Daily Peril

I was lucky enough to find myself back in France last week where I came across the issue of Fluide.G I'm featured in.

Here it is found in it's natural habitat next to GQ.
So it turns out that Fluide.G is a ladies magazine. It's funny what I learn on my travels.
Had I known I may have chosen different subject matter.


Or maybe I would have done this anyway :P

I recently did a four page comic for the May issue of the French magazine Fluide.G.
If you live in France it should be on the stands now.

I'm not entirely sure if the French are aware of the American stereotype of a French maid, so I'm curious what kind of reaction it'll get. If you're French and you've read it, let me know what you think.

Here's a preview.

IRON MAN: LEGACY #3 came out yesterday, the one with my variant cover on it. To celebrate I thought I'd post some of my preliminaries. My original idea was to use the clunky Mark 1 suit since it seems more WWII, and I could put a flying fortress kind of spin on it. I thought the nose art worked better for it. I also tried some flight jacket inspired designs with the nose art on his back. Marvel liked the sleeker designs so I went in that direction.



I haven't managed to find a copy of the issue with my variant cover yet, apparently there's only one every twenty five copies. If anybody out there has an extra they'd like to part with, let me know.

Ronnie Del Carmen and I were both lucky enough to be asked to do variant Iron Man covers for Marvel. They're part of an alternate reality series of covers called "Iron Man By Design 2.0". Marvel assigned a cowboy theme to Ronnie and a World War II theme to me. I had a blast doing it. You can read some more about it on Comic Book Resources (and have a look at Ronnie's)



My cover variant will be for IRON MAN: LEGACY #3 on sale 6/23/10

I'm a huge Dan DeCarlo fan and if you know his work you can see why. One of my favorite DeCarlo characters is that "high school sweetheart of the future", Jetta. Who is Jetta you ask? Well you're about to find out. A mountain of gratitude goes to Craig Yoe for compiling, for the very first time, the entire Jetta comic book run in one retro futuristic edition.
And I got to be a part of it! In Pin-up form that is.
Here's my contribution to the book:


And the study (not in the book, I don't think)


The book has a ton of other awesome Pin-ups, like these for instance:


Craig McCracken, Jenny Lerew, Justin Ridge, and Katie Rice respectively (Katie's is genius btw).

The full list of pin ups:

Alan Gutierrez
Andrew Pepoy 
Becky Dreistadt
Ben Tan
Bill Morrison
Bill Presing
Brandon Ragnar
Colleen Coover
Clizia Gussoni
Craig McCracken 
Craig Yoe
Danny Hellman 
David Reddick 
Dominic Marco 
Fabrizio Pasini 
Jay Stephens 
Jenny Lerew 
Joakim Gunnarsson 
Hedvig Häggman-Sund 
Justin Ridge 
Kali Fontecchio 
Katie Rice 
Leslie Cabarga 
Luke McDonnell 
Mark Frauenfelder 
Mike Maihack 
Molly Crabapple
Paul Guinan 
Robert Ullman 
Ryan Hungerford 
Scott Tolleson 
Stephanie Gladden 
Stephen Silver 
The Savanella Sisters 
Tracy Mark Lee

The book will be released to comic shops Wednesday, April 14th, and to regular bookstores shortly thereafter. Or you can always order it on Amazon. Here's what the cover looks like, so keep your eye out for it.

Yuki7 is Kevin Dart's super cool 60's Japanese spy girl. Needless to say I flipped out when he asked me to do my version of her for his up coming book. Kevin is very influenced by 60's spy movie posters so I tried to think of something from the same genre and era but from a totally different direction. I also thought Yuki would make a great comic the first time I even saw her. So it seemed immediately natural to do a Jim Steranko take on the character. It was a blast, I'd have a lot of fun if I got to do a whole comic like this.

Boy, It felt really good to ink a page again. It's been awhile.

I'm updating the blog shop to include the original 2004 English language Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher trade paperback, which was previously available at www.monkeysuit.com. Monkeysuit is officially shutting down, a sad day indeed. Without Monkeysuit Matt Peters and I probably would have never gotten Rex out there. But I'm hopeful the New York based anthology will make it's triumphant return someday.



The book is 132 pages glorious black and white throughout, published by Monkeysuit press in 2004.
Not very many remain of this edition, and it contains some material that will probably never be reprinted.

Here's what's inside:
"Countdown to Annihilation" The original Rex Steele story that was first published in the anthology Monkeysuit vol. 1 in 1999.



"In the Bosom of Terror" The second Rex Steele story first published in the anthology "The Bride of Monkeysuit" in 2000.
This is the story that was adapted for the animated short film by Alex Woo released in 2004.



"Operation Mother's Day" The Third Rex Steele story originally published in "Viva la Monkeysuit" in 2001.



Quite a rarity, "Menace of the Pinheaded Goons". This story is unique to this volume and has never been reprinted (and possibly never will). Written by Matt Peters, plotted by Matt and myself and illustrated by our very talented friend Stephen DeStefano. This is a faux vintage Rex story found in a fictional archive.



Also unique to this volume is an extensive collection of pin ups, other artists interpretations of Rex Steele. Some of the artists include Bill Wray, Kasu Kibuishi, Ricky Nierva, Mike Wieringo, Dice Tsutsumi, Enrico Casarosa, Jackson Publick, Dean Yeagle, Mark Andrews, Mo Willems and Ronnie del Carmen.



And lastly the volume ends with a section devoted to my sketches and developmental drawings which contains some drawings that are in the French volume and some that are not.



I am hoping to reprint the full color French edition (with it's two additional stories) in English eventually, but at the moment there is no guarantee.

Also, this book will ship from a different location than my pin up books, so I'm afraid combination orders with the other books on my blog will be impossible.

Thanks!

Thought I'd post a few of my favorite pages that Nate Wragg colored for the French Rex Steele edition. (Nate is better known for his 2-D Ratatouille work)





The Book is being published by Akileos, with a release date of December 6th I believe. You can find some more page samples HERE. The book will include a dvd of the animated short as well.

Roughs!

Once I showed those thumbs to my creative partner Matt, he had some constructive criticism. Too much glowering and posturing. It interrupted the flow and energy. He was totally right, you can't have a knock down drag out knuckle brawl with people lookin' at each other 'tween every punch. So I went back to the drawing board and busted these out:



Great, it's shorter and more to the point. I was in a much better head space now. Did these:



Almost there, did a refining pass and got the balance and composition more tied down.



And after that, onto the roughs!

So I had way too many panels for what I needed. The next step was to pare it down and tell the story more economically, and after a couple more passes these were the result:



Now that I've got a panel count I more or less liked, I decided to take it too the next phase. Page layouts. So here the goal is to take the panels I have, and arrange them into a balanced, pleasing comic book page. Sometimes changing the composition of a particular panel to something that works better for it's new panel shape.



The layouts on the right there were meant to be the finals, unfortunately it was not meant to be.

I thought I'd go a little more in depth with my comic book process, as there are a few stages before I even get to the final thumbnails. I can't say I'd recommend doing it this way because it's really a lot of extra work, but it's what I'm comfortable with.
For the example I'm using a 5 page Rex Steele comic that was done for "Digital Webbing Presents" #29
The very first step in the process was discussing the story with my partner Matt Peters. Once we figured out what we wanted, I drew a series of thumbnail storyboards of the entire story (as you see below). I'm a storyboard artist by profession so this is really the most natural first step for me. This also allows me to get a panel count, and therefore a page count. Our goal in this case was to make a 5 page comic, and as you can see I had way too many panels to do that.
The next step is to edit, and try again.

I really enjoy seeing process, so I thought I'd show a little. This is a progression from thumbnail to final for a page from my latest Rex Steele story for Afterworks 2

Once I have a thumbnail I like, I'll enlarge it to letter size on a copy machine (or printer). Then I'll put it on a light box, pop another letter size sheet on top and tie down the drawings. I do this to maintain the proportions I worked out on the thumbnail.

Once I have a rough I'll enlarge that slightly (maybe 10%), put it back on the light box to ink. I usually ink on a large sketchbook paper (I need something thin enough to see through it), and with a brush, brush pen, and a Micron or something similar for the fine lines. Then the finished inks are scanned as bitmap line art.

Once all that is done, I'll spend too much time fretting over what colors to use, try alot of pallets that don't work, and eventually get to something I can live with.