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If anybody lives in the Carolinas (or, ostensibly, Eastern Georgia), you should make a trip out to one of the World's best comic shops, HEROES AREN'T HARD TO FIND, in Charlotte on Saturday for FREE COMIC BOOK DAY. I'll be there, doing signings and free sketches, and so will 13 other really great artists:
MARK BROOKS (Spider-Man)
CHRIS BRUNNER (Gotham Central)
IAN FLYNN (Sonic)
SANFORD GREENE (Method Man GN)
CULLY HAMNER (The Question)
ADAM HUGHES (Wonder Woman)
JASON LATOUR (Loose Ends)
PAT QUINN (Pretty much any title ever published, including a lot of recent work on The Phantom)
BUDD ROOT (Cavewoman)
ANDY SMITH (Dean Koontz' Frankenstein)
ALLISON SOHN (Star Wars trading cards)
BRIAN STELFREEZE (The Ride)
KARL STORY (Tom Strong)
They'll have copies of Crogan's Vengeance for sale, which I'll be happy to sketch in, and if you've got kids in the area, please, bring 'em out!
Here's a page from the new book. Sorry it's so small.
Sorry for the infrequency of posts as of late. I've been dividing my time up between teaching (unlike last quarter, this time around I'm teaching four days a week and coming in for the Sequential Art open studio sessions all day Fridays, the Temple of Cartoon Mojo) and working on the new Crogan Adventures book, Crogan's March. It was slow starting out, but it's starting to pick up speed, which seems to always be the case with these things. Here are a few panels, not to scale with each other, and in no logical sequence:  As you may or may not be able to tell, my lettering has changed considerably. I had a lot of friends whose opinions I respect tell me that the lettering in Vengeance was competing with the art for attention, and I personally found it hard to put the amount of dialogue I wanted into each panel. It's still done by hand, but hopefully this new approach will help rectify these hindrances. I know that there will probably be some people who hate to see it change, and I sympathize;any time a musician I like "grows artistically" I always want to shake him or her until their sense comes back, but what can you do?
The plan is to have the book finished by the time I leave for San Diego, which is definitely going to be a tight deadline (i.e. no time for hobbies), but I think it will be doable. I don't teach classes over the summer, so once June rolls around I'll be able to devote my full days to it.
In other notes, I have two bits of news:
1. I'll be a guest at the Massachusetts Library Association and Massachusetts School Library Association's joint annual conference on May 8th this year, in Springfield, MA. It's part of the conference's Graphic Novel focus which will also be featuring the inimitable Stan Sakai, my friends Dave Roman and Raina Telgemeier, and DC writer Gail Simone (who I've not yet had a chance to meet).
I think it's wonderful that these libraries have embraced what we we do with such enthusiasm, and I'm so excited to be a part of this. There will be a creator panel, time for book signings and sketches, and another panel... here's the description from the program:
Get with the program! Teaching, programs, and hands on demonstrations
Join creators Stan Sakai and Chris Schweizer to get a hands on lessons on how comics inspire students, encourage literacy, and engage readers. Mr. Schweizer, on faculty at the Savannah College of Art and Design, will share his experiences teaching with comics including how comics boosts reading comprehension and vocabulary for all texts, not just graphic novels, and the importance of the visual mnemonics comics exemplify. Mr. Sakai will in turn show how he presents his series, Usagi Yojimbo, to students and libraries, and showcases the making of a graphic novel. Each creator will share tips and advice on hosting programs.
Come prepared to brainstorm your own programs and walk away with fantastic event ideas and lesson plans for your institution.
Speakers: Stan Sakai, creator of Usagi Yojimbo; Chris Schweizer, Professor of Sequential Art, Savannah College of Art and Design and creator of Crogan’s Vengeance
If you're in the Boston or Springfield area, I highly recommend making a trip out. It should be a great event... my only regret is that Robin Brenner's panel on Demistifying Japanese Manga is the same time as my panel, so I won't be able to sit in.
2. The other big news is that Crogan's Vengeance got an Eisner Award nomination for the category of "Best Publication for Teens/Tweens," along with Coraline, Skim, Rapunzel's Revenge, and the Good Neighbors. This is a big deal in the comics world, so I was really shocked when I found out, and am really excited. Liz and I are both going to San Diego this year, so it'll be fun being at the award cermony, and hopefully it'll get more people interested in taking a look at the book.
That's it for now! Thanks for the patience, and I'll try to update more regularly. Now that I'm scanning pages, I'll have things to post.
Hey, everybody. I'm currently hammering away on Crogan's March, trying to get this scene finished by the upcoming weekend so as to have it to show folks at Fluke, and in the meantime I wanted to steer you toward a title you might want to pick up.
Shawn Crystal, a good friend with whom I share an office at SCAD-Atlanta, has started a run on the Marvel series Deadpool, beginning with a pretty sizeable stand-alone story called Deadpool: Games of Death. For those unfamiliar with the character (like I was), Deadpool is a sort of rogueish, smart-alecky assassin, and the stories tend to be action/comedy. This paticular story plays very heavily off of old martial movies movies, with Deadpool infiltrating a last-man-standing reality show/death match. It was great fun watching him work on this project, and I'm excited now that it's out. The colors are great, and play to Shawn's aesthetic, which is this nice mix of cartooning and traditional super-hero style comic art with meticullous inkwork.  (some images from the comic)
Shawn's an incredible professor and a great comic artist, so if you're curious as to what some of the other faculty at Scad-Atlanta are up do, this is a chance to check it out.
I'll have more updates soon, I promise!
Woo! I'm FINALLY working on pages. The first scene ended up being a little bit longer than I expected (16 pages), and the first three pages or so I had to get used to not being able to "fake" a composition by throwing rigging into the empty spots. Composing shots this time around without clouds, ropes, masts etc is a real pain, but it'll hopefully make me better at what I do.
I'm spending a lot more time on the inks.
Here's the first page - click it to be able to actually see it. The modern dad just told his kids that "it all started with a sandstorm..."
On another note to anyone in the Atlanta area, I'll be doing a signing at my favorite kid's bookstore in the world, Little Shop of Stories, which happens to be just down the street from my house. If you've had a hard time getting a hold of the book (I know that a few places in town have run out occasionally) then this would be an ideal time to pick it up. I'll be doing sketches, too. Friday, March 20, 3:30-4:30.
Hey, everybody! It's been an extremely busy couple of weeks. We at SCAD-Atlanta just had our annual Comics Art Forum, which this year featured Matt Kindt, Stewart Immonen, and Cameron Stewart. All three guys were incredibly gracious and lots of fun; I sat in on two workshops, Matt's and Cameron's, both of which were just great. We had heavy snow this weekend (in Atlanta!) and Cameron was stuck on a plane for hours, and Matt had to stay an extra day and a half, so the ending wasn't ideal, but we had lots of good food and drinks and the whole thing was great for the students.
In personal news, a couple of interviews I've done have gone up, so if you want to check them out, feel free!
Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources
Indie Pulp: Sketchbook Spotlight (outlines my process and tools), among other things
WKMS (NPR) Audio Interview
I'm nearly through with my thumbnails for the first scene (12-15 pages) of Crogan's March, and I plan to go to pencils today. My goal is to have it inked by the end of the weekend! Liz is going out of town, so I'll be able to keep crazy cartoonist hours and, with luck, crank 'em out.
In the meantime, I've been doing lots of prep sketches for the as-of-yet-unnamed fourth book, which I've decided will feature Daniel Crogan, the Lion Tamer/Escape Artist. Here are a few - enjoy!
   
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.
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