Hot XXX figure drawing action!

Maybe you're like me. You'd like to get to a life drawing class now and then, but you work full time and then some, and you've got responsibilities at home, so you haven't gone to a class in a long time. Well I'm about to let you in on a little secret: You know that "personal computer" thingy that's sitting on your desk that you thought was only good for word processing and doing your taxes? Well it turns out that if you log on to the "internet" (ask a young person), you can actually find lots of photographs of nude figure models. I'm serious, there must be literally hundreds of them! Sometimes they even show up in my "electronical mail", without me having to do anything! All I can figure out is that someone is putting these sites up as some kind of a public service for home-bound illustrators. Perhaps someday when "e-commerce" (again, sorry for the technical jargon) is more developed, someone will figure out some kind of angle to market this stuff. Whoever does that is going to make a fortune!

Barsoom Blues

This is all Leland's fault. (I've been using that as an all-purpose excuse since about 7th grade, so why stop now.)

The other day Leland was geeking out about the upcoming movie based on a series of science fiction books called something like "Jimmy Carter, President of Mars", by William S. Burroughs. When we were kids we were huge fans of those books and used to draw those characters all day. At some point I said something totally self-important like, why am I working for a living when movies like that need production designers to stand around eating craft service and hitting on PA's. After considering that for a second he called me a homo, said that I never could even draw Tars Tarkas right, knocked me down, took my lunch money, and got Lisa Schlavin from 7th grade homeroom on the phone so they could laugh about what a joke my career is. True story.

FYI, Tars Tarkis is not to be confused with Tars An, which is a completely different series of novels by the same author. Tars An is a postmodern story of existential horror, which asks the question: What if a wild man of the jungle had to go around with his whole life being narrated by late-period Phil Collins music, and he hardly ever got to do anything, mostly because Rosie O'Donnel thinks she's funny. Not for the faint of heart.

Comics! We got comics!

My old pal Marie Javins, Editorial Queen of the Universe in exile, gave me a chance to dust off the old HB and pencil a few pages for a startup company she's doing work for. Here's a page of it, along with the original rough, for you to... well, for no reason actually.

Hey kids, comics!

A comic book page I did last year in an attempt to get accepted for a small press table at the San Diego con. I pretended on my application that this was only one page of a book in progress, which was a total lie. I actually have no idea what is happening in this scene. I scanned some stuff from my sketchbook, photoshopped it together into panels and added some bridging art to round it out. I figured if I was accepted to the con, I'd have to produce a book by the summer! Mercifully, I was not.

THE WINDUP... ANNNNND.....

Earlier this year, the veterans of the CODENAME: KIDS NEXT DOOR crew were invited to submit proposals to Cartoon Network for new show ideas. KND creator Tom Warburton, AKA the Best Boss In The World, has spent the last several months cheerleading us all to take the chance and write something up, and dealing with our stupid questions and half-baked ideas.

Not knowing what else to do I formed a writing partnership with some coworkers which was very fruitful and taught me that what I've been missing my whole life are writing partners. Like all the greatest bands, we developed a lot of riffs and broke up without one song to our credit. With two weeks to go, I showed three concepts I'd been working on to Tom, and watched in horror as they all proved frail and anemic, sputtering and dying right there on the examination table. I was looking across the table at him and all at once I realized he was supposed to be laughing. I had spent dozens of pages writing about an idea I had for a joke, and I should have a hundred jokes.

The next day I was driving a rental car from Houston to Galveston, stuffing my face with BK Veggies and running over the concepts in my head in a blind panic, when I thought of something for one of them that actually made me chuckle to myself. I pulled off the highway and bought a notebook.

The next two weeks went by like some kind of a montage out of a war movie. I dropped all the other ideas, wrote as stream-of-consciousness as I could, pulled in every friend I had with any sort of writing credentials (fortunately no writer can resist critiquing other people's crappy writing), and I rewrote until 5pm the day the pitches were due. I made the wonderful discovery over thanksgiving weekend that my wife and I write really well together, and the five episode descriptions ended up being as much hers as mine. At the 11th hour I sketched a few funny scenes I had in my head and lamely threw tone on them in photoshop.

They got a lot of submissions from our crew. The night of Dec. 1 a bunch of us went out to get drunk and celebrate that the beast was off our backs. I was pleasantly surprised at how imaginitive and offbeat a lot of my colleagues' ideas were. In a perfect world, one or two of us would get a show greenlit and we'd all have jobs for a little while.

My show idea is titled "Backwoods." I'm actually pretty satisfied with it, or at any rate I feel like I didn't punk out. Here's my sketches of the hero kids. We won't hear any feedback for awhile. Fingers crossed!

DEATHLOK

Thanks to the miracle of the internets someone who saw my credit in a Deathlok comic from 1992 sent me a nice cyber fan letter. Whoops, I got confused there for a second, the actual miracle in that sentance is that I have a Deathlok fan. Anyway, I did a little Deathlok sketch for him in return. Probably the first time I ever managed to draw that big neck symmetrically.

BUT BWYIN!

My pal Brian (aka Runbo), insane boy genius, death metal drummer extrordinaire, and pop cultural icon in his own mind, came upstate to help me with the house last weekend.














Brian in his natural Dirty Jersey habitat, seen here giving Ice-T and Coco some love at a hardcore show.














Brian upstate, after a hasty raid of my flannels and power tools...














...and hanging around the local hardware store attempting to pass himself off as a hillbilly contractor. The illusion came to a swift end when the two of us started running around taking pictures like a couple of idiots, but what are you gonna do.

DOGHOOOOUUUUSE!

A piece of groveling fan art I sent to the hosts of my favorite radio show.

When Stern quit K-Rock to go to Sirius Sattelite Radio, CBS basically dropped the rock format and turned the whole station into a farm team of Howard wannabe's from various markets around the country. For these new shows, the long shadow cast by Stern is kind of the elephant in the room.

JV & Elvis used to be on against Stern in the Bay Area, often pulling better ratings. JV (the bald guy) caught my attention because he didn't try to badmouth or ignore Howard, he talked very openly about his respect for the guy, and how he has a long road ahead of him to earn the audience he's inherited in New York. That gives him big cool points in my book, but in actuality their show is often tighter and funnier than Howard's. In addition to the fart and boobie jokes, JV has a weird philosophical turn of mind and he can shift on a dime into a crazy existential discussion. I'm addicted.

Doghouse w/ JV and Elvis, 92.3 Free FM 9am-1pm.

HARD HABIT

I was clicking around Leland's links awhile back, and randomly noticed a post called "If I could draw" on his wife Elizabeth's journal, where she described an image of a nun on the back of a Harley. I thought, that sounds fun to draw, and mentally filed it away for a rainy day.














I saw Elizabeth's comix well-reviewed on Ain't it Cool the other day, so booyah on her.