Spicy Space Sketches

Since March, I've been tossing some pages into the Spicy Space Tales comic blog. It's a good thing since it actually makes me work a bit and when I start a page I have a real deadline to finish it, so I don't overreach and I have to decide quickly what stays and what goes. Usually I find I have much too little space and far too much dialogue....but I feel it's necessary to inject some ulterior motives into the goings on.





When I see the other contributions, my mind explodes into lots of different plot threads! Somehow I find a number of ways to link it all together into a stream of sequential progress. But each new page cuts off my options and by the time I contribute again, my original ideas are not longer a fit.

Anyhow, here are some of the concept sketches I've done over the months. Who knows when these ideas will be used....???

Case Closed on Cheerleader Cop

When I started this blog two years back, I mentioned Cheerleader Cop, one of many quick-sketch ideas I started on years back and never finished up.

This week I wrapped it up in one page so I can check it off in my brain --- completed! All three pages!

Are Comics A Waste?

Any illustrator knows the frustration of labouring over a design and having it tossed to the junk pile. For cartoonists / comic illustrators it's the same -- we pour our sweat and creativity into work that sometimes gets shelved, postponed, lost, or displayed in some remote location where the intended audience will never be able to appreciate it.

Are such comics a waste?

Well...if you had fun drawing them, of course not! And hopefully you can re-use the concepts or layouts in other work. With that being said, today's art is a mascot for a store in some town that sells something that has nothing to do with what I drew....

BACKSLIDE: The Backstory!!!

Everyone has throwaway stories, concepts and characters that never get used. One of mine is BACKSLIDE. Stephen and I hijacked the Halloween party theme in our company's production department and made it Comic-book Characters. So we both went to work and did pretty much EVERYTHING --- the cityscape cut outs, word balloons, outrageous props, newspaper scraps that had outrageous headlines on them, and Stephen made these carnival type posing stands. I drew up templates for people to make up their own heroes and add them to the list I had on a board called the Hall of Heroes or the Vault of Villains. Not too many people signed up...oh, well....at least we got a few brave souls to wear costumes. My costume was BACKSLIDE - a minor villain with the uncanny ability to backslide into time up to 15 minutes!

I had planned to disrupt Stephen's story continuity in THUGS by having BACKSLIDE show up from a side alley and alter events past. I never got around to drawing more than one illo about it. And now your know the backstory.

Covers For All Occasions

I have said before that I'm more of a cartoonist that a bonafide comic book illustrator. Stories I tell are basically extended jokes with the punchline somewhere in the pages, not necessarily at the conclusion. I will build a story around the punchline or wacky situation I have in mind. Every detail is secondary to making that one panel, that one scene where tension, paradox, and incredulity is at it's peak.

That's why comic book covers are great! You can do it all without even telling the story. The covers I like to make are just one-panel gags. Sometimes at a day job a wacky idea hits me and I just sketch it up. Usually when there's nothing to do anyway and I have plenty of time to think up goofy stuff.

So here's a set of gag-covers I whipped up a couple years back, before my company played a gag and sold all the designers down the river.[Can you tell I'm pissed?]

Apocalyptic Anthology -- I love stories about the end. I love that there is no hope here, but the chick is already thinking about a tryst with a bug-eyed-monster. Bigger, better, deal, you go, girl!

PAC-MAD -- This is a direct rip-off of an old Guardians of the Galaxy cover.

GIJOE Testifies -- Amazing how our foreign policy is based on a ludicrous cartoon from the 80's!!

Zombie Physics -- We know how zombie physics works, but what if you were tested on it?

Drive-Thru Divorce -- Yeah, it's weak.

Pin Pro vs. The Devil -- Got to be one of the weirdest ideas I ever had. I just wanted to see this bowling dude kick the devil's ass without breaking a sweat. He's like Job of the bowling alley -- unflappable like he doesn't even know the stakes. Damn!

Unfathomable Fish Tales -- People vs. fish is always great drama or great comedy!

Lost Pages

A couple more sketches from the woebegone boxing project. Not used, but more in the manner of illos I would have preferred to do.

Losing the Fight....

I mentioned a foxy boxing illustration sequence I started on last fall, and I kept putting it off and putting it off and putting it off and well, finally my client ran out of patience and fired me, more or less. I finished all the illustrations (24) in black and white, and I did a number of others to "get the feel" of the content. Towards the end I think I was feelin' it OK, but half the illos I did just didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped.

Here are a few that I like:

NOW It Can Be Told....

Uh, huh....and BEFORE it was just hinted at or mimed or alluded to or written as a crytograph so as to be undecipherable by the people who need it most.

But today is different --- NOW It Can Be Told!!!

Okay, back in the day, when Stephen and I were dredging away in the underground salt mines of --deleted-- Corp., there was this round-robin comic thingy that he keeps using as an example of how NOT to do such a project! Before the brutal overlords tossed us from the caves to fend for ourselves, our group cranked out 28 pages of almost ad-free dreck. My first project in the naked light and sweet aire of freedom was to draw up a cover for the set. OK, that was done pretty quick---it only took me 8 months to ink and color it.

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NOW It Can Be Shown!!!

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Tales of the Aquamarine Enchilada!!!

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Just Survivin'...

Yeah...OK...I need to post, I need to finish projects I agreed to do 6 months ago, I need to finish the cover for the Thompson I need a new job where I get to draw instead of do PowerPoint slideshows in Flash...sheesh....I am wasting away watching dumb TV shows, DVDs, and playing video games...heh...heh...heh...!!!

Okay, so that AND arguing with 15-year olds on bulletin boards...geez...what a waste...

So between all those fruitless pursuits I still turn out something every once in a while. Today I put the second cartoon together for the Survivor BB on CBS.com.

Secret Work...shhhhh......

It's always a bear when you've got a great idea and you want to get it on paper, get a layout done, get some finished work and show it off to everyone. You don't want to spoil the impact by showing something that's not finished enough to get the intended response. Hopefully the idea is compelling enough to keep you working on it quickly and finish up. Or...you take a job with a company that's all "hush-hush" and "don't tell" and you can't even show your work off (damn!!) or something like that. Well in September I took the hush-hush job and I've been doing a lot of nothing, but the company has seen my work -- photos from the company Halloween party!

Additionally, I took on a job to do a short animation for a secret product, but it's taken me much longer than I'd anticipated to finish it. Now it close to being finished, I can show some illos, but still cannot reveal the product....anyhow the work is always interesting...

This Has Been A Test....

HOLD ON, don't freak on me! This post ain't about nuthin! I'm just trying to see if something will work...



Ta da! Alright! Now I can waste time on a whole new level!

Put Up or Shut Up...

Uh, huh...um... I forget where I put sketches all the time. I think I haven't worked on anything because I can't find 'em, or they're not finished. When I find them, I'm not quick to think "I should post that". Still getting used to life in the age of the BLOG. I used to do a lot of APAs (amatuer press associations) way back in the day, so that will date me for anyone who knows about such things. The pace was so much slower...and people were lazier, or I was more prolific. All that stuff is in some boxes somewhere....

Today's post features more aborted work...pinup stuff...I got no explanation, but I don't think they need it.

No Brain Activity...

Okay, another month has elapsed with very little content coming out of my studio. Perhaps it's time to visit a proctologist???

Oh, but there are some things I do to fill the time when I should be working...like this stuff:


The ball purse....a hideous sight, but something I had to sketch when it popped into my head. Better to see it HERE than...well...you know....














And to the right...no, that's not "fire-crotch", it's something I considered doing for someone's web page, but then I let it sit too long and forgot, and found it again and went back, and....the life of the lazy....it's like a chick throwing a curse on her boyfriend. Yeah, the curse might be "fire-crotch", but heck if I know...

I shoulda been working on the boxing comic, afore I get FIRED!!!

Post ex acedia...

OK, the lazy dog does a re-post to outmanuever the quick fox.

I finally uploaded the BATTLEBOT story "BGM Blues". You can read it in it's entirety here:

http://rwagraphics.com/bb_bgmblues.htm

Much Ado About Nuthin'

Haven't been up to too much cartooning/comic production in recent years, or even recent months, but I do tend to do a few sketches a month...whatever comes to mind...revisiting old stories and characters...

...and sometimes I actually work on something NEW. As mentioned in the last post, it would be cool to just sketch pinups and watch HDTV forever, and sometimes I do a sketch for some shlubb. Mostly I ignore a lot of requested details and draw what I want, which tends to work out alright most of the time....

It seems I will working on something a little different over the next month---I'm not sure how it will turn out. Not really a comic-story, but a set of sequential panels featuring foxy boxers. Yup---a sleazy project, but I really want to try it out and just see what I do with it. Besides, I get to draw chicks jumping, bouncing and falling out of their clothes....how cool can that be?

REAL COOL!!

Uh...PINUPs...

Dang it, if only my job was to draw pinups all day...I should have MADE IT MY JOB. I should have quit all my jobs and just drawn pin-ups and drawn pin-ups, and well...drawn pin-ups. But I fell into the work trap and started to buy stuff, and well...you know how it goes, but every once in a while, I draw pinups. And I actually got paid for it few times. You might say I have lived all my dreams in small pieces...travel, comics, sex, computers. Here are few pieces of my pinup world:

• Surfgirls was done as a t-shirt illo for some surf shop in CA somewhere, I dunno where it is or if they even sold any, but I did another illo for them later.

• I did valentine baby per specs by the site owner. I think it's based on her, but she never sent me a photo.


• Yo! Waitress...just one of those things that pop out of my head every once in a while...sometimes I actually get 'em on paper before I forget 'em.

• Araceli - just some chick I drooled over way back in the day when I was doing some all night parties with Peruvians...strange days. The girl's brother bugged me to trade watches. I still dunno why, mine was a $2 piece of junk. But I did get to dance with his sister.

Yeah, I sketched a lot of other pinups too....sheesh, like ya gotta ask!!

Super-Deformed Agenda

From the closet of forgotten work, comes this assault on artistic sensibilities....

In the 80's I took a liking to a certain type of cartoon style from Japan, called 'super-deformed' or 'chibi' characters. I started throwing them into my work, did lots of spot sketches and such, but SDs were not popular in the USA at that time, and I got razzed endlessly for these works.

I foisted the style on everyone, nonetheless!!! Thus fanzine editors were forced to accept my work in the SD style if I chose to use it. I flaunted it boldly with this convention program guide in 1987.

I lot of people kept slamming the style, and after a few years of it, I decided it was time for SDs to fight back! I wanted to get the message out: SDs are LEGIT!!!!!!

This is the first of the SD rants I drew up:

...yeah, it's weak, but it's THERE! Even though the tag line says "Sex and Violence" this sequence has neither! So I had to do another one, something that got the SDs out in the world to face the music.

::UltraMourning...(sob!)

Yeah, after seeing a few pages of THUGs, I agree that Ultramaiden easily emerges as THE POWER CHARACTER, while others wither... But what is Ultramaiden like beneath the breastline? Does she use as much deoderant under the breastdroop as under the arms??? Who DARES to ask such questions? Well....since I do, I drew this illo that kinda probes the psyche of Ultramaiden after hearing of Dark Cowl's fate...even if it only lasts about 0.2 seconds.

I added color so Flintlockjaw's jaw would drop. See how deviously I use art? Let the ILLness flow...