Carbon Clouds

April draws to a close, and while this past Saturday we got a preview of Summer thru a relentlessly hot and muggy day, I'm not ready for it to warm up indefinitely yet. Seriously, the preview was this gross mugginess where outside is this hot vacuum. The sun wasn't even out as it was overcast and was inexplicably warm. It would have been intolerable if it wasn't for the ferocious wind blowing in gust after gust. A smoggy veil was cast over the skyline of the city, and hanging outside for a few minutes meant risking a dirty film on your dermis. But it didn't last long thankfully. A cool front blew in that night and the next day was beautiful. A complete 180.
As far as completed work I worked up my sliver of a design for the Pulp 21 crew and their upcoming t-shirt endeavor.

 

Not only that but the Zine Fest Houston 2017 compilation is coming up and there's a call to all the local recurring exhibitors. I do a two-pager every year, usually with nothing to do with my current work but as a separate entity, but as I've been charged with a butt-load of creativity as of recent and have been moving ahead with the main story for Screw Comics! 4 I decided to send in a two page Preamble of sorts setting up the one of the worlds of the story. Of course, here it is! 

Quite a set-up eh? Of course this is just one of the tropes of the story and it's not even the biggest one. As you can see I've been having a good old time with my white gel pen, that's been allowing me to lay the white ink over the solid blacks apparent in the stars and the "to be continued" text. 

8 pages penciled and written in 3 days. See what I mean burst? Sure pencils are really rough; I do most of the work in the inking process. Here what counts most is the writing. I'll read and read thru the new pages and make amendments as needed, usually simplifying dialog or emphasizing points and attitudes leading to more convincing character development. You know, how writers work! At this rate though, I'm sure to have Screw $4 out by this Autumn. Here's hoping!

Last but certainly not least some info for Shane's memorial: Saturday May 6th, 4pm-6pm, Live Oak Friends Meeting - 1318 W 26th St, Houston, TX 77008. I had the honor of designing the above banner, scanned from Shane's work. Click it for more info, the FB event page.

EDIT: We managed to record audio from the memorial which I'm compiling into a podcast for friends that couldn't make it. There was a lot inspiring stuff and touching stories about Shane, and he will never be forgotten. Along with this I've also expressed interest in helping with collecting, archiving and putting together a Shane omnibus, a fat book of all his (self) published works to be sold at events and whose proceeds will go to a charity, possibly to help other artists and writers start their own zines or maybe help those who need it pay for their insulin. Of course it's all speculative, but in light of his passing we all feel inspired.

UPDATE: Here is the audio from the Memorial, download or stream while it's in my DropBox. Click Snoopy.

I had two mics set up but one cable was old and giving me hell, so we only had one decent mic. Still can hear many of the people loud and clear. Many inspiring stories, peep it.

Armed & Dangerous

Today I saw a post about the top eight women wanted by the FBI here in the US. Reading it was a lot like reading a rogue's gallery list to a secret agent. Some committed some horrible acts of violence and piracy, while others just committed atrocious white collar crimes. Crimes of passion, crimes of money, crimes of revolution. It inspired me to draw out these characters as I saw them in my head based on the mugshots and what I imagined they wear and how they behave. Here's the POST.
Hopefully you'll be inspired to do your own searches on some of these women, and find out what their cause is (was). While some of these crimes are heinous, others are quite revolutionary. As far as the likeness, I did take a lot of creative license to craft these figures, so I would no way consider these entirely accurate to identify these fugitives. If you feel like chasing these bounties better find a better picture.

 

I enjoyed this lil' illustration project so much I prepared a PDF for you to print out so you and the kids can color these illustrations! Just download, print, and color!

HEY KIDS! Download, save, and print the PDF from HERE.

And it's in Honor of #VillainWeek.

Faith Based Initiative

Here are a couple of snips from an upcoming comic compilation and exhibition. It's a 5 page autobiographical piece written by Olga Feliciano for her Graphic Novel Creative Writing class at UH. Because I heard they were gonna exhibit the comic pages I decided to go with a large format 15x23 size on some nice illustration bristol. Unfortunately, they opted to print out and blow up the completed pages with the text and everything, so I worked on this large format for pretty much nothing. But I ain't buggin'. The pages turned out beautiful and I can't wait to see how the printed book looks. 100 copies will be given out at the show on a first come first serve basis. Come out and see this work Monday from 6-8, here are the details. 
And here are a couple of snips of two pages. It deals with a loss of faith, a lapsing of Catholicism, due to passing of a loved one from AIDS. Powerful stuff. The story spoke to me because I was raised Catholic and all the melancholy imagery of the church was a not an alien thing. Neither was praying and praying to no answer. So it was a perfect fit.

Select panels:

Pop Lockin' Super Sale

NEW Episode of "Dirk Strangely gets Crunk" series, thrown together by yours truly! 

In other news, I'm temporarily relocating to another city for a couple of months and I've made an astounding realization; I have plenty of books, but not enough cash! So, in an effort to transform some of these books into cash I put together a BACK 2 SKOOL sale! Much like the ones that killed our summer mood every August; much like the ones that kill the summer mood of vacationing teachers every August...

Yes! So from now 'til Labor Day you can get ALL 3 of my latest books - Screw Comics #1, Screw Comics #2, & Enchanted by Darkness - plus a 5x7 sketch of your favorite character...ever (go ahead, TRY to stump me), all for $25! That's a $50 value; you know, all the cover prices of the books plus the price of the sketch. Shipping's only $3, for 3 fat books. What a deal! I've only got a handful of Screw #1's left and the Enchanted's are also dwindling so ya gotta ACT NOW or Soon! Ya got until Labor Day!

Tell you what, you can READ some of the stories from Screw Comics on the Facebook page!

If you click LIKE the page you can get reminded of when this sale ends and other cool deals!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Screw-Comics/157347317654799

One more thing:

 

Just laid down a cover design for my boy Lee Lawson's FINAL mixtape Nuts, Bolts, & Screws.

It's a 46 track mash-up of song-blends, remixes, screw-downs, and beat loops. Lots of tidbits of interesting shit, and really interesting shit if yer a chronic-smoking underground hip-hop head. I'm listening to it right now. Not bad! You can get it FREE via torrent HERE. 

I artistically directed LEE LAWSON's website, as well as designed most of his mixtape covers. Peep it HERE.

He even includes some info on how to download torrents. Cool shit, read HERE.

Okay! Get to it!

Change Yer Face

Check it out! All you Firefox users out there can change yer persona to the very same background here. "General Summer Solstice & the Bloody Mess" is now available for FREE to download and dress up yer browser.

Click HERE to try it out!

Spider-Man's Deadliest Foe

Here's my latest music vid. Combining my two favorite things: Spider-man and Nirvana's music. I've been diggin' on Spider-man lately, ever since I got this comic reader installed on my laptop. I hit up a site and made a few downloads and the next thing I knew I was hooked on old back issues of Claremont's X-men, as well as Romita's Sr. Amazing Spider-man. Really digging Romita Sr.'s art. Also with the comic reader I'm able to export pages, allowing me to make snippets of the old school gag ads or  interesting panels. One of which makes for the Toonzday title card at the end of the vid.
What made me want to do this video stems from reading those old Spidey back issues. Peter Parker attends college, gets his own place, gets a motorcycle, and is caught in this flirting triangle with Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson. I've caught myself really rooting for Pete to get some play with either one, even so much as exclaiming out loud "Diss!" after witnessing Peter getting shot down by a hot blonde or a fiery red head. It's the dilemma of Peter Parker; if he could only explain that HE was Spider-man, then that would clear up the flaky behavior, and the illusion that he doesn't care. That's what I like about this song. I think it captures that angsty feeling of being around somebody new, someone you could possibly care about, someone you would love to tell your secret to. The kind of situation where if you pursued her too hard, too fast, or if you revealed too much too soon she would run. That's a lotta too's.