Lucca Italy Comic Festival

In September I went to the Lucca Comic Fesitval in Italy and had a great time -- Super Spy was just published over the summer in Italian. One thing I've always done is try to come up with a different sketch every time I sign a book. But truthfully I end up cycling through 15 or 20 different sketches that I've come up with. But for this show I thought it would be fun to come up with a different sketch for every single book I signed. Well, it ended up being about 300 sketches over 3 days. Tons of fun. What I didn't realize until the second day was that my wife was taking pictures of the sketches as I was doing them. Didn't get photos of all of them but here's a sampling....

I'm really curious as to what other artists do at cons. To me, there's a strange kind of fun to work with ink in a book without penciling anything first and having that kind of "danger" of screwing up every time and still coming up with a drawing you haven't drawn before. It's as close to any kind of performance "improv" I'll ever get and I really enjoy it.

If you look closely, there are a few where I started doing 3 panel stories in the front of the book -- each different and written on the fly. I think I only did 3 or 4 of those -- the writing and drawing just took too long for people waiting to get their books so I went back to straight sketches.

SPX Next Weekend!

I'm getting ready for SPX 2009 this weekend. Should be a good show. I sold out of 3 Story last weekend at Windy City Con but should have a Twhole new stack of books for SPX so come by and check it out! I'll be doing commissions all weekend as well. And again, here are a few new commissions I did this week as well as a sketchbook commission from this weekend (The Flash).

3 Story is out, Revolver is in the can and being lettered by the awesome lettering dept. at Vertigo as I type this for a release this spring/summer. In addition, I'm currently plugging away on a fun 70s style Marvel comic with Cullen Bunn called "The Tooth" and laying out pages for the Super Spy sequel "Super Natural".

Thanks again to everyone that came by and talked to me in Chicago this weekend. What a great show!

Commission Time!

My new book 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man is out this week! Check it out please! Also if you want to get a signed copy you can order it directly from me at my newly redesigned website. Take a look! And thanks to everyone that ordered books and art from me -- it is much appreciated!

Got caught up on a TON of commissions this week. I put the finishing touches on my Vertigo book "Revolver"which including actually writing footer "scroll" text for the bottom of every page of the book that was specific to the action of that page and...also contained the page number in the same text. Hard at first but by page 100 I figure it out. There's actually a whole other book if you just read the text at the bottom. Really fun to work on. Here are all the commissions I finished this week! Going to Chicago this weekend for the Windy City Con -- come say 'hi' to me there!

Aquaman

This is a commission I did a few weeks ago -- maybe my daughter's favorite one I've done so far. Still plugging away on a few new projects and waiting for 3 Story to hit the store shelves on October 2. I'm also doing balloon layouts for Revolver right now which is a first. I've lettered all of my books until now so I'm excited to see how this one turns out. I think lettering is one of my weak points generally, so we'll see. Should be good! But I still snuck in a few hand lettered sound effects.

Super Spy Revisited

Here are some character sketches for a new Super Spy project that I'm working on. I'm also starting pencils on a new book called "The Tooth" that I'm doing with Cullen Bunn and Shawn Lee. I'll be posting more on that as I go along. It is going to start as a free on-line comic.

I have about three more commissions to get done this week and then I'm also going to start on the Super Spy sequel "Super Natural". It's written, I just need to start penciling that as well. As I type this I realize it's sounding more like my to-do list. Well, I guess it is. More art and info next week!

Giant Man Short Story

Here is the first of two Giant Man short stories I've done for Dark Horse Presents. They'll be collected later this year but for now you can read them free online HERE! And don't worry about spoilers for the graphic novel. These stories were designed to stand alone and they don't appear in the graphic novel at all so this is the only place to see 'em.

Vertigo Book Announced

The book I've been working on the last couple of months has finally been announce. "Revolver" is a new Vertigo original graphic novel -- 192 pages. It won't be out until spring but you can see a little preview and read a little about it from my editor here.

Also -- my next release 3 Story is going to be out on October 7th. And if you're in the St. Louis area make sure to come by the official book release party at Subterranean Books in U. City from 7-9pm. I'm going to have every page of the original art on display as well as sketchbooks and scripts and other fun stuff that ties into the book.

In the meantime, here are three recent commissions that I did at Heroes Con and San Diego...