Puppets: A Graphic Novel

Cement crosses the Mittman Street Bridge. Inks are fun. I'm trying to get more of the central pieces of art, which have a lot of expressive action in them, inked after the first coloring phase which is a twist in my process which usually goes from pencil to ink to color. This time the process is pencil to color and back to inks. There's another color pass comin' as well. Ratso is kinda psyched about stuff. Rat stuff. Currently, I'm inking digitally over 120+ pencils. I'm finding a few tight little compositions like these, including the silhouetted hero shot for the graphic novel and animation. Yep, I did say 120+ panels. That's about 17 pages. ART FYI: Adobe Illustrator accepts Photoshop PSD Layers when the PSD is imported with the "individual objects" setting checked in AI. PSD Layers for color/detail/lighting can be sent from PS into AI while keeping a sharp vector line. My vectors/inks AND the PSD are saved in two docs: INKS.ai (illus...

Miette is the main character Puppets and always in some kind of bad trouble. These raw colors are a few steps removed from finalized panels but hey, buddies, they contain the art basics. Above, Miette is getting swarmed by giant sewer rats, the rabid followers of Ratso The Rat Man. This charming fella is Ratso the main baddie from Puppets. Adding hordes of small rats and having them move in a massive wave is admittedly pretty fun. Ratso rides along like Ice Man as the rat wave moves beneath his feet like a mobile escalator. I'm having a lot of fun with Ratso and his pals. Copy code to add Puppets to your site: Copy code to add Roaches to your site:

The Blob, merrily eating it's way through Midtown Central City. Cement is surprised by another monster, the massive Blob. The Blob busily dissolves people and buildings then is confronted by the ARC equipped military forces. It/they are smashed up into smaller parts by Cement. The scene features Cement, Miette and ARC troopers and the Blob. There's two principles (Miette, Cement) plus 1 Kaiju (Blob) plus misc. ARC soldiers (7-12 of them firing ARC's) and tanks (3-4) to animate here. That's a total of like 14-19 plates spinning around at once, minus the flames and smoke! In the script, the Blob bellows when hit by small arms fire or by Cement - like a heavy bass meant to rock small film fest theaters. Each time one of the blobs are hit they sound off as a herd with the bass's pitch and volume relative to the size of each blob. The "central" and largest "main" blob would always be the deepest sounding bass with the smaller blobs sounding dif...

Early production art from Puppets with Cement and Miette. Early production art for Puppets blocking out the basics of form, grayscale tone and scale. Cement is 6 stories/65 feet tall and Miette is barely 4 feet tall so getting them into the same shot/frame was one of the first challenges. Reviewing Godzilla, King Kong and Gamera movies (which I somehow have all of which on VHS and VCD) saved me a great deal of time. Looking at the composition of the screaming crowds or Faye Wray and Naomi Watts has helped me structure my shots and lay out. On the Mittman Street Bridge Cement faces off against Ratso and his horde. Looking at my own unlikely combination of very large and very small characters make me feel like there is a unique "middle ground" created by this combination as if the two would be radically different w/out each other's company. Miette alone would be an vague, indie Ghost World rip-off. Cement alone would be a Concrete/Godzilla clone. Together they ar...

Great Caesar's Ghost, man - this sketch is 1 years old! Working from pages of some seriously scrubby lookin' pencils I've managed to sketch out a few key scenes in the graphic novel. These scenes revolve around a giant named Cement and a little girl named Miette as they stomp downtown area into rubble. This book started a big pile of rats and kaiju. The characters are all sketched out. Also, is it uncool to say "mon" a lot? I mean, if I am a white, middle-class cartoonist from Indiana? No? Ok, then. Fasten them selt-belts, pards. It's on like Cheech Marin said. Bad-ass galore and a inverse mohawk. Some fella, hear tell. "Mondo" bizarro. Internet viewing audience. Copy code to add Puppets to your site: Copy code to add Roaches to your site:

Self-portraiture is like looking in a mirror covered in grease. It can be hard to make out anything clearly. Here's a few of my sketches of a cross-section of the people from the old neighborhood. Two blocks down from where I lived I used to sit and read outside this run down little laundry-mat. There were always bums demanding smokes and packs of screaming kids running in and out of there. Kafka and Tide packets were a welcome distraction. Sometimes you find old friends in new places. Justin was one of them. My friend Justin is a real fixture in the neighborhood. He is something of an urban legend in his own right for surviving being a chauffeur for blues and rock acts for 20 years - he is also known to wield a mean punchline. Clearly intractably adorable. I have no idea why she gave me the time of day. Above, Girl #1 that I was sick deep infatuated with. She reminded me of an Elliot Smith song from New Moon. "You're so pretty and smart, So why do you ...