TWART week 2 - THE ROCKETEER

The colour version! Pencils and inks by me, colours be m'lady Debs (and me, a bit).



Check out the original (and many, MANY other beautiful versions of Dave Stevens' iconic character), HERE.

EDITED TO ADD: This wasn't my first go at the Rocketeer. I did this one, but... gah. Botched the legs, and didn't have time to fix/re-do them.

Cheg on - you am a TWART

I'm not busy enough at the moment, so I decided to join a... what would you call it? A sketch troupe? A Bore of Artists? I dunno, but this is it anyway: http://comictwart.blogspot.com/

I find myself in the company of genuine comic art luminaries, such as:

Mitch Gerads
Mitch Breitweiser
Mike Hawthorne
Tom Fowler
Steve Bryant
Ron Salas
Nathan Fairbairn
Andy Kuhn
Chris Samnee
Evan "Doc" Shaner
... and that Irish guy. Declan something or other.

Pretty bloody heavyweight, I think you'll agree.

So our first week's subject was Zorro. I didn't do the best one (I think that's between Andy Kuhn and Mike Hawthorne - but gawd, they're all ace so far... and I hear Francesco Francavilla's gonna join us later, and he is THE MAN when it comes to Zorro), but mine is pretty cute, I guess:



I really dig the whole "Gay Blade" side of Zorro. He should be having fun - he's living the dream!

I did another one, but rejected it as too... I don't know. It just doesn't work, and I don't know why:



We're going to be doing a sketch a week, a different character each time. When it's my turn to pick a character, I'm gonna choose...

Actually - I'm open to suggestions!

D

Jersey Gods - WIP

Don't think I've done one of these for Jersey Gods, so here goes.

I start off with a very small thumbnail - that's where I work out where the panels are gonna go, what sort of size they're going to be, etc. Sometimes I'm in the mood to do lots of experimental stuff with the panels, sometimes I want to play it straight. This time, I'm keeping it simple. (Don't bother clicking this, by the way - it really is tiny)

A size up. Here's where I start to refine the storytelling a bit. I also use the blank bit of the paper to work some stuff out - what the afro guy will look like, how Zoe's friend is going to be dressed etc.


Pencils. I work solely in blue-line these days. Partly cos you don't have to do a load of erasing at the end, but also cos my brain finds it easier to separate blue from black than grey from black. That makes it easier to concentrate on the inks, when the time comes.


Inks! I use a mix of brush and ink, pitt pens and markers to ink (though I generally favour the brush, cos I love the variation of line it gives me).

And that's it! Exciting stuff, what?

Pow!

Finally coloured last year's Jersey Gods Christmas card...!

Blam!

This was my go at drawing Warwick Johnson Cadwell and John Hoffman's The Nun with Two Guns. I botched it a bit - the original idea was to have her pointing the guns at us, with rosary beads strung between her arms, but I did her head too big and that left no room for the guns. So... no guns. The little "BLAMS" were a pain in the bum to colour (my own fault, I drew them very crudely, lots of open lines, difficult to flat), but they look rather good. And spent cartridges. Oh man, I *love* spent cartridges.

Look for more of this sort of thing in the New Year, fingers crossed!

D

THAMMMM!

Or do I mean MMMMAHT? Whatever, here's a sneak preview of issue ten of JERSEY GODS. Ooh!



After the relatively formal first issues, I'm trying to see if I can have some fun with the layout without breaking the story flow.



D

In Livin' Colour - Mk II

It's Batman!

Jersey Gods 9...

...is out today, folks! Behind a cracking Mike Allred cover, you'll find:

Nightmares! Barock confronts a figure from his past.
War! Helius discovers the truth about Hecticus.
Secrets! What is Barock's hidden weakness?
Death! Which God has reached the end of the line?
Gratuitous nudity! No, really.

And here's my favourite page from the ish...



D

In Livin' Colour

Really pleased with the Gordon I did, so I thought I would lay down some colours on the aul' fella. Apologies for the cheesy background - who's got time to draw cityscapes?



D

Get in the Ring!

This is a little something I'm kicking around at the moment. It might come to something, it might not.

Re: Animated

During my convalescence (I had an eye problem that's too complicated and dull to talk about right now - it seems to be on the mend, though) I bought and watched A LOT of the Batman Animated Series. At the risk of sounding redundant - cos everyone knows this, don' t they - it really was bloody good. Weirdly, the Joker episodes are the weakest of the series - as though the presence of Batman's arch-nemesis forces the show into a shape that doesn't quite suit it. The best episodes are the smaller, quieter ones, the morality plays, the detective stories, where Batman is almost a peripheral figure. The Joker of the Animated Series is an abstract, immutable figure, as fundamentally unchanging as Batman himself, so Joker plots mostly amount to: Joker does something evil/mischievous; Batman gets angry; Batman finds Joker and a) captures him or b) doesn't capture him (the honourable exception to this rule is Joker's Favor, which uses the big J as a plot element, and focuses instead on the woes of a perfectly ordinary Joe Bloggs).

Anyway, it's great. Also, Robin rules. His first "big" story - Robin's Reckoning - is an absolute cracker.

So, all this Bat-thinking got me digging through my sketchbooks for Bat-stuff. And here (some of) it is! I did these a couple of months back, with PITT pens and graphite pencil.

Hey, Commish!

A couple of commission pieces I did. From Robert Kirkman's Invincible, here's The Immortal:



And from Marvel Comics' Spider-Man, here's, uh...



I love Spider-Man, but I find drawing him tricky. Maybe 'cos he was one of the first characters I really loved as a kid, so he's, I dunno, important to me. Anyway, I shot for a pseudo-Romita look here, and that pretty much got me through.

I'd be thrilled if any of you clever, talented folks would like to colour these - drop me a line or leave a comment if yer interested...

D

Jersey Gods Issue 8...

...will be in your local comic store this Wednesday. Hooray!

I am fantastically proud of this one - the script is super, super sharp and I have to put false modesty aside here and say it looks pretty damn good, too.





The good people of Comic Hero News have more preview stuff on their site. Well nice.

D

EC on the eye!

This is from a sequence in Jersey Gods issue 9. Unusually for JG, this scene required a bit of added spookiness, so I decided to bring a bit of an EC Comics, Creepy/Eerie vibe into the inks. Dunno if it came off, but all those extra little lines were a lot of fun, and added some nice texture to the scene.

God, is this the most boring blog in the world, or what? Something fun next time, promise.


D

Jersey Gods numero 7!

These pages (and three more) from JG Number 7 are up on Comic Hero News. Check 'em here!

Batman vs The Crow

Remember The Crow?

I've had an idea for a wicked Batman/Crow crossover brewing for about, bloody hell, fifteen years. Back from when The Crow was kind of a big deal amongst my Gothy/metal-y friends. It'll probably never happen, but that's not gonna stop me doing some Crow/Batman fan art!


See?

Blue line pencil, india ink on bristol board, ink wash. I then attacked the board with a compass to give it an appropriately scratchy, Gothy look. Came out quite nice, I reckon!

D

It's JERSEY GODS 8!

OK, I'm not allowed to show too much of this yet - obv - but I just finished drawing Jersey Gods 8 and felt I had to show off. So cop a loada these:


Barock, shown here blasting... is that *Zoe*?

Really pleased with this sequence. It's just three people talking - albeit in space - but it works quite nicely.

OMG!

D

Hard Science!

A few years ago - probably just before I landed a job with Doctor Who Magazine, and maybe six months before I got into Comic Book Idol - I had this idea. As ideas go it wasn't up to much - basically a remix of Challengers of the Unknown/Fantastic Four - but it would've been lively, fun nonsense, mixed in with a lot of daffy comics science and some fun time travel/soap opera hijinks. It was called HARD SCIENCE - and here are the first (and only) pages.

I think it stands up quite well - especially the colour stuff. And it was around this time that I realised I *loved* doing my own lettering. Woo!

Next time - something new!

UPDATED: image 3 now works. Knock yerselves out.

D

Minions!

Well, I've been saved some bother by the awesome Mr Luke Pickett and the superfly Mr Matthew Schuler, AKA Cosmic Pencil, who have kindly coloured two of my recent pics. Luke Pickett did a beautiful job with Jersey Gods' BAROCK vs SUPERMAN and Cosmic Pencil knocked the GREEN LANTERN out of the park (as they say). Good work, my colouring minions! :)





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Superman v Barock - updated

I stuck in a background and some logo stuff. I'm gonna end up colouring this, I just know it.

D