A very exciting new project just hit Kickstarter. Cartoonist Dave Kellett and filmmaker Fred Schroeder have put together what looks like one of the most important pieces of film journalism that the comics community has seen. It’s a serious talk about past and present, a medium that can’t keep up with a changing world, and how technology changes art and craft that’s essentially been the same for decades. It’s about adaptation, and as a young cartoonist I feel caught between a tradition taught for years and a curveball pitch that could make that tradition obsolete. It’s an honor to be part of such a special project, along with some of the greatest cartoonists I grew up admiring and loving.

Meg Golding, Madeline Rupert, and myself were interviewed for the documentary. I had the privilege to sit and talk comics with two incredible talents at SCAD. It was a very emotional chat. We talked aspirations, our hopes for our careers, our doubts and fears about the business and how that shaped our perspective and affected our craft. But by the end of it, we all agreed that we just want to find our place.

Please contribute to what will be a very powerful film for comics creators, historians, and lovers and enthusiasts. Comics and cartooning will never be the same as it once was, and already truly isn’t the same now.

Check out this comic that made it onto Classy Hands. Comedians I knew from Savannah, Lee Keeler and Phil Keeling, have created a great hub for writers, thought-provokers, and even illustrators like myself to make some fun. It’s a taste of the new direction I’m taking my comics. A brand new story with the same sensibilities will be premiering at SPX September 10-11 with chuckloads of fun.

Mm. I just finished a brand new book. It was a grueling process to get through 20 pages, written, pencilled, inked and hand-lettered. And it was heavy subject matter. I spent weeks putting it off, and then I found a way to reach the end. And that ending was MoCCA.

I went to New York this weekend for the MoCCA festival, the indie-comics convention that the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art puts on. Thanks again to my tablemate Pranas. We had too much fun meeting and interacting with New York comics lovers, and eating Shake Shack burgers (You’re the best, Amy!)!! I met talented cartoonists, talked about The Village Voice article that came out that weekend, exchanged copies of “Luke Holds Off”, and enjoyed the comics culture that I most identify with. The comics blogs are all talking about how the show is all about the cartoonists, and it is. People making handmade printed books. Stapling sheets of paper together and saying “I did this”. That what comics are. It’s so simple, so basic. And when you’re in it, you forget that there’s a world that doesn’t know this kind of art and expression exists.

I’m always scared to travel to new places and stay in unknown neighborhoods. Who isn’t!? I stayed in Brooklyn with my good friend Andy Mai, and we had too much fun making fun of Asian people. We hit up a stand-up show in Williamsburg at the Knitting Factory that I’ve been dying to see ever since I found out who Hannibal Burress is. And the comedians made so many jokes about Asians. Wyatt Cenac brought up Asian people and he looked right at Andy and me to see us approve. Btw, Andy is hilarious and super talented. I am glad to see him with the success he has. Thanks so much for hosting me this weekend, man!

Next up is FLUKE in Athens. I was just there a couple weeks ago chatting with Patrick and Robert, and they are so excited for this year’s event. I saw Patton Oswalt perform at the 40 Watt club, which will be the exact same venue for the FLUKE festivities. I’ll be bringing more copies of “Luke Holds Off”, because nothing beats feeling proud of the work you’ve done. Come see me at my table, because I want to tell you “I did this”.

This year, I took both.

NOTE: I enjoy writing these reviews of classes and the assignments given. Some of these posts become very long and strenuous, so I identified that problem by breaking up longer sections into separate posts. In this blog entry that you are reading right now, I display the final image (or images) of the comic along with a general look at the assignment goals, and what I did to meet them. Separate posts provide more in-depth looks at certain aspects that go into the creation of the comic or illustration. They show sketches, original pencil work, and I talk about where the ideas came from and the troubles I faced while making the final piece.

Project 1 – Not a Box

Booster Puzzle

I hit the ground running on the first project. Our first assignment wanted us to create a comic that didn’t conform to traditional panel shapes. We were not allowed to use squares or rectangles.

The first idea was more puzzle-like. The narrative was more linear, and I planned to create a puzzle that had to be put together entirely to be read. It would have a beginning, middle, and an end. The story would start off with a character that answered the door in every panel, revealing more about a painting that he was showing off at a party. Once the puzzle was complete, it could be flipped over to reveal the painting the main character was speaking of in its entirety. But with some suggestions from the class and little bit more guidance from the professor, the idea evolved into something better.

The concept was similar, but instead of answering the door in every shot, the main character spoke to his guests at an already happenin’ party. The puzzle would fit together to create one entire image, and the puzzle pieces could become a stand-alone conversation between the main character and a guest.

I wanted to create an all-ages friendly piece just like Where’s Waldo. At first, the story took place at a party that starred twenty year-olds, but I couldn’t have drugs and alcohol. They were replaced with pieces of gum and carrot-flavored soda! The character Booster walks around the party and mingles with guests, and hidden within his conversations are references to the past and the future. Things are seemingly happening all at once in one image, but there is also a contradiction in the storytelling that they are happening after one another in an interconnected narrative. I was working with simultaneity without even knowing it, something we would explore in project 2.

Note: If you are interested in reading a more in-depth look at the process of the “Booster Puzzle”, including my reflection on the piece, please click here.

Project 2 – Simultaneity

The idea that two events are happening at once is not a new idea to comics. I’m going to be honest; I wanted to draw a girl several times over. I wanted to draw a figure in a trendy outfit and explore the different angles and poses her body would take over the course of the drawing.  I found a common thread that weaved through the stories of Lichtenstein’s paintings and went to work crafting my own.

Project 3 – Continuous Scene

The problem I faced with this piece was that I felt that this project I had already done before. Booster’s Party became a continuous scene organically, and The Flichtenstein Gallery was logical to make into a continuous scene. My goal was to do something new with the “continuousness”.

I focused on a story and a character. Another beautiful woman would dominate the page, but this time it’d be a woman we’d gradually not like. The story begins with photographs of a girl whose relationship with the narrator is obvious a romantic one. But as the photos will tell us, we learn that their relationship goes sour. I wanted to create a sense of noir storytelling with a hint of 100 Bullets crime and grit. It turned into another interesting concept that needs more exploring.

With only a few days to do this project, our class agreed that finished pencils was what could be accomplished realistically, so I present to you the final penciled work on Project 3.

Project 4 – Parody

The parody is an art I’ve always been interested in, and with the Internet age, the art has grown even more! We live in an age of irony, where nostalgia and callbacks are the fun of living in the now. We all are fans of something, followers of something, NERDS of something, and creating jokes that only those in the know will get is what makes us feel part of a group.

I think collectively, the class had a hard time choosing whether to parody and make fun of a known property, pay homage to it, or even make a pastiche of it. I personally had trouble in finding something that parodied something new.

Now let me ask, have you ever done a Mad Fold-in? Comic enthusiasts and people with a very American childhood growing up will remember that Mad Magazine had a creative activity on the back covers of every issue. The ingenious idea to tell a joke with one image and provide a punch line by folding it and creating a new one was the creation of Al Jaffee. Jaffee has been with Mad Magazine for over 40 years, has made over 500 hundred Mad Fold-ins, and to this day continues making them well into his sixties years of age.

Spoiler Alert! By clicking this link, you will be taken to a page where you can see the fold and ultimately the punch line replicated here, online.

Or you can download the PDF version of my Mad Fold-in, and perform the fold yourself, and enjoy!

Project 5 – Mini-Comic

There was only one other person taking both Mini-comics and Alternative comics simultaneously this quarter, like me. Matt Burbridge and I had been making minis all quarter, separate from these assignments, and now it was time to make another. Most of my comics so far had been illustrations and I was craving to do a narrative. It had to be something simple, maybe a series of illustrations that ultimately told a story in the end. I began to tell the story of a young man who was running into past lovers, all of whom were at the same party as him.

Click here to read the entire comic, “Guilty Party”.

Project 6 – “Off the Wall”

The final was a lot more open than all the others. It could be almost anything.

The catch was that it couldn’t be just another comic on paper. It had to have real-world applications. While we were advised not to do graffiti, our minds were headed that way.

Idea generation was difficult because I wasn’t sure what message I wanted to make. With the quarter coming to a close, I felt burnt out, and ready to call it in. I looked back at my quarter and felt proud of the work I’ve done, and reminded myself that every project isn’t a hit. I decided to just go with my first instinct and make it the best I can.

I settled with an idea I’ve struggled with expressing for years. When I was younger I went through a phase of manga and shounen, like most American boys these days. As I grew up and manga gained popularity, I noticed American comics trying to get on the bandwagon. It bothered me! It was a marketing stunt. It was a trick. I was being marketed to, and even at that age, I was smart enough to know that I was being taken advantage of.

Under the same umbrella is the idea of variant covers. Variant covers are a mainstream comics practice that sells the same comic, but with a limited run of covers drawn by a different artists (most commonly, a celebrity comics artist). The idea is that people will buy the original version of the comic, and then later the same comic again, only with a different “special edition collector’s” cover. And of course, that bothers a LOT of people.

My idea explores two ideas. Readers might be interested if Spider-man was “manga-ized”, but would readers of Japanese manga buy a book that was “Westernized”? I created a cover for Bleach, drawn in the style of classic Jack Kirby, who is basically the father of the American comic book art style.

I placed the covers around actual Bleach graphic novels in bookstores, but it’s a mystery what happened to them.

———

This was the most liberating class I’ve ever had, period. It was a class that I felt paralleled what I wanted to do with comics. Alternative Comics is a class for those who want to learn how to change the medium. You will learn the history of cartoonists who rebelled against the mainstream and created a culture of comics that not only spoke to a generation at the time, but changed the way people view comics and graphic novels today.

Visual Storytelling 1 gives you the basic rules you need, while Alternative Comics will help you break them. With Visual Storytelling 2 next quarter, I’m sure that my experience with both traditional and alternative methods under my belt, I’ll be creating another set of artwork that pushes my skills as a creative artist.

If you are interested in being creative and leaving the comics medium more enriched with possibilities, Alternative Comics will cultivate that side of you.

Have you ever done a MAD Fold-in? You know, those things on the back cover of MAD Magazine? It was a riddle of sorts, where you read the set-up, folded the page over, and got the punchline!

Now, I wouldn’t ask this of anyone who comes to the website in any other circumstance, but in order to really fully experience this piece, you have to print it. Print it out, and fold it, and laugh or feel enlightened. That’s right, PLEASE PRINT THIS OUT AND FOLD IT TO GET THE PUNCHLINE. You can print the above image, or download the PDF by clicking here.

[UPDATE: It will also work if you print it in black and white. This really is the one and only time I would ask ANYONE to print something from my website, after years of giving my art and comics for free. Thanks!]

It was originated by living legend Al Jaffee who responded to the fold-out pages of dirty mags, and inexpensively thought of the fold-in. He’s been doing it for about four decades now, and was even profiled in The New York Times. And if I knew how to use Adobe Flash, I would have provided online fold-ability, too!

MAD Magazine ushered in an entire movement. Most of today’s greatest satirists like Saturday Night Live and Monty Python wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for MAD. There were many doppelgangers of it back in its heyday, but these days the magazine is cutting back employees more and more. I wish there were more comic artists doing comics for humor and making statements on society and culture.

This is one of my favorite things I’ve done. So please, print this, and fold it this week, and next week I’ll talk about why I think it makes a unique statement about everything that is important to me!

At first, we were concerned with our placement, unsure if people would be able to see us at all and make it behind some of the bigger booths. Luckily for us, we had nothing to be afraid of.

The “we” that I’m referring to includes me and fellow artist, former course mate, and SCAD soon-to-be graduate, Guthrie Ensor. I had planned on going alone to Asheville, but thankfully Guthrie found out I was going. We put two minds together and carpooled up, and it was the most perfect decision I made for this weekend. We had a blast sharing a a car ride up, accommodations, and mostly a table. We got to share the same experiences, talk to a lot of the same great people, and riff off each other when we recorded an interview for a podcast, and when customers came up to peruse our wares. We saw tons of people and got to talk with lots of “new fans”. And luckily for Guthrie, he will be moving back up to Asheville (he had lived here previous to Savannah), and the new-found connections he and I made will benefit him, with some possible future appearances and signings.

I sold out of my latest comic, “Stand-up Comic Book” #1 in both the Limited Black Book Edition, as well as the standard blue book run. I also ran out of stock in Jimbo Maneuver books. Both books were quite a hit at the show, so I was glad not to have to haul them back to the hotel. I was able to get away from the table and meet with Hope Larson. She was completely pleasant and both her books Chiggers and Mercury looked immaculate! I was seeing people throughout the convention clinging their copies lovingly and it made me miss my copies at home. But meeting her was definitely a highlight, and I can’t wait until the next time I see her. NOTE: Had it not been for Hope Larson and her Twitter, and the tweet she sent out about the Fanaticon organizers treating her so well 4 months in advance to the convention, I wouldn’t have signed up. So thanks!

Guthrie sat by the booth and inked some work which captivated casual attendees. To our surprise, families were gathering around him, aspiring artists loomed over his shoulders. We also attracted the likes of the media, including a photographer for the Asheville Citizen Times. You can see us both in picture 4, and a close-up of Guthrie drawing in picture 44. Also, I’m on the Mountain Express website! We both felt so honored .

Asheville is a thriving community and a wonderfully beautiful city. People really wanted to see artwork. In the beginning, we had seen only exhibitors with golden age back issues, tons of guys with action figures and Magic Cards. I certainly felt out of place as the lone self-publishing artist, but it provided some variety on the floor. We later learned that the lower level had most of the self-publishing cartoonists, and though it would’ve been fun to riff with those guys downstairs, we were perfectly comfortable in our spot and made it work for us within the hour.

There were a handful of artists we got to meet and talk shop with, including our neighbors Nicki and Mary, who were selling and receiving commissions for minimalist superhero paintings. From the booth behind out table, we met Meg of the Firestorm Cafe, whose cafe/bookstore/performance venue we later visited. They have a zine section next to their bookshelves, and there were a ton of literary zines but no comics. I wish I hadn’t sold out or else I would’ve brought some over to the store. At the con, we also got to chill with TL, Darrin, and Patrick, representing Asheville’s comic shop Comic Envy. After the convention we trekked out of downtown to see the store, and again we were impressed. I noticed tons of independent graphic novels placed in very prominent shelves. They really have a love for comics that are not just superheroes. They had books that had JUST come out, like my friend Joey Weiser’s Cavemen in Space.

We ate at Doc Chey’s, checked out the Malaprop Bookstore, hit up the True Blue art store, and Guthrie pointed out all of the landmarks to (basically) his entire life. We showed me restaurants and construction site he worked at, body shops and food stops his wife worked at. The skate shop, the free parking lot, the bar/restaurant where he proposed to his wife. He definitely brought an energy to the trip that I wouldn’t have gotten had I gone alone.

And here’s some other show notes:

• We were the only SCAD students there. That alone made it feel a little bit more special.
• There was a Ghostbuster’s car!
• The news was all over the place, and that combined with the costumers and street performers drummed up a ton of hype around our venue.
• Because it was free, it brought in all kinds of people. I was surprised to see droves of girls come in together, guys dressed in tuxes waiting on their prom dates, moms who wanted to buy my books for themselves by using their children as an excuse to buy them. We did a lot of people watching at the booth, had some great conversations, and met the great people that make up Asheville. I’m visiting again soon.
• This experience for us will never happen again. It was a feeling of surprise that just delighted our entire weekend and we couldn’t stop talking about how much fun we had at the con.

And once again, you should visit Guthrie Ensor’s portfolio and check him out. He took some boss photos and I’m really glad to have been a part of his FIRST real comic book convention experience. This one was definitely a good one to start with.

After 2 months of absences at the Sentient Bean, I’ll be appearing tonight to make more people aware that I am able to stand on a stage and speak. Laughs are secondary, optional, not required, but highly appreciated so thank you for your donation! Filmmaker Dan Fine will be shooting scenes for his documentary which he also stars in, performing comedy as a comedian usually does. He’s my dude, so come out and add your laughter onto his audio recordings.

I’m emceeing an event on Friday from 12:00 to 3:00 called “Your Future Looks Bright” at Arnold Hall. You want a career int he arts? You gotta get yourself to this, because it’s going to be poppin’ off with tons of bright minds who want to let you know how you can EMPOWER yourself with the business attitude of a successful artist. Get it son!

I will in Asheville that evening, tabling Saturday morning at Fanaticon, held at the Asheville Art Museum. I’ll be selling mini-comics, prints, and posters between the hours of 10:00 – 6:00pm. If you’re in the area and you want some comics, I am providing them!

It’s been a good week, got my future in my hands. My path is laid down and I’m ready to walk the line. Say hello to ya motha for me!

Please click to enlarge! The “Booster Party” is one of my favorite undertakings, with stories that criss-cross around the board, alluding to events that happen at the same party that happened, that are about to happen, and that ARE happening as you read.

I will be selling prints at the Norris Hall Swap Meet tomorrow at 11AM – 1PM. I have a limited edition print run of 15, measuring at 24″ x 19″, at $30 each, and signed! And finally, I have process scans after the jump, where you can see the stages of its creation. Enjoy!

First of all, I want to thank everyone who has enjoyed this project as much as I have enjoyed making it. Thanks to Brian Ralph for pushing to find wall space where we could hang our very first pieces. It brought lots of eyes from people throughout the department, and if you are one of those people, I hope you had a good laugh!

Besides Where’s Waldo, I was inspired by the illustrations of Scott Campbell, whose work always has lots of simple characters taking part in a large scene. There are always little stories in the scene that create a big picture, and looking at each one allows a reader to slow down and take it in. I also loved the simultaneity aspect, and the referencing of past, present, and future. I’m a fan of Lost, and injected some of that influence on a much smaller scale here.

And I love creating characters. My work in previous comics classes were much more based on realism and accurate proportions, but this class encouraged me to think more about the concept. I stuck to a much simpler style that resulted in lots of energy and personality in each person I drew. It was a lot of fun to create an image on such a large scale, yet hone in on small characters who take up very little of the space.

The Original Pencils

I worried a lot about how I could reprint these inexpensively and at a similar or exact same size. After my penciling, I was too scared to ink on top and have to erase the graphite underneath. Projects where I’ve employed that process always ended with inks that look too different, lots of smudging, and lower quality of blackness in the inks after an eraser went over them. So I decided to do the blue line process and ink over the blue printout, which now results in two original art pieces of the same project (and less stress!)

Inks

Soon after the inks, I printed another version. This time I would complete the assignment by cutting it into puzzle pieces. My cutting was improvised, but by gridding out the comic beforehand in rectangles, I was able to make each conversation contained within a puzzle piece.

Color in Progress.

Party on!

Thanks for reading! Again, I will be selling these at tomorrow’s SWAP MEET in Norris Hall between 11AM and 1PM. I’ll also be selling comics, graphic novels, and action figures (and other people’s prints!) from my personal collection. Hope to see you there .

I had an illustration published in District Quarterly‘s “Love and Lust” issue. (photo by friend and magnificent photographer Jessi Gilbert)

I won an Addy Award for third place in the Poster category. You remember that old thing?

I also won two awards with the Society of Professional Journalists. One is third place in Editorial Cartooning, and the other is first place in Online Feature Writing, an article which is written and drawn in comic form! You can read that by clicking here. The District is a wonderful place, so if you get the chance to work with them, submit to them, I’m sure you’ll enjoy the results! Give them love, my friends, and thanks for the support.

This was my submission into this year’s SEQA Anthology/Sampler. It didn’t get accepted, so now it’s available here to read!