Comic Grabs

I picked up a few comics this weekend. Here they are.

I got this Toxic Avengers book because the cover looked fun. I figured why not? I do like the interior art by Tristan Wright.

Eventually I'll read it.

I will never pay money for any of these Ultraverse comics... unless they have a Dan Brereton cover. Putting his art on your cover is like reaching into my pocket and taking my money.

But the interiors... I mean, no shade the creators and all that... but this shit is shite.

I tried to read a few pages but it was difficult. I know this is like mid-story. It's just irritating to be thrown into an epic and expected to buy a whole line of comics and respect all these characters you've never seen before as if they were classic icons of superheroes. Spoiler alert: it did not work out for Malibu.

This Thundarr #1 just sang to me. I love that cover art by Michael Cho (one of MANY ALTERNATE COVERS... but that's a whole other rant).

The real treasures I found! I got that fat Nexus book for $2 and that complete Eternals for $5. Amazing. This is what flea markets and vendor malls are for. I'm actually excited to read these! I might never read any of the comics I mentioned before this, but I'll probably read Eternals (I've never read it before).

So yeah, that's my little haul. Got me in a comics mood.

Hymla Comic

Just a quick follow up to this post... I completed a 13 page Hymla comic called "Eye Am". Right now I'm not sure where this will end up. I can just post it online, and that's fine. But I want it in print. I'm kicking around ideas such as Black Pudding Comics (various fantasy stuff) or a straight up Hymla comic book. If I manage to do a second story as long as this one, I'll probably just do a Hymla comic book. Time will tell, I guess.

Here's a page from it.

 

Hymla Calls Me to Action

Here's a bunch of sketches of the barbarian warrior Hymla the Horn, slayer of demons, scourge of bandits and handsy wizards, and seeker of adventure!

Hymla presented herself to me over years, at first a vague representation of slayage and only since late 2023 fully corrupting my mind and revealing her identity to me. She is here now. I can't turn her away. She has free access to my inner life.

She wants me to make comics about her. She knows about those other barbarians who have their own comics and movies and god dammit she wants hers too.

I haven't the courage to tell her no nor to tell her that if I do her comic it will go unseen by almost everyone on the planet. Only a small but elite cadre of weirdos will care.

But maybe that's enough to prevent her from gutting me from neck to navel, as she has all but promised to do.

Therefore I will do what I can, Hymla. I swear to Black Wing, god of death! But have mercy and be patient... I'm very slow at this stuff.

ROC Talk

I'm in a comics mood.

I was in a comics mood this time last year and I knocked out a 25 pager with Hellion Cross. I printed 50 copies of that book with an egregious error on the center spread... I had drawn the center pages without considering the correct margins. I had to manipulate the positions of captions to make it work and in doing so I duplicated one caption and deleted another. No idea how.

Fast forward to today... I'm finally going to launch ROC: Random Order Comics... a "regular" comic book title I where I can just stuff all my comics work. When I get something finished, I can just add it to the next issue. When I hit the 28-32 page count, I can do a cover and pull the trigger on it.

I'm not worrying about what kind of content goes in each issue or how I'm going to publish them. They are standard American comic book format and I'm keeping it Rated R or under. I'll probably stick to black and white for now. Those are my only rules. There may be fantasy comics, goofy strips about politics or memories, or whatever I feel like drawing.

Here's a few pages from the first issue. I'll post more about it later. This issue is complete other than a cover.

Hypergraphoid

Drew this silly comic this past week. Made a little mini of it. I have a bunch of little minis so maybe I'll eventually put a batch up for sale if you wanna have copies. Zines!

Now enjoy the intense cartooning. Or go read it on my website.

 

Artists I Like: Rick Geary

I had no idea Rick Geary was born in the 1940s. I guess I assumed he was roughly my age. But that's because I don't do my research and I assume too much.

Geary has a long career spanning back to the early 1970s when he did work for various newspapers. He was in National Lampoon for years. I recall seeing his work for the first time in Heavy Metal when was a teen, so it had to be around 1988 since that is when his first story appeared in the magazine. (Is he in the new Heavy Metal??)

The one book I own of his is Jack the Ripper. Apparently Geary is a bit obsessed with Victorian murder because he did a whole slew of those kinds of books ranging from the Borden murders to the killing of Abraham Lincoln.

His style is iconic. I don't know his tools, but it always felt like he was using technical pens (maybe dip pens) and working with delicate precision over these pages. But I suspect his comic pages are not large scale. I don't know. But the Victorian murder books are digest sized, or around 8.5 x 5.5 inches or something. If I was publishing at that size, I would draw on 8.5 x 11 or something. (Look at me speculating about what I could probably just research.)

Geary does good work. Check it out.

 

Ye Olde Comique Booke Airte Struggle

In the early 90s I got my hands on Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art. I never read it. Not really. I flipped through it a lot, and took notes from some of the examples. I might have read a few pages. But reading dry texts like that was not my strong suit. I'm sure I missed a lot of valuable lessons from Will.

Which makes me think about comics as an art form and how that a lot of folks talk about it, ponder it, and theorize about it. I love that they do that, but it's not my bag. Just like with tabletop roleplaying games, I love making them and playing them but I am not sure I have much to say about the philosophical side of it or the theory side of it. Why does it work if I put three dots after a word to convey a pause or some unspoken thing? It just does. I'm sure there are good psychological reasons and I know it's rooted deeply in the actual material history of language and writing. But all I know is I put three dots when I want to suggest that sort of thing. It's all feels.

It's ALL FEELS.

And I might not even be good at it. I don't know. I know that people always enjoy my comics, but is it because they like how I draw or because they enjoy reading my stories? I don't really know. But I suspect, honestly, it's because they like how I draw. I know that's why I pick up books from Philippe Druillet, Vaughn Bodé, or Richard Corben. It is not for the stories. Those are fine, and sometimes good, but it's all about the visuals. I love the styles, the colors, the lines. I love the mark making. And how those marks come together to convey movement, meaning, narrative. Even when the story being told is, let's be honest, forgettable as hell. Or disgusting. Or ham fisted. If it looks cool to my eyes, I'm still gonna love that shit.

For example, I just read Druillet's Vuzz for the first time and holy motherfucker what a nakedly savage and nihilistic read. Vuzz is a psycho and a killer and a rapist. He JOYFULLY rapes and murders. Yet Druillet's exquisite lines and pacing and figures are so compelling you have to love the god damn book.

I kept all this shit in mind while working on Hellion Cross. This is the first full comic book I've created in a long time. I look at the finished pages and I ask myself "are these good enough?". Dangerous question to ask yourself. I could scrap them and start over and improve them, maybe. But why the fuck would you do that? I'm not a perfectionist. The next iteration would also have flaws and I would have exactly the same thoughts.

But I worry about stupid things. For example, I kept the 4 fingers style. In the original Pan-Gea comic, all the characters have 4 fingers like in old cartoons. So I thought... well, this is a successor to Pan-Gea, I might as well be consistent. And that's cool. I like it. But there's a devil on my shoulder going "Do you really wanna do that? Some guy will pick it up and say those hands look dumb."

But I can't help that. When I did the original Pan-Gea comics I had a few comments that the hands were weird or that the chicks were too fat. I can't be bothered with any of that. What am I trying to do here, make art for the masses? This is my shit, and folks who like my shit will like this comic. That's really all I can do.

Perhaps the story is lame, perhaps the hands are dumb. I don't know. It's not for me to say, is it? I make the art, the world judges it. That's just how it is.

Hellion Cross Center Pages

When I drew Hellion Cross issue 1, I decided to have a centerfold type of piece. A two page spread. I usually shy away from doing them because of printing concerns but I went for it. And it looks pretty good, I think.

Except it has a glaring error. I must have been half asleep when I was laying that page out in Photoshop for printing because I repeated a caption twice.

Here's the thing. I drew it without fully considering how the captions would fall within the safe margins. So I had to scoot one caption over to the left quite a bit. The problem is instead of scooting the correct one, I just copied the other one and placed it. Didn't even notice until a friend pointed it out in the actual printed book. Egg on face.

Anyway, that means the first printing of this book (currently the only printing) has an error and will be worth at least $10,000 more. You know it's true.

For the record, here's the corrected page and spread. Sorry about that.

Overton

Random comic I was compelled to draw this morning. I like firing off a simple 4 panel strip if an idea is burning a hole in my psyche.

As to the content... hope it's obvious. That Overton Window is a fucking bitch. You pride yourself on riding the  middle ground but that middle ground just keeps slip slip slidin' into destruction, buddy. Might want to correct your course because whoever is painting that line is on some bad drugs.

 

Hymla the Horn!

CW: This post contains a bit of nudity, so you might want to hide it from your granny. A lot of this art is more appropriate for my Blood Red Pinups blog, but I'm in a mood to blur the lines and feeling less interested in compartmentalization.

Theme music for this post: Wo Fat's entire discography, but The Conjuring and The Black Code in particular. I think Hymla's theme song is probably "Beggar's Bargain".

Those of you reading this thing who care, let me know in the comments if you want to see a god damn Hymla the Horn comic book. I'll do what I want, you know that. But it is a strong motivator to know anyone out there gives even one shit.

HYMLA THE HORN: The story of a low class, low brow dishwasher turned slayer.

Hymla the Horn was born from a sketch. I can't seem to locate the original sketch sheet, done in Clip Studio Paint. But I did find a snippet of it that was saved on October 8, 2022, with the name "Hymla" drawn on it. So I must have created her at least by Oct 2022, duh.

Since then, she has popped up in my sketchbooks over and over again. I played an AD&D character based on her. I wrote a comic script. Clearly this brash, brazen ne'er-do-well looms large in my head. Both figuratively and literally. She ain't no wispy little daisy, after all.

The first Hymla drawing I can find, 2022.

Eventually I will make a Hymla comic book. I don't know when. I don't know how. I just know she is inevitable. So far there is one script written: Hymla is introduced as a lowly cantankerous kitchen helper in a tavern dive bar. A cult invades the bar and turns everyone into a mindless cult member, so Hymla brutally and bloodily slays every motherfucker in the place with various kitchen implements. Then she takes the tavern owner's old sword off the wall and walks off into a life of adventure, having discovered she has a knack for slaying.

Hymla is like... what if Conan/Red Sonja but fat and sassy and mean and missing a front tooth? Pure fight comic, violent as fuck, just for funsies. A character that says "I don't give a shit what you think" and means it.

"But why is she called Hymla the HORN?"... Because it sounds cool. I added the tagline "the Horn" right after doodling that first image and creating an AD&D first edition character. One of her carried items was a horn (the kind you blow). She also had a magic sword that she could blow through the pommel to inspire her comrades. None of that Dungeons & Dragons info is canon to the character, though. Just a riff on an idea. But that is the origin of "the Horn". It also ties into the first comic book script because her boss, the tavern owner, has a fancy old horn on his wall that she takes with her when she leaves the bloody mess behind. Unless I change up the script.

Bit of a tangent here, but fuck it, this is my blog... I don't savor the idea of having to draw the same thing over and over. Which is why my relationship to comics has always been slightly at arm's length. Though I was much more of a comics guy before getting into tabletop RPG creation so heavily in the 2000s and later in the 2010s. I used to draw a lot more comics, folks. Anyway... I resist the idea of giving this character a signature sword and horn because I don't want to have to draw the same thing all the time. One of the things I always loved about Conan comics was that in each story he could have a different weapon, different clothes and armor, different everything. All that was consistent was his personality, his long black hair, and muscles.

Hymla's world is Yria, the same setting I've explored in the pages of Black Pudding RPG zine. Well, to be fair, when I use this setting for stories and comic ideas I tend to cleanse it of elves, dwarfs, and halflings. But that's neither here nor there, as the rubes are wont to say. I think it matters not. Maybe those folks all died off in a plague or maybe they are still around, just not showing up much. Can't say yet. But this is the world of the Worm Witch, Blazing Heart, and Hunter Raven and all that jazz. Hymla just walks through it for a good time.

And that's Hymla. What matters is she's a fat, tough, mean, mirthful, belligerent motherfucker who wanders the land slaying monsters, wizards, and other villainous bastards while drinking, gambling, singing, and probably fucking. Not a sex comic idea, mind you, but definitely a hard rated-R. And NOW I'm officially rambling. You are witnessing me working out the idea on the page, naked for the world to see.

Anyhow. Here's the ultimate collection of Hymla the Horn artwork, as it stands in the year of our lord 2024, September 2.

This ended up being the cover for Black Pudding issue 8.

Doodled during a D&D game where we fought a kraken in the middle of the night.