Some More of These Bridgman Sketches

I haven't posted any in a while. I kind of doubt anybody cares to look at these; at least, I wouldn't care to look at anybody else doing them. They're more exercises than anything else, but I guess I put 'em up to prove I actually am doing them.

Flight of the Living Dead series two has begun

Click here to read three new pages of Flight of the Living Dead.

Flight of the Living Dead series two

FoLD series two starts tonight. Here's page one, and there are two more pages on the way tonight at midnight. And then three pages every Monday for the next six weeks.

A short story about robots.

This is for Slave Labor's Fat Chunk anthology, released in comic shops and bookstores in 2008. Click to enlarge.

Flight of the Living Dead on paper

This is the proof copy, to make sure everything turned out right. It did, so it'll be on sale real soon.

The President has been informed FoLD is returning

And he's held a press conference:

Flight of the Living Dead UPDATES!

1) Flight of the Living Dead series two (that's hour four, or pages 25-42) starts on October 1, 2007. I'm putting up three pages every Monday for six consecutive weeks.

2) The first issue of FoLD ran into some snags, but from what I understand it's ready to go. I'm waiting on the proof copy to make sure everything's okay, and once I approve it, you'll be able to order it online. It's $3.00 a copy for 24 pages. Hopefully it'll be ready to go by the end of the week.

3) The website's going to look different for series two (I think I'll change it up for every series), and I ran into some trouble because I reformatted my hard drive recently and in the process lost the font I used for the logo (Berlin Sans), but someone emailed it to me, so everything's good to go. Here's a screenshot of what the website will look like on October 1:



The greyish background is a photo of my desk, and the "blood" is ink spatter I converted to red in Photoshop.

Flight of the Living Dead #1 on the way

I just got an email from ComiXPress that my proof copy of FoLD #1 has been sent. So hopefully if it looks good, it'll be available to order by the end of the week. I can only apologize for the delay of the printing of this, although I do not know what the problem was. I sent the files to them months ago, so I'm not sure if I'll be using them for subsequent issues, but hopefully this issue looks good and it doesn't take too long for customers to get their copies.

A lot of Bridgman drawings

Meadmonster25 doing stand-up

Kevin L. Sheath, writer of "The Sundays," does these. I believe this is the funniest one yet.

Space Christ

Click to enlarge it.

More Bridgman drawings

Test

I've been having trouble logging in to my website. Just want to see if I can do it now.

The Golden Compass

Watching this fairly awesome looking trailer inspired me to download and listen to the audio version of the book it's based on, which is called "His Dark Materials, Book One: The Golden Compass" (also known as "Northern Lights" in its native England) by Phillip Pullman. It's really great, and now I absolutely can't wait for the movie version.

The story revolves around a young girl named Lyra Belacqua who lives in a world in which every human is born with a sort of "spirit animal" called a daemon. The daemon is akin to a soul and takes the form of a physical talking animal that accompany their human at all times. It is taboo to touch someone else's daemon and separation of a human from his/her daemon causing unbearable physical and emotional pain on the part of both human and daemon, and often results in death. Lyra finds out about an organization that is kidnapping children and forcibly removing them from their daemons because they believe that "impure" thoughts and desires are caused by the daemons. Battles ensue, people get killed, and there are talking polar bears that wear armor.

This is crazy shit but somehow it all works, and it's real good. This is a trilogy, so I've still got two more books, and I can't wait.

Bridgman

Emaline

A character from The Sundays. She shows up in, like, issue four or five.

Bridgman

New FoLD website layout

This is not a working page yet, just a layout I made in Photoshop. So I'll probably have to make some tweaks to this, but you can get a good idea what the Flight of the Living Dead website will look like when series two starts (probably in September). I'm doing three pages every Monday for six weeks in a row.

Bridgman, nudes

I haven't been able to keep up with my Bridgman sketches because of my computer issues (I only have a PDF of the book, not a paper copy), but here's a sketch from the book I did weeks ago. Now that I've got my computer back, I'm going to start this back up again.



And in the meantime I did sketches out of a couple nude pose books I have ("The Figure in Motion" and "The Nude Figure").

Comic Book Recommendation of the Week

First, I managed to get my computer working again via some questionable methods that are possibly dangerous and very likely a fire hazard, but never mind that. There's new Flight of the Living Dead on its way and The Sundays will be sent out to prospective publishers within the week.

The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S
By Jaime Hernandez

Now, what I've really come here to talk about is my latest comic obsession, LOVE & ROCKETS, which was recommended to me by my friend Joe Frontirre. The comic, by Jaime & Gilbert Hernandez, has been published on and off since the early 80s, but they just started releasing these big trades of all the stories in chronological order, so I picked up the first one, "Maggie the Mechanic," a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it. I've been itching to read volume two, "The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S.," since then but was only just today able to find a copy at my local Borders.

Jaime is a fantastic artist and impresses me with his talent on every page. He also writes convincing and natural sounding dialogue, despite writing mostly for female characters. This is one of those indie slice-of-life comics I'm always going on about, and fans of other similar stuff like "Strangers in Paradise," "Wet Moon," or dare I say it, "The Sundays," should maybe check it out. There's a third volume called "La Perla Loca" out in December, and there are already two volumes of Gilbert's stuff as well. I'm not as familiar with Gilbert (having only read his Vertigo GN "Sloth" and one regular issue of "Love & Rockets"), but I'm looking forward to picking up his trades as well.

Comic Book Recommendation of the Year

FLIGHT VOLUME FOUR
Edited by Kazu Kibuishi

Every time a new one of these come out, I tell everyone how amazing FLIGHT is and how foolish they are for not reading it. Well, volume 4 just came out so here I am again. Jeff Smith's BONE still holds my number one spot for favorite comic, but in regards to comics that are still being published, it doesn't get any better than the yearly short story anthology FLIGHT.

Favorite stories this year:
"The Saga of Rex: Castaway" by Michael Gagne
"The Window Makers" by Kazu Kibuishi
"The Forever Box" by Sarah Mensinga
"Igloo Head and Tree Head" by Scott Campbell
"The Story of Binny" by Lark Pien

I also picked up DEMO by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan, which I haven't read yet. I am a big fan of Becky Cloonan, especially her work on AMERICAN VIRGIN. I've been told by more than one person my art reminds them of Cloonan's, which I take as a great compliment.

By the way, my computer's broken which is why I haven't put any new art up recently. Flight of the Living Dead series 2 was supposed to start in August, but I don't know if it'll be possible now. I have the first few pages done but no way to upload them.

The Smashing Pumpkins - Zeitgeist

The first Smashing Pumpkins album in seven years came out this week. They officially broke up in 2000, and Billy Corgan "reformed" the band in 2005 after his disappointingly awful solo album, "TheFutureEmbrace." However, only two of the original members (Billy and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain) are present here, and Jimmy drummed not only on Billy's aforementioned solo album, but 2003's "Mary Star of the Sea," the only album by Billy's side-band Zwan, which was actually pretty decent. So in effect, this is not a reformed Smashing Pumpkins, but the same thing we've been getting from Billy Corgan for the past three years, with the SP name added on to sell more records.

The Smashing Pumpkins were my favorite band in high school, and I've spent countless hours listening to their albums over and over. However, in retrospect, it was really just 1993's "Siamese Dream" and 1995's "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness." Their first album, "Gish," is forgettable, and their final album, "MACHINA/the machines of god," is awful. 1998's "Adore" is notable for being the only album Billy's ever made without Jimmy Chamberlain (he was kicked out of the band in 1996 for his heroin addiction, following the overdose and death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. A drum machine stood in for Jimmy in "Adore," and he rejoined the band just in time for them to break up), and for being a huge departure from their previous stuff, and the most depressing fucking album Billy Corgan ever made. You could also count 1994's "Pisces Iscariot" and 1996's "The Aeroplane Flies High" among their great albums, but really they're just collections of songs that didn't make it onto "Siamese Dream" and "Mellon Collie."

So I was apprehensive about "Zeitgeist," knowing full well it was probably going to suck. And it does. It reminds me more of "MACHINA" and "Judas O," the second disc of unreleased material from their 2001 Greatest Hits collection. It has that whole "see? we're heavy! we're hard rawk!" vibe that MACHINA had following the more subdued "Adore," full of down-tuned guitars and frantic drumming. This is an album full of songs that sound like "The Everlasting Gaze," arguably the Smashing Pumpkins' worst single, not counting their "The End is the Beginning is the End" from the Batman & Robin soundtrack.

Admittedly, "Tarantula" is not as bad as the rest of the album, but in the same way that a piece of your least favorite candy sitting on top of a turd might be the highlight of the turd if you were forced to eat it.

Rating - 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Voldemort doesn't stand a chance.

Not when Liefeld Potter is on the loose.

Space Christ: Coming Soon!

Click to enlarge slightly.

Liefeld Link

I've been playing quite a lot of Zelda recently, and was inspired to do this Liefeld version of Link.

Liefeld Spider-Man

What if Rob Liefeld was the artist on Spider-Man? Why, it might go a little something like this.

Dramatic Chipmunk

Test

test

Bridgman #1

I decided recently that I'm going to draw through Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing From Life. This is the first page, I'm hoping to do a page a day. Click to enlarge.

The Sundays #1 page 8+9 lettered

Letter'd!

The Sundays page 8 & 9

Click to enlargify.

Flight of the Living Dead page 24

Last page for a while. Enjoy!

FoLD page 24 prior to adding ink wash

Click to make big.

Flight of the Living Dead #2 news

Page 24 is going up shortly, which is the last page of not only hour three, but also the first issue. The second issue consists entirely of hour four, which will be eighteen pages long.

However, it's going to be a little different than the first three hours. I'm taking a break from this comic until I finish up The Sundays #1. Then I'm going to wait until I have about half the pages done from FoLD #2, and then put the pages up three per week for six straight weeks. They'll probably go up on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

I'm also going to try something different, in keeping with my original plan of having this comic be about experimentation. I'm not going to be doing ink wash again for the second issue.

Flight of the Living Dead page 23

One page left. Click below to read the new one.

FoLD

I've spent the last few days getting the first issue ready for publication. The company that's printing this needs the files at 300 dpi and for whatever reason I scanned all these pages in at 200 dpi. So that means I had to rescan all of them and do clean-up and level adjusting on them all over again.

But I now have it all ready to go, except for the last two pages, which are very close to being done.

Flight of the Living Dead #1 (of 5)

Today is the day Flight of the Living Dead #1 was going on sale. I'm having a bit of trouble with Paypal, though... I've been trying for the past couple weeks to get an account set up with them, and I can't get it to work, so there's going to be a delay on Paypal payment.

However... if you are willing to order a copy via check or money order, please send $3.00 plus shipping ($2) for a total of $5.00 American to:

Flight of the Living Dead
c/o Scott Ewen
271 W. Blackwell St.
Dover, NJ  07801

This is currently for domestic orders only, but I will have international orders figured out within the week.

A video for you.

I never really liked the song "Flagpole Sitta" that much when it came out, although I'm starting to like it more now that I hear it at the beginning and end of every episode of Peep Show. But I love this.

Simon's Blog

Writer of the Sundays Kevin L. Sheath has created a puppet named Simon, and that puppet has created a video blog. Look at it here and then befriend him on MySpace.

FoLD page 22

Click right here for page 22.

Fold page 21

Here it is.

There are three pages left after this one in the first issue. After this point is where things start to get particularly hairy for the passengers.

I just rewrote the end of the first issue of FoLD

Everything is completely different now. I think it works better this way, though. Hopefully. What this means, though, is that the climax of the story I had envisioned is no longer possible.

Once I finish up the last three pages of this issue, I think I'm taking a little time off to work on The Sundays. Maybe a month.

FoLD

FoLD

I've been mentioned on a Canadian film site

Talkin' bout the Flight of the Living Dead movie, and they talk briefly about my comic.

Click here to read.

Jeff Smith inking Shazam: Monster Society of Evil

Jeff Smith hand letters his comics. I've read BONE twice and I could have sworn that was computer lettering.