of the ink lines, noted the areas where the color went off register (damn cheap 4-color printing), actually dreamed about the day when you might discover the page sitting, with no one aware of its true value, at an estate sale somewhere, next to the old china. Except those things don't happen anymore.

Except that, in this economy, you never know who may or may not have over-extended himself buying things. And collectibles are certainly assets. And a certain number of these assets, the more valuable ones, many times never hit ebay or heritage. Many times they're traded or sold silently through a network of traders and collectors that all know each other.

So I'm offered this page... and it is quite out of my price range. In the same number of thousands of dollars more than i can spend as when i saw the Starlin cover and splash that are on the short grail list. And I had to turn him down, but not without doing a quick inventory of artwork and assessing with both my gut and my wallet, in that way that we collectors do, what i might be willing to sell to make that happen. And it was touch and go as to whether I let go of a Starlin splash to get this one, or an early Dringenberg, or... we'll I decided against it. But it was an offer, and I was happy, if literally for this one chance in my life, to get the opportunity to own it.

After 20 years of lusting for it, I can at least put it in the column of ones that you had to let get away.

My first experience with original art

And I recount this with the gravity usually reserved for telling a story of how one had sex the first time, except that this time was better.

Mid 1970's and I'm a kid living down in the Diamond Bar area outside of LA, occasionally to some slightly distant shops outside of the little area that I'm living in. Typically via the understanding other parent, since mine could care less, then and now, about comics. However, I had friends whose parents would actually take part in the collecting part of it, and would be willing to drive to shops where other bit and pieces could be found: the missing book, the upgrade on the vintage Neal Adams work, etc.

So we're outside of the town, I forget exactly where, and I have amassed $20, which was a lot for a 12 year old back then. Where it came from, I don't know, perhaps it was birthday money. I certainly didn't have a job back then. There were no comic shops in Diamond Bar back then, perhaps still aren't now. I've not been back in 20 years. What they did have were the trusty 7-11 with the understanding owner, and a couple grocery stores that still had spinner racks in them, so going to an actual comic shop was a huge treat. Kid in a candy store and all that.

So I'm filling the in the last couple of Master of Kung Fu's that I need to have a complete run, and the shop owner says, "I have an original from MOKF, would you like to see it?" "Really," I ask, as though somehow the idea of an actual original hadn't occured to me. "Yeah, its from Gulacy." I was, of course, already infatuated with Paul's art already, and since he had never been at a convention that I had been, the idea that one of his originals was in the area wouldn't have dawned on me.

So he pulls out a portfolio and in there is a page from MOKF #42, inked by Tom Sutton, using the patented confusing-in-a-non-novel-way flash forward effect that Doug Moench was never to use again. And I was blown away to find myself looking at the non-repo blue on the page, and looseness of Tom's inks at full size. It was quite an education for the 10 minutes that I spend looking at it.

Oddly enough, I didn't catch the original art bug then, probably because I knew that price, even at 1970's rates, was well out of my reach then, lacking parental involvement. But I started to have the idea of what it should look like. And the differences that exist between printed art and the originals. I don't think that I've looked at printed art the same way since.

In Praise Of: Paul Gulacy and Master of Kung Fu

Occasional Superheroine has this post up as her start of Paul Gulacy week. I'm excerpting a bit here that is one of those quotes that certainly sums things up:

One can only imagine the reaction a kid had to a comic book as kinetically wild and relatively exotic as "The Master of Kung Fu" in the early 1970s. It certainly had an impression on a young Quentin Tarantino, who has been quoted as saying that the title was his favorite.

Valerie, I was that kid, and found myself poring over the Fight Without Pity and the Murder Agency, stunned by the choreography and violence and cinematic beauty of Shang and Shen, awed by the beauty of Leiko Wu, and overwhelmed, to this day, by what Doug and Paul were able to do in a monthly Marvel comic.

Paul forever raised the stakes on the subtlety of character interaction and he had a writer that didn't pull any punches either, giving him some real, true emotion. Do we feel the betrayal of Leiko's feelings in issue #40 when Shang innocently breaks her heart by not realizing that she is in love with him? Or is there a more fully realized death (that has stuck) than Larner's sacrifice in #49, visions of his dead wife around him?

The 12 issue run from Master of Kung Fu #38 to 50, barring #41 which is a fill-in, is a remarkable run from 1976, a literate, adult, kung fu and espionage thriller certainly better than anything the Bond franchise was putting. Doug's plotting was matched by Paul's pencils, and he gave his stories a gravitas because he could pull off the subtle character interaction that made the series. In another artist's hands (and you only have to read issue #41 to see how the series could have looked), we would have lost most if not all of what made the book unique.

Accused early on of being a Steranko clone, Paul certainly wore his influence on his sleeve, but there is nothing wrong with that. In my opinion, Jim went on to become a great designer, but Paul became the greater illustrator. In defense of this, I'll point out the two issues where Paul inked himself, Master of Kung Fu #29 and #40, and the subtlety introduced in the reflected light and shadows of #40 is a quantum leap over the earlier issue. And #29 still rocks to this day with one of the great comic fights of all time between Razorfist and Shang Chi and some deliciously deep and subtle shadows in an issue that would carry three parallel plotlines, a rather ambitious storytelling devise, in the same issue. But issue #40 is brilliant.

Paul went through any number of inkers back in those days; a scheduling issue perhaps? Something, actually, that i've never thought to ask him about. Dan Adkins, Pablo Marcos, Jack Abel, Tom Sutton and, most forgettably, Vinnie Colletta for part of issue #50, contributed to the book. For my money, Paul was best served by Adkins and Marcos. I know that Paul feels that Adkins did the best work on his pencils back then, but I really enjoyed the energy that Pablo brought with his brush work to art. Paul's work is so exacting that it has the potential to stiffen up when traced over, and so I modeled my own inking over him along the line of Marcos and Adkins.

(I finally met Pablo just a year or so ago, and was overjoyed to have the chance to tell him how much I enjoyed his work. I'm not sure that it meant as much to his as it did to me, but I pulled out a stack of Batman work over Gulacy that I had done to show him. His wife, at least, humored me and said that she saw echoes of his style in my brush work. I commissioned an expensive Living Zombie sketch that was really an excuse to give Pablo some money to thank him for his work. Of course, he kicked out an amazing Zombie sketch that I will always have.)

Paul, as you can see from the artwork scanned, has been well and interestingly served by his inkers over the years. I had the pleasure of working over Paul on a number of series, from The Grackle, Eternal Warrior and Turok/Timewalker at Acclaim to Batman: Outlaws over at DC Comics. His work on that Batman series was exceptional, as these scans from my originals show. I'll leave it to the gentle reader to decide how close to the Adkins/Marcos ideal I really hit, but I spent a hell of a lot of sleepless nights trying to get close.

I just upset that I didn't get asked to contribute to the Gulacy book that Vanguard put out. They certainly scanned in enough of my inks for the book.

Panels: Detail from Master of Kung Fu #40, inks by Gulacy; uninked pencils from The Grackle #2; Marcos inks on Master of Kung Fu #49; Yoakum inks from the final page of Batman: Outlaws #1