My head really hurts right now. Here's Monday's Exciting Tales! strip. It's a tribute to Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland:
Not exactly one of my best, I'll admit, but I'm still fond of it.

I have all thirteen pieces for Embrace Infection finished, though a few need minor revisions. I had seven printed on campus today, though three of those are the ones which need revising. I'm excited to see them in the full size they were meant to be printed at, however, with the colors brilliantly popping on the glossy paper.

Here's one of those finished, printed pieces, entitled Feeling Good:

I've been thinking a bit lately about, well, women in comics I guess, given the shitstorm that hit last week with DC's Catwoman and Starfire being portrayed as trashy sex-hungry sluts, not real characters but cheesecake for fanboys to gawk over and fantasize about having sex with. It makes me feel dirty and uncomfortable, seeing the pages, and I don't like it at all. I'm plotting a new comic in which the villain is a woman, and I'm thinking hard about how to develop her as sexy, yes, but more than anything else, FORMIDABLE. There aren't a lot of formidable women in comics, I don't think...

Chiyoko in Akira, though. The big burly woman in the apron who protects Kei and Kaneda? I'm pretty sure she punches more faces in than she has lines of dialogue in the third volume. I love her. I just got volume 4 in the mail today, and she's on the back cover, in ragged clothes, ammo belts, and wielding a rifle. I do hope she gets to smash more faces in...

I also got a copy of John Dies at the End, because I saw the trailer for next year's film adaptation by Don Coscarelli:

Looks like he's channeling Cronenberg quite a bit, which makes this movie look even tastier. And given that the novel's from the editor in chief of Cracked, one of my favorite websites, I'm so excited about getting to crack this book open and start reading.

I just have to finish Philip K. Dick's Now Wait For Last Year first.

Also, I must admit something that MAY be considered blasphemy among many circles: I've been watching old James Bond movies on Netflix, and, well, I don't much like the Sean Connery flicks. And I LOVED On Her Majesty's Secret Service, despite the fact that yes, George Lazenby is not quite a good Bond. But man, the way that movie was lit and shot is phenomenal! And Diana Rigg as the Bond girl! It's a weird one, yes, trying to be grittier and more serious than the Connery films while at the same time including a bobsled chase scene, but I dunno, it may be my favorite Bond film alongside Casino Royale...

And I think I'm gonna call the entry quits here, because I keep getting distracted by Top Gear. AWAY.

[Brett]

Today is Thursday, and here's the new Exciting Tales! printed in today's East Tennessean:
It has been requested that I do a future strip about Professor Waterbear. I have to agree, his story must be told.

Today I drew the seventh Exciting Tales! and the fifth Distinguished Gentlemen. I also started character sketches for a graphic novel idea. Now it's back to work on Embrace Infection, I guess.

Also, this has got me excited:

No, it's not as intense as the original teaser trailer, but still, the more I see of this film, the more I want to see it. The novel was amazing, but the Swedish film was a bit lacking. Did I say that already once before? I feel like I might be repeating myself.

I've got more things to do. Rawr.

[Brett]

I've been stupidly busy, spending the last several days working hard on pieces for Embrace Infection. I gave it its own gallery on the site here, but only five pieces are uploaded now. Ten are done, but...I'm gonna wait and think on them. I know one of them STILL needs some more work. Still though, I showed all ten to one of my professors today and he loved them, so I'm excited. I've got three more to finish up, making thirteen in all.

I won't get to exhibit that many, though. It's up in the air, sort of, but the week that I'll be showing, November 14th-18th, I'm sharing the space with two other students, and none of us really have any idea of how many pieces we each have and how much space we'll need.

I wrote my artist's statement for it, and well, for once in my life wrote way too much. It'll have to be cut down on quite a bit. I had a hard time thinking of what to say, then I just went nuts and starting typing words. Heh.

I want to finish the other pieces this week. That's somewhat unlikely, seeing as how today more than ever I feel like I just pushed myself too hard these past several days and have finally hit that brick wall. Now I just need to lay a while and get my strength back, then attack again. There's still the printing to be done, and mounting, and other stuff too. Gah.

Honestly? While I think this is the best work I've ever done, it's exhausting and once the show is up and all, I will be able to sigh with relief, take a power nap, and start exploring the 600 or so ideas that have been burning in my mind that I just haven't had the time to put on paper yet.

Oh, and here's Monday's East Tennessean strip, the second Distinguished Gentlemen. They accidentally reprinted an older comic last Thursday, hence the delay:

Also, added some more links to the sidebar. Amalgae Comics is the newly-named home where just about every comic published for the ETSU comic book illustration course is up, including Cyberpunk Blues and works by some good friends of mine. Check it out.

That's about it for now. Exhaustion has hit me hard today and I need to just rest some. Tomorrow? I'll be back to the grind, yes...

[Brett]

So DC Comics is now a couple of weeks into their huge new deal, the DC New 52. Fifty two new first issues essentially relaunching the DC Universe proper and releasing them simultaneously in comic stores and digitally. It’s a huge move, one that feels just a little bit desperate, but it’s nevertheless a bold and interesting thing to do. However, my knowledge of and interest in the DCU has always been extremely limited largely to just following specific creators. Still though, their overall excitement and the heaps of exposure they've been getting still got me interested in a few of their titles…

…Only the fringe stuff, of course. DC’s pantheon of superheroes never really appealed to me as much as Marvel, and I’ve never tried to puzzle out why, nor will I.

It all started, for me, with OMAC. Everyone involved are clearly trying their hardest to be like Jack Kirby was when he created the character. Keith Giffen is doing his best to draw like Kirby, and while the colorist is also trying their best to make everything into a shiny plastic mess, it still works. The writing is juvenile. The first issue is 20 pages of OMAC busting things up and smacking strange villains around. Like the Build-A-Friend chick! Her face PEELS BACK to reveal twin laser cannons, where a skull (mechanical or not) should be! And those crazy Gobbler things. They just line up to get smacked down by OMAC in these horribly bright colors, spouting off silly dialogue, AND I LOVE IT. There’s a genuine sense of child-like glee in the book that’s infectious. It’s crazy, not in a Grant Morrison talking about time centipedes way, but in an odd, sincere, childish way, like some of the superhero stuff I would make up when I was in elementary school. And I mean that as a compliment. I hope it stays weird, and I hope it stays silly. It’s nothing groundbreaking, and admittedly I’d rather have actual Kirby art than someone aping Kirby, but still, it’s a lot of fun.

I wanted to buy Animal Man, but it sold out and I can’t find a copy. Arg. Well, I guess I could get it on ComiXology, but I don’t want to read it one panel at a time.

Which leaves me with the only other comic I bought, Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE. The title alone hooked me. I had to know if DC were really trying to reference Marvel’s Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD stuff and, well, the truth is that no, they’re actually trying to be more like the DCU equivalent of Hellboy and the BPRD. I’m not complaining. Frankenstein and his Creature Commandos (get it? GET IT?!) are like if the Universal movie monsters got together as a special ops team. There’s a winged vampire dude, an amphibious scientist chick, a mummy whose identity is unknown, and a werewolf. In the first issue, they’re dropped into a town that’s been taken over by monsters that have mysteriously appeared. Their commander is Frankenstein’s father, Father Time, who for some reason is a little asian girl with a domino mask. Their base of operations is a tiny sphere that they have to be shrunk down and teleported into, created by Ray Palmer, the Atom. And here I was thinking OMAC was nutty. Read this paragraph again. If a team of horror movie icons fighting monsters doesn’t appeal to you in any way, I don’t want to know you.

Apparently further down the line, OMAC and Frankenstein are going to cross over. It’s meant to be.

Looking at the checklist of all of the other titles, there’s nothing else that grabs me in the same way these do. I don’t know how the merging of the Wildstorm universe with DC is going to play out (awkwardly?), but I don’t think there’s much reinventing the wheel going on. Yes, they’re starting from scratch (for the most part, there may be some continuity snags here and there I’m sure, but I am indifferent), but it’s not like they’re radically re-envisioning these characters and stories, which is kind of a shame. I keep wondering if we’ll ever see something new and monumental out of the superhero genre like the Dark Knight Returns, Elektra: Assassin, or Watchmen, something that breaks the rules and changes the way the game is played. Chances are? Not very likely.

Ah well. At least there’s a comic about a bulky blue guy with a shimmering mohawk beating people up, I really think the world needs more of that.

[Brett]

Today's Exciting Tales! in the East Tennessean:

All of these things are true, though of course, people who know me and know my work really well will realize that I am personally responsible for the first two.

...Heh.

Thursday sees the second Distinguished Gentlemen strip, of course.

Met with my advisor today about Embrace Infection, showed him the seven finished pieces. He seemed to talk to me longer than any of the other students, and it was mostly about the concept of a loose narrative, which is what I'm calling this stuff. He suggested some minor changes to make to a few of the pieces, then told me to keep cranking them out and not to be afraid to be even more outrageous. Excellent.

I got a Droid X2 smartphone and have been learning my way around it. Obviously, one of the first things I downloaded was the ComiXology app and a nice big slate of free comics. It's a bit exhausting at times, but reading the comics one or two panels at a time is a very interesting thing. It's got me thinking about how page layouts are affected by it. For instance, a big, beautiful two-page spread by JH Williams III would not translate all too well. However, something simple, on a 6-or-9 panel grid would be pretty much perfect unless the artist is playing around with symmetry between panels and such, the way Dave Gibbons did for the Fearful Symmetry issue of Watchmen. There's a lot of push and pull, and I wonder just much professional artists think about the differences between the physical book and the screen on someone's iPhone, yeah?

It's fascinating stuff, but still: nothing beats having the thing itself in your hands, being able to flip between pages, smell the ink on paper...Er, right. I'll shut up now.

[Brett]

Since it was published Thursday afternoon, here I will share with you the first Distinguished Gentlemen strip:

This is the first Distinguished Gentlemen strip I've done since...late high school, early college, I think? I had made a stab at doing a webcomic, and you can still find all those strips online, but please don't. They're appalling. I created these guys out of the blue my senior year of high school in a painting which now hangs (appropriately, I think) over my brother's toilet in his house. They are very endearing to me for some reason I can't quite put my finger on.

These strips are a different beast from the Exciting Tales! stuff, because there's an arc, with each story being (I think) four strips. This one and the second one were also absolutely tough to draw. Then I spent a long time hitting my head on a wall trying to figure out how to do the third one when I had a breakthrough. I gave it an interesting layout, but it'll be a couple more weeks before you get to see it.

I'm still ahead on the strips, yes, but gosh, it's turning into a grind. I know I could move faster, but I have to work to motivate myself sometimes, especially since I'm just going back and forth between them and Embrace Infection, having difficulty sometimes in determining which is the higher priority.

But they're still getting done, and I refuse to resort to Jim Davis-levels of awful laziness. Though I do kind of want to do a Garfield or Family Circus parody at some point. I just finished penciling a tribute strip to Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland earlier this afternoon, but maybe only three people total will get that. Still, though, I'm learning with each strip I draw and I feel like I'll soon find a happy method of working where I can provide good quality comics without breaking my back over it.

I hope.

(I also want to do a tribute to George Herriman's Krazy Kat)

[Brett]