Dirty Look.

For anyone who’s been missing the lazy eye action that’s been lacking from this blog lately. Enjoy.

I’m keeping this post short as I spent the whole of last week re-lettering all 24 pages of Project B.O.B. and designing a logo for the comic. At the moment the sight of a computer or keyboard makes me feel sick, so I’m going to be avoiding them for a couple of days at least. Let the headaches die down a bit and hope my eyes stop burning. Plus it’s the summer and I live in a seaside town and I need to start taking advantage of that. My sunburn should be a lot redder.

Spoilers.

This joke might be a little lost on you if you’ve never read Watchmen, or if you’ve never seen those old Twinkies ad in the back of American comics. But it made me laugh. I’m not sure who it’s by? I couldn’t spot a name, I just found it on someone’s Tumblr. But I had to post it.

Also spotted another online gallery of old pulp covers this week.

Been spending my week trying to avoid spoilers for the end of season Doctor Who episode this weekend. Avoiding certain website and so on. Six years ago, having Doctor Who back on TV sounded like a joke and now we’re three new Doctors in, and every paper, website, podcast and magazine are Doctor Who mad and have spoilers. I’m doing pretty well so far, just two more days. I’ve had a couple of near misses. Aren’t spoilers just a modern day pain in the arse?

Blimey, it’s just gone pass 11pm and I’ve got my window open and I’m still going to have to put the fan on because it’s too hot. I guess Summer has finally kicked in.

Centre Of Attention.

Got another boring week coming up this week. Well… not boring, but all my energy will probably be spent making notes, thumbnailing and a very large slice of the week will be spent re-lettering a lot of old comic pages. So that will probably leave little or no time for drawing. But just to start the week off right, here’s a new panel.

Also Blood Belly can now be found on my DA page.

Read Crossed (probably the sickest graphic novel I’ve ever read) over the weekend and now I have a massive urge to get back to doing some sequential artwork. I just need to get my arse in gear and start drawing up those thumbnails… a lot of them.

Blood Belly.

Even Vamps overindulge from time-to-time.

A chance to see some of my new font in action. I managed to solve my Comma problem from last time (in a really round about way.) You may also have noticed those little marks either side. They’re what some letters use sometimes when someone’s making a noise like a gasp or sneeze or burp. Those marks aren’t on modern keyboards and therefore are kind of dieing out in modern comics. But I love that effect, so I made some of my own. I wasn’t sure if the website I used would let me get away with it, but I got lucky and they did.

As for the image itself… there’s bits I like about this shots and some I don’t. It was quite fun to draw a sexy Vampire. I’m to close to it still to really make any calls on the quality yet. I’m hoping when I look at it again in a few days it will still hold up. I just don’t want that nasty shock, when you like something and then you move on and look at it again later and think “God, that’s awful!. What was I thinking?” It’s always like a punch to the gut when that happens.

I know these X-ray pin ups shots have been up over the net for a few days now, but they blow my mind. I still feel a little cheated not to live in a world with X-ray specs. I had always hoped as a kid that by the time I was an adult, they be real. But sadly not. No flying cars or invisibility suit either. You suck, adult world!

Comic Book Sans Speaks.

An open letter to the world from Comic Book Sans.

You can only push a font so far.

The Andrew Reed Font.

Well, it took a couple of goes, and I’ve written out the alphabet so many times this week I feel like I’m back in school. But I have made a font out of my handwriting (that‘s it above.) I haven’t had a chance to do any lettering with it yet to see if it’s any good, and sadly I put down my commas as apostrophes, which is annoying as the font I’ve been using lately didn’t have any commas either, when I downloaded it off a website (it‘s how they get you to buy the whole font.) It seems it’s my curse in life to have to letter something and leave spaces and then go back and put the commas in… oh well, at least I know it shouldn’t be a problem and by now I‘m kind of use to it. I could always resubmit it and sort it out easily… but at just over £8 a go (and remember it’s already taken me two goes) I can live with this small problem.

I’m hoping it well look ok used as lettering on my final artwork, as I’ve been wanting a font made of my own handwriting for ages (it’s also nice to know I own the copyright on it for once, and it makes the lettering more personal.) I’ve just got to free-up some time first, so I can sit down at my Mac and try it out properly… bloody real life, eh?

X-Ray Punch.

I like this panel a lot. Nothing’s really happening and it’s a pretty small panel on the final page… but I do like this shot.

Finished watching The Street Fighter trilogy last weekend. Probably some of the best kung-fu movies of all time. It’s at this point I usually put up a Youtube trailer, but since the first film is in the public domain, they’ve got the whole film up. Which is good as I couldn’t find a decent trailer on there anyway. It’s well worth a watch. I’m really going to have to hunt down some more Sonny Chiba movies. He’s a legend. One of my dreams is to learn that move were you screw your fist up into a funny shape and punch someone in the back of the head and their heart explodes 50 seconds later. I refuse to believe that isn’t true. I just need to find the right old, wise, kung-fu master living in a cave to teach me.

Also got round to putting up Sewer Snatcher on my DA page last weekend as well. I doubt I’ll have time to do another pin up this week as I’ve got loads of boring things to do. But I need to post some stuff from Project B.O.B. so that ok. One of the things I’ve got to do this week is try and make a font out of my handwriting. I’m just filling in loads of templates now and making loads of annoying mistakes. You have to pay for it, so I need to get it right. Also that and as I’ve said before, I do have the handwriting of a retarded chimp… so even if I do fill one in right, buy it, and there’s no annoying computer problems that means it doesn’t work on my computer or it doesn‘t work as a comic font… it can always still just look crap.

Sewer Snatcher.

Tell me this pin up wouldn’t have made a great old style pulp cover? Evil giant creature reaching up from the sewer. Maybe I should have swapped the Super-heroine for a 50’s looking damsel, but still… I wasn’t going that much for retro.

I may have gone back to my default setting slightly with this image (girls and monsters) after the hassle of last week. But saying that I’m maybe not so down on Mind-Flux as I was last week. I’m seeing a couple of things about it I like now.

Been on a bit of a Kevin Maguire craze lately. Ordering a lot of his books. Reading The Cat And The Bat and so on, has made me wonder if I could draw a decent Super-heroine. But the above image isn’t a great try as she’s tiny in this shot. In fact, because the set up of the image was so bizarre, she was kind of a bit of an afterthought, really. Maybe something to come back too.

I learnt one thing from drawing this image… if you’re drawing a Super-heroine who’s look more like a wrestler or something, just throw on a utility-belt, utility-belts make Superheroes look super.

What Could Have Been.

Think of this as a little add on from last weeks post.

You’re probably going to have to click and enlarge this photo, but if you can make it out, this is a shot of the two peril scenes that I ended up rubbing out. If you can imagine these in the thought bubble from last weeks pin up. That how the shot looked.

I’m still glad I scrapped them. They would have been tiny in the final image, plus I feel the three in the Hot tub is a better drawing. But I did like the two heroes on the pile of TNT shot. I did think for a second I might scan that part, blow it up and print it out, then light-box it onto a sheet of A3... but then I realized redrawing all that TNT again was a fate worse then death and I didn’t love that image that much.

Speaking of things I forgot to post recently... Here a really cool gallery of old style pulp comic covers I found a couple of weeks ago. Some of these are just amazing, some not so great. I would have love to have been an old pulp cover artist back in the glory days. You probably got paid peanuts but look how cool some of these cover are.