They're Sort of a Fantastic Four, I Guess

Okay, another of those random deck-driven strips.

Maybe it was a bad decision to take foreground elements from both of the deck panels and depict them as characters. Getting four monsters into panel #2 meant crowding it up kind of a lot. (These panels aren't a good shape for crowds.)

I'll be a little sorry to see the four-armed sea-monster dude leave the deck: I really like his face. On the other hand, I am finally getting to discard the line about the goldfinches that I swiped, perhaps unwisely, from a Patrick Kavanagh poem.

More soon!

One Way to Parse Those Three Left Hands

Here's the first strip in which I happen to use the panel that was my B Alphabots drawing.

I like the way that turned out, though I'm sort of starting to get self-conscious about using cross-hatching in lieu of a real background.

If You Think of the Interlocutor as a Changeling

I'm not sure whether this one works, though I like the point it raises, and I really like the way the demon looks in the final panel.

When I say I'm not sure it works, I mean I'm not sure it really "reads" in and out of panel 3 the way it should. But here we are, and there it is.

Alphabeasts: V is for Vermicious Knids

This week's "Alphabeasts" come from Roald Dahl's lesser-known sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the book that answers the question of where that magic elevator winds up after it leaves Willy Wonka's Factory. In Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, as you may already know, Charlie Bucket and Willie Wonka make it into space, to a vast orbiting American hotel, where the are menaced by alien invaders.

Yes, my friends, V is for vermicious knids.



The vermicious knids are amorphous hostile entities from the planet Vermes, entirely comfortable in deep space but prone to burning up on atmospheric re-entry. They can assume any shape they care to. Here's an illustration from the original book, to give you a sense of the shapes they try on, and to explain why I eschewed my usual brushpen-plus-Photoshop methods for the week.



They're fun to draw. There's no wrong shape for a vermicious knid, and you can keep putting crosshatching on them until they take on the dimensionality that you want. Give them a try the next time someone puts you on hold!

Here's a little process doodle that I used to figure out whether the cross-hatching method was going to work:


Next week, I am planning a trip to a children's book that's quite a bit better known.

Hadpanagus Fanart

One of the contributors to Alphabeasts has been cranking out really crazy mythological creatures that I had never heard of before, and with her entry for the letter H I simply could not resist jumping on the fanart bandwagon.

The artist in question is AZ, the daughter of another contributor. AZ is six years old. This is what she has to say about her creature hadpanagus:

HADPANAGUS just walks around & says “look! a butt!” & he eats butts! & grows butts! & wears butts! he just loves butts!

Furthermore:

Hadpanagus also hooks butts onto his butt, so all the butts trail along behind him like a tail. he already has a tail, so now that he hooked a butt tail on, he feels like he has two tails! he even sews butts together for blankets & pillows & matreses & carpets & you know what? he even sings about butts! he just needs butts! just give him some butts! he has millons of butts he has millons of piles of butts. he eats butts with butter he also chases giingerbread men a lot, so he can stick them in the crack and then put some salt and pepper and butter on!

I am not the first to draw a fan tribute to hadpanagus, and I'm sure I won't be the last.



AZ's mom has also taken a crack at it (so to speak), and I believe her version met with AZ's disapproval. I hope mine passes muster.

If the relevance of hadpanagus's speech balloons isn't initially obvious, please give this video a minute and a half of your time.



And if you find that amusing, you might also listen to the video behind this link.

Alphabeasts: E is for Erina

I was thinking about hoaxing up a different source for this week's "Alphabeasts," but let me come right out and admit the truth: I got this week's critter from our friend (and the organizer of these alphabet projects) Ben Towle.



You see, when I say that E is for Erina, I am borrowing a demon from his (Almost) 100 Demons minicomic, which I think mainly survives as this tag on Ben's blog. (Ben, if the mini is still in print, let me know how people can order it!)

Ben's demons represent an awesome amount of visual inventiveness, and in a way it's a shame that I'm not drawing more of them. But if you want to build a whole alphabet out of Ben's demons, though, let me tell you right now that there aren't entries for Q, W, X, or Y. (So much for that plan.)

Looking at Ben's original Erina, I was stumped for a little while about how to pose my version. This is probably the single creature in my "Alphabeasts" set about which I have the least information—just a name and a single drawing.



At first, I thought that since the opposable thumbs give the Erina more ability to manipulate the world, I'd try to make the six-limbed canine devious, tricky, and canny ...



But looking again at Ben's drawing, the erina looked to me a lot more lupine than coyotine, so I rethought my ideas about the erina as a trickster demon. And since the erina seems to be a lone wolf, not a pack creature, I thought, "What's the main personality characteristic of the wolf?"

Then, looking yet a third time at Ben's drawing, it occurred to me that the erina is much sturdier even than the largest living canine—those are some thick legs. And so, I thought, it must be pretty big. Let's have it eating a bison.



I leave it for you to speculate about what it might be defending its kill against.

By the way, Ben's demons happen to have been created independently right around the same time that Mike and I were drawing our own sets of a hundred demons. I've still got copies of our Demonstration minicomic, if you're interested in getting a copy of it...

For next week, I have a few options. What do you think I should draw for the letter F?



You've got until Friday evening to tell me.

New T-Shirt Designs; T-Shirt Sale

It looks like Zazzle is having a Memorial Day weekend sale. All their t-shirts are 10% off.

In honor of the sale, I've designed a couple of other t-shirts, and I'll try to bring another couple online before the end of the weekend.

Satisfactory Comics Logo (black) by SatisfactoryComics

The Dark Abbess T-Shirt by SatisfactoryComics

Kellyish Demon Shirt by SatisfactoryComics

Again, these are available in lots of sizes and colors.

When you check out, you have to type MEMORIALSALE in the space for a discount / sale code.

Don't worry, not every post this month will be about the way we're selling out. But I figure as long as we're going to have a Zazzle store, it might as well have a few different things in it.

Happy April Fool's Day!

April Fool's Day has got to be my second-favorite holiday in the calendar. Or at least I love it in theory.

In practice, I don't get to play nearly as many pranks or to jink half as many japes as I'd like to. It's a drag sometimes to have to act like a responsible adult.

However, in the spirit of the day, let's see how long it takes Mike to notice this.



It's a colored version of his self-portrait from our fun Demonstration project.

Shh! Don't leave a comment. If you do, he'll get an email about it!

Doodle Penance: "the kiss painting"

This week's Doodle Penance comes from someone who found our site after searching for "the kiss painting."

Probably this poor searcher found him- or herself visiting one of Mike's old swipe file posts. (Incidentally, this is by far our most-visited page on the site. Could that have something to do with Uma in the altogether? Personally, I prefer to imagine that it's just general affection for the details of our second issue. Order it now and have it in plenty of time for Valentine's Day!)

But here's what the poor Googler probably wanted to find on our site:

Many people do not realize that Chaim Witz, otherwise known as Gene Simmons, based his "Demon" persona on an early version of Picasso's 1903 The Old Guitarist. Recent technological inspection has revealed a preoccupied woman, apparently nude, under the famous painting, but the earlier and more awesome version of the painting has been lost to the vagaries of time... until now!


(You may click to enlarge somewhat.)

It's worth noting that Simmons is unlike Picasso, in that there are some things that Pablo Picasso was never called.

"Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar," indeed.

Mike, I hope you'll paste your penance below...

...uh, okay, Isaac, hyar 'tis:
Clearly this is based not on Klimt's famous painting "The Kiss" (as seen, sort of, in SatCom #2, as noted above), but on Edvard Munch's less famous painting "The Kiss," which you can see here in its oil-paint version and here in its woodcut version. I have altered the image ever-so-slightly to suggest that it depicts a scene of osculation between Prince, original performer of the song "Kiss," and Tom Jones, who covered it with the Art of Noise. Munch's original design didn't leave a lot of room to suggest who's who in my version. I leave it to the viewer to decide if TAFKAP is wearing his own apparel or if the Performer from Pontypridd is sporting the Purple One's coat as the fan he must be.

Halloween Fun Punkin!

BOO!

I know I should be grading papers tonight—and I'm about to get back to work—but I just couldn't let the season go by without doing something to mark the arrival of Halloween, which is my favorite holiday. Last year, as a special treat for our blog readers, I posted some Halloween Fun Comics, a choose-your-own-adventure story that is included in Satisfactory Comics #7.

This year, because we're likely to get trick-or-treaters here in Burlington, I decided to do something people could enjoy without being on the internet.

It started with one of the best demons from our Demonstration book, the Dark Abbess.



(Well, actually, it started with a bunch of sketches and doodles. I was originally thinking that I might make a punkin with the werewolf from "The Graveyard of Forking Paths.")



But once I'd settled on the Dark Abbess, I had to figure out how to make the shading work. I couldn't put her pupils in the middle of her eyes and also carve out the eyes for light to come through...



... but it looked like this was going to work. (I did have to upgrade to a bigger pumpkin.) And so, with a little handheld pumpkin jigsaw knife and a regular old craft knife, I started carving, and about an hour and a half later, I had this:



Let's turn off the lights and enjoy that the way it's intended to be seen. You can click this picture to enlarge it.

Old Kirby-Character Doodles

I pulled out an old notebook (from 2004) the other day, so I could hunt up some details about the apartment I used to keep on Long Island. As I was flipping through the notebook, whom did I see but my old favorite superhero from childhood, Scott Free?


There he is, among notes for a verse essay on escapism. (I've written the poem, but haven't found a place to publish it yet. I keep sending it out.)

I wasn't sure whether I was remembering this right, but I dug out a notebook from the spring of 1995 (the first year I was in New Haven, while I was still taking courses in graduate school), and sure enough, there's Scott Free in pencil, on his aero-discs, sailing among doodles drawn from a discussion of The Tempest. I think the bug-eyed guy on the left is one version of Caliban.



You see, when I was just five or six years old (if I remember right), a friend of my father gave me a big collection of Kirby's work at DC: almost every issue of Forever People and Mister Miracle; lots of New Gods and Kamandi and Jimmy Olsen and The Demon. It was a huge influence on my young mind, I think. Kirby's design sense permeated my childhood head, and his characters seemed to me more "real" than Marvel's characters, in the way that Hercules and Odysseus are more real than characters in a novel or on TV.

A few pages earlier in the 2004 notebook, just goofing around on a page with a to-do list, here's Etrigan:

Yarva Demonicus Etrigan, people!

Something about this doodle got me thinking: where have I seen something like that recently? A Kirbyesque physique, in celebratory contortions? Swagger and strut with blocky fingertips?

A-ha, I realized: Casey and Scioli's Godland! Friedrich Nickelhead, dancing in celebration, taunting Basil Cronos!

Yep, that's Dylan he's listening to. It's a trippy, trippy book.

The Power of the Daily Routine

I'm working on a post about Tales from the Classroom, a comic that Mike and I produced back in 2003 for the Graduate Teaching Center at Yale, but a shiny thing drifted into my view, and it got me thinking about something else.

Some of you reading this will already know that I send a lot of postcards. In fact, I send five postcards a day, and have been doing so since the summer of 1998. (If you get a numbered postcard from me, that's what the number is for: I'm counting them. Later today, I will write postcard #16,615.)

You may not know that I was once interviewed on the radio program Weekend America about my postcard regimen. (You'll have to scroll about halfway down that page and have RealOne Player or something like that to listen to the four-minute interview.)

I've never done this calculation before, but if you collected them all up into one stack, it would be at least seventeen feet high. Maybe more like twenty.

Why do I send five postcards a day? I don't know. I've been doing it for a long time now, and some of my original motivations have been lost or modified, but now it's a large part of how I process my day. It's a way for me to keep in touch with my friends about the small stuff of my life.

But that's not what this post is about. I wanted to talk about the power of a daily routine. You can accomplish a lot in small bits, day by day.

When Mike and I were working on our Demonstration project, I really did draw one demon a day for a hundred days straight. After only a couple of weeks, the sketchbook was taking on a nice heft: it took a little while to look at it. By the end of the project, it was more than you could really take in at once. Since you've been so patient, and since I've been going on for so long without a picture, here's a demon that didn't make it into our booklet.

That's a to-do list and, under it, a not-yet-written postcard that he's urging me to rock.

Around the same time, I think, and unbeknownst to us then, our pal Ben Towle had undertaken a similar project, doing a demon a day for (almost) 100 days. All of his demons are online, but you can also get them in a handsome minicomic for only $3.50 direct from Ben's website store, where there are lots of nice goodies to choose from. (I recommend his cartoon alphabets.) Ben's demons really showcase his awesome inking and his sense of light and shadow -- here are a couple of examples I nabbed from his site:


The Partyka comics collective has a daily drawing feature on their website -- it ought to be the first thing you see when you click over there. I don't think that requires a drawing a day from each of their members, but it's definitely in the same spirit.

I'm not sure whether he's got a daily drawing routine, but the inimitable Eddie Campbell, author of some of my favorite graphic novels, has been blogging daily for quite a while now. (In his blog, he proves himself not only an excellent raconteur, but a whip-smart theoretician and a voracious reader.)

Some of my other favorite comics bloggers also work on a daily routine. Mike Sterling, a comics store owner in southern California, has been posting every day since I started reading his blog, and I think it's because he posts daily that his ruminations on the comics industry have become so interesting to me: I've gotten to know his personality, his store's history, and even some of his employees and regular customers through those daily updates. Chris Sims not only posts every day, but has regular weekly features, chief among them a Thursday-night roundup of his week's comics purchases. It's because of Chris that I now usually go to my local comics store on Fridays and not on Wednesdays (when each week's new comics arrive). Finally, Bully, the Little Stuffed Bull, who seems to post at least daily, has several terrific weekly features, including a "Separated at Birth" post comparing comics swipes (though this week's is a little dubious, as a swipe), his really fun "Ten of a Kind" comics-cover posts, and, recently, a review of one P. G. Wodehouse novel per week. And yes, he at least pretends that he's a little stuffed bull.

That's him in San Diego last month, about to triple his weight with a plate of fish tacos.

And then there's the daily comic strip. I don't think anyone can doubt that working on The Sketchbook Diaries every day for years has helped James Kochalka hone his craft, even though he used to say that craft is the enemy. Drawing the syndicated Zippy every day has certainly made Bill Griffith an incredible draftsman. There are more daily webcomics than I could even try to list. Probably you already have a favorite.

But none of these is the new shiny thing that distracted me from the post I was planning. I also found out, this week, about an artist (in the DC area, I think), who is making a skull a day, for a year, each of them out of a different material: scratchboard, wire-frame, linocut print, chalk on a sidewalk, watercolor, carved watermelon (worth looking for)... One of my favorites is the one made from soy sauce on a plate:

Some of these images are really gorgeous, and the project as a whole is super impressive. When it's all finished, what an awesome coffee-table book (or set of postcards) it would all make.

Which brings me back to what I wanted to discuss: the power of the daily routine. Setting a small artistic task for yourself once a day -- some discrete thing you can finish, or some quota you need to hit in a larger project -- is a wonderful way to make the steady advance of days amount to something.

(I have always been a big procrastinator, and the moment I started really making progress on my dissertation was the point when I set a daily quota for myself. First, it was just twenty minutes of free-writing. Then, when I started drafting chapters, it was a thousand words a day. That's not so much, but it quickly adds up.)

Maybe once a week would work for you better than once a day. Maybe you need to focus on the large chunks; maybe it can be something small that you finish in twenty minutes or an hour. But if you've looked around, with summer waning, and been amazed at how much time has passed without much to show for it, stop thinking (for a minute) about how many months it will take you to realize your long-term goals. Instead, think about how much you can accomplish in a day. Then do it every day.

Demonstration (May 2004)

In the spring of 2004, we undertook an interesting exercise in cartooning, inspired by Lynda Barry's excellent book One Hundred Demons. More to improve our drawing and visual thinking than to plumb any inner recesses, we resolved to draw one demon a day for a hundred days. The best of our results from that exercise are collected in this "oversized" minicomic -- 24 pages of doodles, sketches, and strange ideas.

For each of the demons we chose to present, we include a bit of prose explaining something about the demon: where the idea came from, whom we were imitating, what the demon reminds us of, or what we've come to think of it. Here on this page, for example, (you may click to enlarge) ...

...I have a few words to say about the linguistic origin of the "Dark Abbess," Mike talks about an early "failed" demon and his all-in-one-line satyr (with a nod to our friend Jeff Seymour's Satyrn minicomic), and I acknowledge a visual debt to Dan Clowes (and the "Nunzilla" toy).

We're also able to juxtapose a few demons in interesting ways, as you can see on this page:


If you're not deeply involved with comics, you might appreciate the set of footnotes that we include in this book, giving a little more detail about a few of the people we reference in our explanations and captions. Although there's no story in this book, and although some of my early drawings in the project are kind of clumsy, there are a lot of ways in which Demonstration serves as a nice introduction to our visual style or our collaborative oeuvre.

We've been pleased to see the demons pop up in a few other places, too. A couple of them had cameos in Satisfactory Comics #5, in among the other weirdies in the Museum of the Horrible, even before we'd finished our fivescore. Tom Motley also used quite a few of them (including my demonic self-portrait) in his first story for the Mapjam.

Since Mike posted a little last week about his devotion to Walt Kelly, I thought I ought to include an image of this little guy, who is one of my favorite results of the project, and who is one of the critters that cropped up in Satisfactory #5:


Demonstration is 24 pages, at 8 1/2" by 7". Each cover is different: the demons on the cover are rubber-stamped on there, and we had several different stamps to choose from. (Some covers feature doodles instead of or in addition to the rubber stamps.)



If you'd like a copy, you can buy it at our Storenvy shop.



RARR!