Bride of the Water God Fan Art

Hey guys! I know it's been a while since I've posted anything here. Symphony Number Six is chugging along (slowly) but I took some time out this weekend to do some fan-art for Bride of the Water God, a deceptively compelling manhwa by Mi-Kyung Yun, published in English by Dark Horse. ("manhwa" is, I believe, Korean for "twelve educations of the adulterous winter," but I might have that wrong.)



I drew the titular water god, Habaek. He's a pretty interesting character - short-tempered, haughty, but also quite loving. He's trapped in the past in more ways than one - figuratively because he can't move on from his ill-fated first marriage to a human woman, and literally because every day when the sun rises his body transforms into that of a small child.

BotWG has more wrist-grabbing than I've ever seen in a comic or anywhere else. A panel of a wrist being gripped by somebody's hand occurs probably 7 or 8 times an issue! Sometimes it's erotic, sometimes it's violent, sometimes it's humorous. Mi-Kyung Yun clearly loves to draw grabbed wrists!

Titanzer Fan-Art!

I drew some fan-art for my friend Kevin Wilson's giant-robot webcomic Titanzer!

The image depicts the titular titan, Titanzer, having his ass handed to him by the immense evil alien robot Inert, whom I internally refer to as "Fisto Punchalot." In the foreground is Titanzer's distressed owner/operator, has-been celebrity Johnny Yamamoto.

In addition to being a fun and hilarious guy who draws a great webcomic, Kevin is also the person who lent me a button machine to make promotional buttons for Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment. Below are the three designs:

Check out Titanzer everybody, and DON'T! GET! FISTED!

Calico Jack Guest Comic

I did a guest comic for my friend Patrick Devine's comic "Calico Jack," which reassures us that in the 26th century there will still be punk rock, piracy, and (apparently) floppy disks! The more things change, huh?

The comic re-depicts an incident from issue 2, page 13. Jack has obviously taken some creative liberties in the retelling. Capt. Miller is nowhere near as villainous or confrontational in the original story, despite working for an organization, the Federal Union, whose initials are "F.U."

Life Ain't No Ponyfarm Fan-Art

My friend Sarah Burrini is visiting Portland this week, all the way from Cologne, Germany! She has a great biweekly webcomic in German AND English called "Life Ain't No Ponyfarm" which I recommend you check out, especially if you "sprechen zie Deutches." I decided to honor her visit by drawing some of her characters.

There are a lot of auto-bio webcomics out there, let's face it. But "Ponyfarm" is exactly the type of auto-bio comic I can really get into i.e. one that is full of lies. Though Sarah herself is the main character, she is only sometimes the focus of the story - the other characters are Ngumbe, an elephant who wants to be Miles Davis, "El Fungo," a hot-headed Mexican mushroom, and Buttercup, who is just an adorable pony.

Here's the color version - I sorta rushed this, but I sense the potential for greatness.

Theo a la Theo

Here's a picture I did of Theo and the other characters from Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment in the style of local cartoonist Theo Ellsworth. Consider it my modest tribute to this awesome artist.

I actually got to chat with Theo Ellsworth over burritos last weekend when we were both in Washington for the Olympia Comics Festival. Even though I was bumping elbows with much more famous comics artists during the festival, none of them intimidated me so much as Theo. I feel as though in this candid photograph of the two of us you can actually see the nervousness in my facial expression and posture.

Why would this be? Festival guests Larry Gonick and Paul Chadwick are both excellent artists, but I basically understand how they got that way. They practiced a lot, studied the works of artists they admire, probably read a few instructional books on art or storytelling, or got pointers from fellow cartoonists. By contrast, Theo's artistic process is completely opaque to me. If his comics are to be believed, he basically gets inspiration by delving into some weird interior mental zone and meeting a bunch of thoughts incarnated as fantastical creatures.

This might be why meeting him in person was so intimidating - anyone else who's met him can tell you that Theo has about the gentlest, least intimidating personality you could imagine. The cognitive dissonance comes from knowing that his mind is nevertheless capable of concocting bizarre mystical visions, and may be doing so at any moment. As he was talking to me, was he imagining tassled antlers springing from my head or little monster-men driving on my shoulders in tiny cars?

Even though I've spent the past year honing my "craft" by studying the Masters, and even though I have a long-standing aversion to the "Vesuvius" school of creativity - i.e. the muse strikes you and you simply spew out its inspiration on the page, there's something I still seriously admire about this kind of self-taught, highly personal/intuitive creativity.

When I was a younger and less technically schooled artist, I loved putting little weird things in my drawings, cramming every inch of a picture with whatever quirky idea struck me at the time - sometimes without even knowing what to expect would come out of my pencil. I sort of miss that now!

(By the way, don't take any of this to mean that I don't think Theo's work is also technically very good - it is! Nor is all of it psychologically ponderous - it can be very lighthearted as well.)

(Also, just so you don't think I'm an obsessive fan-boy, I named the character Theo long before I had ever heard of Theo the artist. It's a coincidence, I swear!)