Dogerpillar

Well, this happened.

The Most Important Meal

You know you're a cartoonist wheeeeeeennnn....all of the above.

Snacks and Squidinking Still

Man, this feels nice. I made a short comic last year, that I hadn't finished filling in solid blacks on, so I'm squidinking the pages before I head off for my closing shift tonight. (Firmly putting that out of my mind now.) Listening to The Breeders while I work seals the deal, as does rendering the Triple Ginger Snaps (just offscreen) an endangered species.

True Stories, All

Comics! Quick, poorly scanned ones from my sketchbook, about yours truly and the glamorous life I lead. 

 Usually, I'm pretty relaxed about co-habitating with beetles, spiders, and other little critters: bugs generally don't scare me. But dang. Thousand-leggers, man. (Or house centipedes...whichever you call them depends on where you're from, I guess.) Seriously, though. Those guys are fuckin' fast. Even if I know they're benevolent, and only want to snack on other housebugs...I just can't deal with all those legs.

The Girl With Hair Like THIS

Oh man, dudes. I could draw the inimitable Bryan Lee O'Malley's Ramona Flowers all day. There's plenty of terrific fan-art of this character out there, but it seems most of the ones I've seen depict her just kinda...standing around, wearing nice clothes? I decided to remedy this.

(I also just love the idea of her regularly using her subspace bag as a sidecar for Scott whenever she's impatient to get someplace at rollerblade speed.)

Crowbar Couture

A sloppy, ten-minute ink warmup that was super inspired by zis man. His ink work is absolutely gorgeous. Mine...not so much, hahaha. But it was really liberating to get back to traditional inking. I feel like I have trouble drawing fashionable ladies without making them menacing.

(I don't think it's a problem, though.)

Run, Don't Walk

Woah, hey! I made a thing! A thing for a Clamp fanzine that some friends of mine are putting together. In the wild days of my misspent youth, I ended up reading a ton of this kind of manga, but I can't say I have a single regret. If you have no idea what Clamp is, then damn...you should get yourself a shojou education. 

The group is super-prolific, and out of all the works they've made, I decided to make a tribute to one of their more unabashedly absurd titles, Duklyon: Clamp School Defenders, which is a zany parody of the metal hero genre. My favorite part is near the end, when an antagonist turns the heros' dog Inuko-San into a dangerous kaiju monster simply by making her really huge. The resolution is splendidly silly.

But yeah! Everybody worked real hard on the zine, and it came together nicely. Check it out, if you can!

Creepin'

Creeeeeeeeeeeepin'.

Finally managed a lineup of the characters that my friends and I made...they're for the campaign we're currently playing in. From right to left: Ben's character Gronningor, our resident grizzly tank; Helgora, Jabari's duty-bound, portal-slinging messenger; Eule, Jon's owlish bard/healer; and Gren, my scheming contortionist art thief. 

Maybe if I have some time, I'll add a couple NPCs.

Etch-A-Sketch

Just some quick character designs I'm revisiting for a future story idea. Got to do a lot of awesome research on traditional Nepalese costumes for this...studying history and anthropology while hunting for reference pictures is one of my absolute favorite parts of being an illustrator. (If there were a position akin to a visual art dramaturg, man, that would be the job for me, hahaha.) 

More to come soon...updates featuring zine submissions, comic strips and probably some party art for a few campaigns I've played in. Hang on to those hats, hapless readers!

Little Annie Oakley

A warm-up that's basically amounted to me playing with brooshes in Photoshoop. Broosha-broosh!  St. Vincent's knack for contained chaos has always blown me away: she wields that guitar like it's a goddamn weapon. 

More to come, soon. More stuff that's blended with traditional mediums...I promise that I'm not just going to use this blog to document my wince-worthily inept forays into wrapping my head around digital illustration, haha.

Sociopathic Space Gnomes

Quite possibly the best drawing I will ever make, in my entire life? Yes. These are the characters I and my friend Rez made, respectively, for my roommate Jabari's fantasy/space-opera/metaphysical mindfuck of a homebrew, called Lucid. Quiblyn and her little brother, Mongrel are both Jovys, which are basically space gnomes in the world of the game...except where Joyvs are usually cautious arcane tinkers, Quiblyn and Mongrel are like two loose cannons. She's a maverick weapons engineer, whereas he's the muscle who tests her heretical creations in the field. (She's currently working on smithing a sort've proto-tommy gun in a world where any firearms technology hasn't really surpassed flintlock pistols yet.) They're less than four feet high, but they're kind've unabashedly a pair of sociopaths. With cockney accents.

Pretzel-Rogues

Some loosey-goosey sketches of the character I made for a tabletop RPG my friends and I are playing in. (It's my friend Rez's homebrew, Creep, which is ten kinds of rad.)

Gren is a professional art thief, bent on taking full advantage of the war-torn age our campaign is set in. (He met up with the rest of the party after looting a manor abandoned by its aristocratic inhabitants before their town was lain siege to.) He's also a contortionist, which helps him get out of some pretty tight spots while thieving, or running away from adversaries. I was excited for the challenge of  making a character who was definitely not proficient on a battlefield--my last Creep character was a brawler.