Scuba Steve

A friend of mine from our elementary school days uses a diver doll as her house's version of Elf on the Shelf. I love the idea, and her online photos of the diver's adventures are fun. I had to draw a tribute.

Also, this is the best foot I've ever drawn.

Bizarro Sketch

I was inspired to draw this after spying Bizarro on a HIVE Soda poster on Teen Titans Go.

I merged the traditional "No. 1" sign around his neck and the reversed Superman symbol as they always seemed like overkill atop each other.

Bitch Planet

Bitch Planet 1 came out this week by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro. It was the first book in my stack, and it's a great first issue. 

Disclaimer: I'm biased. I've been lucky enough to meet and chat with Kelly Sue, and I root for her. I was all in for this series when the premise was announced  -- outer space women's prison -- and the comic lives up to my optimism. I wanted to do a sketch, and I remembered the promotional "Non Compliant" tattoos handed out at conventions this year. I know at least one person using it as a template for a real tattoo, and I wondered how far would someone go with it. And here we are.


This was done on letter-size paper with Microns, Sharpies, and Spectrum Noir markers.

Coffee Break

The local pop-culture art gallery ZaPow! recently opened a heroine-themed show (you have to pronounce that very carefully in conversation). As a ZaPow artist for almost a year now, I jumped at the idea and wanted to make a Wonder Woman image. But she was yoinked by a few quicker folks, and I quickly let that notion fade. Dang it.

Instead I decided to make a short original comic as a piece of art, and I remembered a sketch I did in July 2013 of a coffee break between fight scenes.

I thought it would be more accessible if I used the two lead heroines from the year's big comic movies, Captain America: Winter Solider and Guardians of the Galaxy. What if they had a breather between waves of Avengers-level invaders?

I started noodling the idea while waiting at a car dealership and quickly came up with the story skeleton. I had some ideas of specific speech and a general idea of the conversation flow. Nothing was locked in yet.

Then I thumbnailed the script. I didn't know if the story should be three or four pages, and that would be determined by the frame. Submissions for themed shows have to fit certain dimensions, so that required the pages to ultimately be at the size of a printed comic (6.75 x 10.25) instead of the original art size of 11 x 17. The frame also required the comic to be three pages instead of four. This was no big deal to adjust at this point.

When the size was locked in, I penciled on letter-size pages; two such pages combined equal 11 x 17.

I scanned those pages and reduced them to the finished-art size, printed them, and inked over them on bristol board with a lightbox. I also used those scans to start the lettering while I colored the pages with Spectrum Noir warm and cold gray markers.

I then printed the word balloons on sticker paper, cut them out with scissors and much profanity, and adhered them over the color pages. I usually don't work this way, but I wanted to give the comic the appeal of mixed media art. And there it was.

It looks like this in the frame.