Above water

Hello, Hello,

My ROYALBOILER art book is sent off to the nice folks at Image comics, with just the spine to finish up tonight.

Here’s the Outro-comic I made for the end of the book:

Also I made a couple diary comics. The first one’s an older one from when I was last in Vegas.

I drew that last one in a hotel room in Vancouver — that me and Alejandra went up to for a small convention. my old Homies and former YOSH roomates Marley Zarcone and the elusive recluse James Stokoe were the main guests– sooo good to see those guys again (and the rest of the Vancouver crew) and see the new stuff they’re working on in meatspace.

I bullied poor James into drawing something in my sketchbook:

and speaking of my sketchbook here’s some pages from it–

That last page I drew today –taking notes on panel ideas and characters from 1982’s BLUE FIGHTER by  Jiro Taniguchi, on Art—-whose Walking man manga I talked about in the last post,and Marley Caribu, who wrote the Oldboy manga on Story.

The cover drawing looks like a young Willem Dafoe

The book has a manga-americana feeling to the whole thing. I feel like it would be fun to make a book for a foreign market and try to make the MOST american feeling thing.  but maybe it’s better from outsiders. Like when Muñoz and Sampayo did their Alack Sinner book set in NYC before they’d ever visited the states.

Anyway Blue fighter has some great scenes that just feel like they’re there to set mood. Also I know it was done years before Walking man, but I didn’t even recognise the art until I looked it up.

The main character is a boxer named Reggae

later in the final fight of the book, Reggae is knocked down- and we get this Jazz and Reggae and Tibetan(?) and camels (???) montage

Something I really liked in the book was this way to show time passing in the boxing matches with the rounds over the drawings.

I hit up a couple comic stores yesterday with my pal Joe and found this old Paul Pope interview.

I like reading Pope’s 1995 plans for his career. I’m always trying to remind myself how many options I have to take my work in any direction I want. Early in his career Pope would often talk about how he was learning by researching different types of art and comics and what work of his he regarded as failures (but still published) it gave a nice feeling of seeing an artist at work.

And in the interview some early THB drawings I hadn’t seen before, here’s the table of contents page.

and a couple others.

Aside from that I picked up some other books this week:

Ex-Mutants and Stark Future are books I’m always looking through dollar bins for. I haven’t read the issues I got yet, I’m sure they will be excellent!

I haven’t read the new issue of Farel’s Proxima book yet either– this issue has a nice Simon Roy pin up on the back. coooool.

I did read the title story in the DHP ROMA issue (also found in a dollar bin)

ROMA was done by John Workman, who mostly just does lettering these days– he lettered Pope’s Heavy Liquid and Keatinge and Del Duca’s Shutter.

This story is drawn landscape (sideways) and might be the best use of that format that I’ve ever seen.

Such pretty pages!

The Workman stuff reminds me of another comic I read this week– Mr Inkstuds was also selling books at the con I was at and gave me a couple bound Heavy metal books. With stories by Italian comic artist Bruno Brindisi. (who according to Wikipedia has drawn 39 Dylan Dog stories)

Here’s his name on this helpful Dylan Dog chart

His Heavy Metal Stories, Bit Degeneration are like early 90’s casual cyberpunk, that follow a Heavymetalish lady named Axel.- she has spray on clothes and pasties that wink at people.

I like the look of her apartment.

Here’s a page where a robot stripper removes her body parts after she takes off her clothes.

I remember this stuff being especially exciting to me when it came out, because one of the scenes is based off of a bus tunnel in my hometown of Seattle.(panel 6 below)

Aside from an issue of Pete Bagge’s HATE, where he put Fallout records and comics in it, this was one of the 1st times I’d seen a place I’d been to in a comic. and in the all exciting Heavy metal no less.

also in the line of his reference a robot Sigmund Freud shows up in the comic.

— In other newds I just discovered that there is a Brigitte Bardot statue in Saint-Tropez based off of a Milo Manara painting.

and Manara’s painting.

And Manara playing “got your nose” with it. Boop.

Some more Manara /Bardot

This sent me down a statues of comic artists drawings rabbithole.

There’s a bunch of Leiji Matsumoto statues.

Herge hanging out with a Tintin statue

And Rumiko Takahashi with Lum

I wonder if anyone’s made a list…

Anyway, here is an Asterix truck that I found a photo of on the internet.–thanks for reading.