Redesigning Robin

I am not the biggest fan of Robin: The Boy Wonder.  It's fun in a Dick Sprang, Burt Ward kinda way, but in any half-serious take on Batman, the idea of bringing a kid (no matter how expertly trained) is pretty reckless.

That said, I think you can do a fairly interesting version of the character if he's a kid inspired by Batman, but operating without his expressed consent.  That's the thought here, with obvious nods to Frank Quitely's Damien Wayne design.

UPDATE: People on Twitter seemed to like the Robin design with Batman colors, so I thought I'd post it here as well.  Which do you prefer?

A Real Canadian Hero

I don't know about you, but I've always preferred flannel shirt and leather jacket Logan over yellow-tights Wolverine.  He never seemed like the kind of guy who would go in for all that BS.  Superman is actively attempting to become a symbol of hope, Batman is trying to scare the bejeezus out of criminals, but Logan is just a dude trying to put his head in the right place.  It is, however, entirely possible that this is a flawed reading as I've only read two Wolverine comics since the 90's.

"Thor's Man"

Old World Mythology fascinated me -- and continues to do so -- mainly because the gods are always fallible.  As a kid raised in a Baptist church the idea was so dangerously alien that I couldn't help but be attracted.  Even now I think it's really compelling that certain cultures created deities like themselves, with all the good and bad that entails.
I have a special place in my heart for Thor, because my wife's last name (and our children's middle names) originated with Pagans who were attempting to hold off the inevitable wave of Christianity by wearing Mjolnir's around their neck.

Now, about the actual art.  I think Thor's gotta have a beard, and yes, I know Kirby is The King and he never drew Thor with a beard, but Thor's a damned Viking and he just has to have a beard.
Also, bet you didn't know Thor was such a Johnny Unitas fan.

Superman Redesign

The crucial part of a good Superman design is color selection.  You have to have the bright red, you just have to.  I'm partial to the darker blue used in The Animated Series, but I also understand why some people like the lighter, Curt Swan/Chris Reeves blue.  I also like the gold detail Jack Kirby put at the top of Superman's boots, and the red cuffs Jim Lee put into his redesign.  All that is mainly just little extra touches, because you absolutely don't need to redesign Superman.

Batman Redesign

It always seemed logical to me that a guy who spends a large percentage of his time crashing through windows would probably wear safety goggles. That's the most drastic change in this slight Batman redesign. Obviously influenced by Paul Pope's Batman and Darwyn Cooke's Catwoman. I've also included the original black-and-white sketch as well as a version with blue accents

 

RiGBY Deleted Scene

Work has resumed in full on RiGBY, and the first chapter will be back online at the end of the month after we make a couple of tweaks to the website.  Chapter Two (starting with Rigby's arrival in Sauria) will be online the following month with some slight dialogue changes and a brand new ending.  The goal is that new chapters (each approximately 20 pages) will be posted at the beginning of each month in the entirety.

The above picture is a deleted scene from around the time after Screamland ended when I was considering restarting RiGBY from the beginning after talking with some publishers.  Nothing came of it, but it was nice to reevaluate the comic as a whole before pressing on.

Now In Stores

It took four or five different release dates, but the Screamland: Death of the Party collection is finally out in stores.  I snapped a picture of this one at Friendly Frank's in Prairie Village because my comp copies have not yet arrived.  If you haven't gotten a copy yet either, you can pick one up at your local comic book shop or on Amazon (where you'll still have to wait another week or two).  The book is also now available as a single digital volume on comiXology complete with all the extras.
Chris shared some thoughts about what the book means to those of us who slaved away on it, "[...]this will have to stand as a road map of the last year of my life. I certainly can think of way worse things to mark one's time[...]".
When I think about this past year, I'll mostly associate it with the birth of my second child,  hiking in the Smokey Mountains and taking Eleanor camping for the first time, but throughout all these other parts of my life, Screamland was the thick mortar that filled in all the cracks.  Estimating that I spent a conservative three-and-a-half hours on each page, that's still almost 400 hours of Screamland crammed into my lunch breaks and in the late hours after everyone in my house had gone to sleep.
The amazing thing is that those 400 hours (or however much it actually was, 4,000?) was just one part of the entire process.  I'd shutter to think how many hours Chris spent writing, flatting, lettering and laying out the damn thing.  He really was the wheel who turned all the other cogs
And I'd be an idiot not to mention all the work Buster put in.  Early in the process I had lunch with a guy I respect to get his opinion on my pages and he said, "Buster's really saving your ass."  Truer words have never been spoken.  Buster made everything I drew look way better than it had any right to. In another decade or so, Buster Moody fans will read Screamland as one of the deep cuts the way Beatles fans listen to those Tony Sheridan records from Hamburg.
And now that I've started, I can't help but thank Mellon, Kyle, Stephen and Dennis for their work on the back-ups even if it made me look bad.  And of course Kevin Gritzke for being the anchor leg on our deadline marathon.

But mainly thanks to those of you who read it and liked it.  This was my first widely read book, and that's all any artist really wants, someone to listen to their stories.  Thank you for giving me that, and I hope to see you in Screamland again some day.

Favorite Thing I Drew in 2011

This year I did a lot of creating.  The most important (but from my perspective the easiest to actually create) was Arthur.  We had a son in April, but all I really did was supply half the building materials while Bethany did most of the work.  I did paint him a picture, which I guess makes us even.

I also pumped out some comic books, easily the most productive year of my life.  I designed or illustrated over 600 greeting cards for my day job, drew 103 finished comic book pages, 4 covers and saw 6 books published.  It was a great year, and I can't thank those of you who supported RiGBY and Screamland enough.

To finish out the year, here is my favorite sequence of the year, from Screamland #3.  The Mass ended up being one of my favorite characters to draw thanks to his malleable frame, and I really like the acting in this scene.  I'm man enough to admit that not everything in Screamland came out as well as I would have liked, but this scene (as well as the aquarium scene in issue 4) stand out as high-water marks for me.

Rigby Twitpics

Some recent in progress RiGBY pics from twitter.

Where's Rigby?

I've had a few inquiries about the ETA on new RiGBY comics, and my stock answer has always been simply that "I'm working on them." Which, honestly, is just a cheeky way of not answering.  In truth, I had the opportunity to rethink RiGBY thanks to my work on SCREAMLAND.  And even though RiGBY will be staying a primarily digital comic, I still want to implement some of the new ideas into the existing comic.
To do this we'll be starting over at the beginning.  After reading SCREAMLAND on comiXology it became clear to me that the way we read comics on digital devices is purely anachronistic.  I'm not planning to completely reboot RiGBY, but I do want to reformat the original pages into what I think will provide a much better digital reading experience.

I'm also completely changing the way I work on the strip.  Originally I wrote each strip one-at-a-time as I was drawing it, mainly making up plot points and twists as I went along.  It was a necessary evil that allowed me to post comics on a (mostly) continuous basis, but prevented the comic from being about anything more than drawing dinosaurs and making Star Wars jokes.  So now I'm writing the entire first book, and will be posting not a page-at-a-time, but a chapter-at-a-time.  I know this will make for less frequent updates, but each update should be more substantial.  The first book currently weighs in around 200 pages, with about 10 chapters.  There are tentative plans for two books after that, but lets focus on getting this first one done.
 Bottom line: look for new RiGBY starting in February.