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Sorry to have been absent for so long! It's been a ridiculously busy few weeks. First, New York Comic Con happened, the highlight of which was probably a relaxing get-together with the gracious duo of Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman and a number of their amazing friends - a nice change from the gereally hectic con dinners. I got a four-fingers-worth-of-meat Corned Beef and coleslaw sandwhich at a deli called the Stage with my editor James not once, but twice in the same day (I'm salivating just thinking about it), I picked up the five published volumes of the new Terry and the Pirates set for half price (my big find, especially great because the first volume is out of print even though the other volumes are still coming out, so I wasn't going to buy THOSE until I could find #1... come on, IDW, that's about the most moronic publishing strategy I've heard), plus lots of other good-looking stuff, and really enjoyed palling around with my Oni buddies.
We were ridiculously busy the whole time, owing primarily to the justly deserved mania (and it was mania) for Mal's new Scott Pilgrim book.
I spent a chunk of Friday and the majority of Saturday working at the Wacom booth, doing demos on the Cintiq. I use a Cintiq at home, and stand by their merits; it was nice getting to answer questions about them. Most of the time it was just people coming up and telling us how much they love the one they already have. The Wacom rep, Adam Wetzler, was my host while I was in New York - he let me stay at his place, showed me around the city, and filled my ears with all sorts of great New York factoids - he's a real knowledge fountain.
I did a couple of panels - one a kid's draw with Jay Pisopo, Ruben Procopio, and Jamal Igle, which was lots of fun and had lots of kids out there (it was sort of like a "Who's Line" thing, with kid's calling out suggestions), and one, by myself, called "Pillaging History for Story Ideas," which was a little trickier. It was a kid's day panel, and so I designed it around reaching eight-year-olds... and guess what? I had sixteen adults show up, and no kids, wanting to know about research and ethical practices for doing historical fiction. Needless to say, the first fifteen minutes or so were a little rougher, with me trying to wing it with a stream-of-conciousness type rant about approaching historical fiction, but after that it smoothed out, and by the end, when there was a Q & A session, everything was great. Still, it threw me for a loop!
After New York, I went down to Athens, Ga, for a presentation by the inestimably briliant Sergio Aragones. He's an incredibly gracious and friendly man, and a heck of a raconteur, and it was a huge pleasure getting to meet him.
His lecture made me and everyone else there feel like throwing our pens and brushes out the window. He would ask for suggestions - people would call out "Giraffe," or "Ninja," or "Racecar," and he would do a pantomime gag cartoon, right there, on the spot, drawing in the "punchline" part of the cartoon last. And they were always funny. And beautifully drawn. And he would start drawing the SECOND someone called something out, and would be finished - FINISHED - in less than a minute. I've never seen anything like it. The man's synapses must be atomic. I know this has been a long post, but I've been off for a while. Another part of this was trying to finish my story for the Awesomer Anthology, which will be coming out in May. It's a Crogan Adventure story, so if you're a completist, make sure you get hold of a copy. This one was tricky - I couldn't use my regular layout style, because the story is seven pages long, so I had to work with a tighter grid, with ten-fifteen panels per page sometimes, rather than my usual three-to-seven. I also got to practice more with my new lettering, which I'll be employing in Crogan's March. Anyway, here are a few panels to keep you from getting too bored:
  
Oh, some of it's in Japanese.
Anyway, sorry for the lateness... and I know a few people are respecting e-mail replies, so I'll get to those today or tomorrow - thanks for your patience!
In my final prep lead-up to starting the pages of Crogan's March, I've done a Legion line-up. Designing the legionnaires has been a real pain because I'm a big proponent of shape-based character design, and by definition these guys unfortunately all have the same clothing, and it's very cumbersome clothing, at that - tall hats, triangular cloth, baggy pants, clunky coats - gotta tell ya, it was pretty tough trying to make some thirty-five characters look strikingly different while dressing the same.
Anyhow, here's the complete lineup, which is a pretty tiny image when shrunk horizontally for the web:
So to compensate, I'll show a few selections standing by themselves.
Okay, so in other news, I'll be in Savannah, GA this weekend, so if any of my Savannah friends want to get in touch with me, I'll be at Norris Hall most of Friday, from noon until sixish.
Also, I still have my old Kentucky phone number, and have had it for years. Why is that relevant? Well, KY has been hit hard by ice storms (Liz's family, for example, is likely without power for the next week or more), and our cell network is down as a result. So while I can make outgoing calls without any difficulty, I can't receive calls - try, and you'll just get a "Network unavailable" recording. So if you need to reach me, shoot me an e-mail - chris at curiousoldlibrary.com.
Big news for anybody who buys prints, original pages, or who just wants to put up their own stuff on the wall. We in comics use the 11x17" paper size a LOT. It’s the right ratio for standard comic pages, so originals are often done in that size, and as we’re a fiscally frugal group we often cap our self-printed posters at this "tabloid" size, because the printing costs jump exponentially for anything larger. 11x17 has always been pricey to frame, because it’s always had to be a custom job. It’s one of the reasons I give out 5x7 or 8x10 sheets when I want to do an art trade – prefab framing is within my budget, and custom framing most definitely is NOT. But now, 11 x17 is in my mix.
Wal-Mart (yes, everyone’s corporate chain boogeyman) now carries 11x17 frames – standard, non-nonsense black frames – for $6 apiece. Six dollars. The last (and only) time I got something 11x17 framed it cost me almost thirty dollars.
Here’s an original page, which is a gift for a friend, and a print for my office, both framed using these new six buck Wal-Mart babies (Liz is out of town and has the camera, hence the drawing).
So now you’ve got a reason to get one of those purty Smokers of the Marvel Universe prints the next time you’re at a con.
I'm doing seven pages for the upcoming ISR anthology Awesomer (available for preorder at the Top Shelf website). Aside from having a gorgeous cover by Bone cartoonist Jeff Smith, the book is gonna be chock full of work by some really great cartoonists.
I've got my pages thumbed out pretty tightly (for me, anyway) and am gonna go to pencils as soon as I get the Japanese dialogue translated into characters. A friend of Hung Lee at SCAD has helped me with Japanese translation before, so I may beg for her brain again, but if anyone reading this is fluent in Japanese and capable of writing out the characters for me (which I'll subsequently rewrite in my own hand), I'll show my gratitude by giving a copy of Crogan's Vengeance, as well as an original page from this story. Any takers? There'd be about sixteen balloons worth.
Anyway, here are the thumbnails for a few of the pages:
I've been doing lots and lots of preparatory drawings for the next book, Crogan's March (I'll probably refer to it as "March" in shorthand), and I figured I'd post a few. These are for the Tuareg camp. Also, Atlanta cartoonist Justin Wagner's website is up and running, and he has some great sketches up on his blog. You should check it out; he's one of those guys that straddles animation and comics, and does does both well.
You know, drawing these guys, I just cringed. Ouch! I was going to draw the old man, but I don't have the DVD and google image search wasn't particularly helpful. I'm kid of glad - figuring how to work the iron scar in with flat colors was challenge.
Well, that's it! Have a Merry Christmas, everyone! Hohoho!
For the next-to-last Christmas drawing, here's a Hun, a Frog, and a Limey having a soccer game in no-man's land during the famous Christmas Eve cease-fire of 1914.
Here's an X-Mas image bristling with holiday terror - Santa!
In case you haven't seen the Futurama Christmas episodes, Santa is a murderous robot who judges everyone to be on the naughty list and thus destroys anyone he sees out on X-Mas eve.
Also, I realize too late that my title numbering system was off - I should have started with T minus ELEVEN, because as it stands Christmas will still be one off from the theoretical Christmas blastoff. Curse you, advanced arithmetic!
Poor, poor Flick:
The Christmas Story holds a special place in my heart, for reasons beyond its exceptional comedic quality. From the time I can remember, my parents and all of their friends would hold a Christmas Story party each year, where everyone would come dressed as a character from the film. The first couple of years were standard - Randy who can't put his arms down, Scott Farkus, stuff like that - but as the years went on, and no one wanted to be repetitive, the costumes became more nuanced and obscure - the Christmas Tree Salesman, the teacher in paper-grading regalia, the lamp, the old man knee deep in Bumpus hounds, dead Black Bart... it was tons of fun for me and my sister to see, as a kid, these adults going all out to make a big evening of it.
We moved to Kentucky when I was eleven, but the Lousiana folks STILL have the Christmas story party each year. Gosh, it's coming up on twenty-five years, I'd bet! Liz and I were lucky enough to live a couple of hours away when we ran the hotel, and made it up for it.
So while I've heard griping of TBS's annual 24 hour marathon, I couldn't be happier with it - each scene in that movie is the funniest scene, and its as much a part of Christmas to me as opening presents.
Eleanor of Aquitaine: A sort of composite likeness based on existing period depictions.
She had been a crusader, queen of two countries, and a cunning political mind before being locked away by her second husband, Henry II, to keep her from stirring up any more civil wars. I picked her as a Christmas character because of Goldman's excellent play The Lion in Winter, which is about Henry bringing his family (Eleanor and surviving sons Richard, Geoffrey, and John) home for the holidays to play mind games and ostensibly decide on a successor. The play was made into two very, VERY good films, one starring Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor and Peter O'Toole as Hal II, and the other with Glen Close as Eleanor and Patrick Stewart as the vengeful hubby.
When compared, both films have their strengths and weaknesses - in the 60's version, Hepburn plays Eleanor as increasingly desperate in a way that Close seems to try and mask; Patrick Stewart, with the same lines, is a far more magnanimous Henry. O'Toole seems downright cruel and diabolical; Stewart says everything with a smile and you can't help but like him even when his behavior is contemptible. In fact, that's a good way to look at the films as a whole: the dialogue is the same in both, but everything uttered in the sixties version is hard-walled contempt, and everything in the 2003 version seems to be good-natured ribbing. As a medieval political movie, the former works best; as a home-for-the-holidays movie, the Stewart/Close version wins out.
I don't care for the performance of John in the older movie, and I don't like the performance of Richard in the new one. Both, though, are worth watching - give 'em a queing in your netflix cycle.
The Krampus is Saint Nicholas's dastardly sidekick. He takes your toys if you're bad, womps merrymakers with a birch twig club, and carries naughty children away to work forced labor at the North Pole. I for one am upset that he doesn't see more play in the good ol' U.S. of A.
I originally did a more realistic, less Schultz-design-oriented Mr. Van Pelt, which I based on the Phillip North-Beardsley kid from the old Lucy/Henry Fonda Yours, Mine, and Ours film, because I was, for years, convinced that the kid was the voice of Linus. Turns out I was wrong (not WAY wrong - turns out it was that kid's little brother), but I always envisioned real-life-counterpart Linus as being that kid. But it looked weird to have a non-Schultz design, and I thought the Peanuts purists might call for my blood. So here's the traditional Christmas Linus. If you haven't watched the special yet this year, shame on you. It's tradition.
It wouldn't be the holidays without Gormaanda.
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