I’ssa zombie. Oddly enough, I just started playing Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare. Western zombies. I’m a little rattled right now.
027 – Zombie
Ok, PANIC!: Garfield
This is a shitty joke at the expense of my friend Pat Kain. I know some people got it. Believe it or not, I sold the lineart for this.
026 – Barney Miller
Barney Miller was always a favorite show of mine as a kid and still really holds up.
025 – Li’l Dexter
My friend and I were discussing inappropriate cartoons based on movies or tv shows that were clearly made for adults (Rambo, RoboCop, etc.) and during the conversation, I thought of Li’l Dexter. I’d been wanting to draw a Dexter related post for years, but I am terrible at likenesses. This seemed like a perfect opportunity.
The concept: Harry and Dexter Morgan are out hunting when they discover a crashed alien spaceship. Only Harry and Dex find the pilot, an alien called The Dark Passenger. They take him in, and have to hide him from Dex’s little sister, the stuck-up, bratty Deb. The Dark Passenger takes a liking to little Dexter and always winds up convincing Dex to do bad things and get up to hi-jinks, while Harry always has to clean up the situations, and teaches Dex a valuable lesson in the process – a code, of sorts.
I think we have a winner. Somebody bring back Saturday morning cartoons, pronto!
024 – Battalion
Just wanted to draw one of the most ridiculous obscure ’90s comic character I could find. In an earlier post, I mentioned that DC Comics published some of the best books they’ve ever had during this period. They also published some of the worst. Hi, Team Titans! That’s where this abomination sprung from.
023 – Lockjaw
Fulfilling a request from Kurt Dinse, he had asked for Lockjaw, the teleporting dog from Marvel Comics’ The Inhumans. I think Kurt was deliberately trying to make me struggle. If there’s one thing I struggle with more than anatomy, backgrounds, coloring, details, likenesses, proportion, perspective, consistency, inking, penciling, the female form, faces, eyes, hands, feet, shading, layout, clothing, inanimate objects or plants is animals. That said, I kinda dig the way Lockjaw turned out here. He looks like a petable dog.
As for Kurt, he is ridiculously talented artist in his own right. He is the publisher/writer/artist of One Year in Indiana, the saga of death metal vocalist Conrad Lant and the year he spent living in Indiana between tours on a college campus. It’s a fantastic comic about beer, college douchebags, monsters and idiots. He is also the artist of the comic Hurr and Star.
I stumbled onto Kurt’s work at the annual SPACE convention in Columbus, Ohio. I’m an idiot metalhead and saw the pentagram logo of One Year and needed to buy it. Through means that I am not completely aware of, Kurt became a listener of my podcast, and eventually a guy I now consider a friend. I have been drunk in his company, and if that isn’t a basis for friendship, I don’t what is.
Kurt is also the newest member to the art collective I am a part of, Ok, PANIC!. As of this writing, he only has one piece up, but it’s a pretty fantastic debut. Kurt’s other works (comics, rock posters, etc.) can be found at Pungent Basement Art.
For giggles, here’s a piece of art my pal Jason commissioned from Kurt for my birthday about a year or two ago.
As you can see, Kurt is the King of Stippling. At once, I admire and do not envy his ability to do that so well. Go check out his site, he’s awesome.
022 – Havok
Havok was always a favorite X-Men character, and I’ve hated every single costume of his except for the original. Neal Adams is a legend for a reason.
021 – The Thing
So yeah, that’s why I don’t do much stippling. Tiring.
The above was drawn back in 1995 by a friend of mine by the name of Matt Lukacs. We had a bunch of art classes together in high school, and shopped at the same comic store. I asked him if I could ink his drawing. He was super talented and I wish he was doing stuff now. Me, I ruined his Thing drawing with my shitty shitty inking work, and for whatever reason, I hand drew the world’s worst Thing logo. But man, back in 1995, I thought I was the king of all comic art.
I’m an idiot.
020 – Supergirl
Too much black in the drawing, kind of sloppy. I’m really out of practice drawing female characters. I should try to rectify that.
019 – True Blood
So via Facebook and in the real world, several of my friends (many of them female) have gone on and on about how awesome the show True Blood is. To be honest, my love of vampires only goes so far, and the genre of brooding romantic vampires can all go fuck off. While I was certainly a fan of the show Angel, I never got into Buffy. Watching Angel was more like watching a Batman TV show, which I am 100% in support of. Everyone else, if you want to show me vampires, I prefer the crazy mutant vampire-killing vampires of Blade 2. God I love that movie.
I also recommend the Charlie Huston Joe Pitt vampire/noir book series. It’s definitely not about brooding and more about kicking ass. It’s a hardboiled detective series, but with vampires. Read ’em.
Anyhoo. So these folks who kept telling me to watch True Blood, sold me on it with three little words: Anna Paquin naked. I like an Anna Paquin. One of my very few celebrity crushes. But the problem was, it’s still True Blood, and I’m certainly not going to waste a Netflix shipment on it, or the money spent at my local brick’n’mortar video store (plus 90% of their DVDs are scratched to shit and won’t play. Thanks, FAMILY VIDEO!). So my friend Stephanie stepped up and let me borrow her copy of Season 1, in exchange for borrowing S1 of Dexter.
She got the better end of the deal.
It’s not a terrible show, but it’s just okay. It’s engaging enough, and as I kinda alluded to in the Get Smart post, I like having seasons of TV shows on DVD when I draw. It’s a pleasing enough show that I can keep on and only marginally pay attention to.
The show’s biggest problem is that I really cannot give enough of a flying fuck about any of the main characters, particularly any of the vampire characters. They’re pretty much all awful. What saves the show for me is the secondary and the background characters. They have tons of personality and a degree of fun.
The three characters I drew are Lafayette, Terry and Sam, possibly the three biggest redeeming qualities of True Blood. I would totally support a spin-off show with those three guys. Maybe they’d drive around America, solving mysteries and fighting crime. Maybe they’d all move to L.A. to try to start a band. I don’t know, but I’d totally fuckin’ watch it.
All that said, I’m mostly done with Season 2 now, and it’s a metric fuck ton better than S1, but it’s still mostly bad and filled with horrible, cardboard main characters. The background characters are all awesome, though, and have really shined. And also, not nearly enough of Anna Paquin naked. So screw you. I mean that in the best way possible.