CulturePulp.

Mr. Don't, Relay Mascot

Just finished the back of this year's Hood to Coast team t-shirt. It is also a comic strip about what you can expect from your H2C experience, starring our old friend Mr. Don't. 

Drawings for food and drink.

Good Lord, I haven't posted here since March. Still working on the aforementioned long-term projects. Anyway. In the meantime, made a few drawings for some local food-and-beverage folks.

1. Drew a postcard for my friends at Barista featuring the Sabertooth Vampire as coffee pitchman.

2. You can now buy bottles of Sasquatch Brewing's excellent Red Electric IRA -- label art by yrs. truly, colored by Bill -- at Sasquatch and at specialty beer joints like Belmont Station and the Imperial Bottle Shop & Taproom. I drew four more labels for Sasquatch -- I'm told they'll roll out over time.

3. Had occasion to revisit the punch-drunk Big-Ass Sandwiches mascot, which I first drew for their sticker a few years back. I really enjoy drawing him/her/it engaged in various acts of rage, disapproval and exhaustion. You may see some of these sketches turn up at their new brick-and-mortar location.

 4. And finally: Here's a slice reading a comic book, drawn for Hot Lips Pizza's "Free Comic Book Day" promotion.

State of the Union

Catching up as we lurch into 2015:

• Obviously, I've taken an extended hiatus from writing/talking about movies. On a related note...

• ... I recently joined Periscope Studio, where I've been quietly working on a few comics projects for the past several months. One project is "Sabertooth Vampire" Season 3. Two of the other projects are secret.

• I wrote about my strange relationship with a single copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle for the Uprise Books blog.

• On the final episode of "Welcome to that Whole Thing," I interviewed Cort and Bobby about the end of their 10-year podcasting partnership.

• I made some Lady Killer fan-art.

• I joined Joe Cortright and Adrian Wallace on KBOO's "Words & Pictures" to talk about our educational comic, Clusters and Your Economy.

• Despite my "Live Wire!"-professed ambivalence about all things "Star Wars" nowadays, Bill Mudron keeps having me on his podcast to talk about it.

That's it. More soon.

Lady Killer

Drew some fan-art for Joëlle Jones and Jamie S. Rich's upcoming comic Lady Killer. Colors by Bill Mudron (in hues I can only describe as "Mid-Century Mayhem"). Click to enlarge.

I've read a preview of the first issue and watched Joëlle draw pages at her Periscope desk for months, and I think this is going to be a really special book. Joëlle has found the perfect container for her obsessions with bloody mayhem, retro design, vintage advertising and, weirdly, "101 Dalmations"-era Disney animators. You'll see what I mean in January.

• 'Lady Killer comic book' Tumblr
• Dark Horse Comics blog post on Lady Killer
• Dark Horse info page on Lady Killer #1

 

Happy 40th, Excalibur.

Just finished this poster to promote the 40th birthday of Portland's iconic Excalibur Books & Comics. Pencils and inks by me, colors by Bill Mudron. Click to enlarge.

The crowd scene contains several comics characters (Shang-Chi, Doctor Strange, and Power Man and Iron Fist) specifically requested by Excalibur co-owner Debbie Fagnant. Bill also gave all the color an old-school newsprint dot-screen effect. It should really pop on the 11x17 poster. I hear the store is printing 100 or so.

Excalibur's press release on their month-long birthday celebration after the jump.

Pope, Garfield

Oh, and Ryan also asked me to imagine how Paul Pope would draw Garfield. This was the best I could manage on short notice.

(For all your Paul Pope Tumblr needs, by all means visit destroycomics )

Self-portrait. ECCC announcement.

Self-portrait. Also, an announcement.

It turns out I’ll be tabling at Emerald City Comicon March 28-30, thanks to an opening in the Periscope Studio booth (#1214) that they were very kind to offer me. Here's a map of the show floor.

As far as merch goes, I’ll have two prints that come in lovely custom envelopes, an educational comic I scripted, and my last 15 or so copies of "Sabertooth Vampire" Vol. 1. I'll also have a new sketch-card. Hope to see you there.

We made a comic about businesses and places.

My favorite panel from the comic: Adrian capturing the major components of California's wine industry in a single drawing.

A couple of years ago, economist Joe Cortright sent me an email with the subject head "Almost Random Inquiry from an economist." In it, he threw down a comics-making challenge.

Joe's an expert in the study of "industry clusters" -- as he described it in the email:

[Cluster theory is] basically the notion that businesses flourish and ideas happen faster and better in places where there's a geographic concentration of people and businesses interested in and doing the same kind of things -- think Hollywood for movies, or Detroit (once upon a time) for cars, and Wall Street for inventing diabolical and opaque ways of defrauding people and destroying the economy.... We're exploring alternative ideas for trying to communicate clusters in a simplified, non-technical way....  One idea we want to explore is some kind of graphic treatment, not unlike the narratives you do in CulturePulp.

So yeah, flash forward, and I spent a good chunk of last year working on an educational comic about economic theory.

Clusters and Your Economy: An Illustrated Introduction provides a quick 28-page overview of why industries tend to group in specific places -- finance in London, winemaking in California, Portland's "Silicon Forest" and coffee-roasting scene, high-end sports cars in Italy's "Motor Valley," and so on.

Boiling these ideas down into simple comics panels was a serious ability-stretch. I scripted, thumbnailed and lettered, in collaboration with Joe and Lotte Langkilde. Adrian J. Wallace did some of the best work of his career on the art. Bill Mudron provided colors.

Anyway. The comic is now for sale on Amazon.  It also has an info page  at ClusterComic.com. I'm really pleased with how this one turned out.

If you're a media outlet and you want a review copy, drop me a line.
________

Clusters and Your Economy: An Illustrated Introduction
[ info page ] [ Amazon page ]

'Serenity Tales': Now on Tumblr

(Above: Mal and Zoe by Bill Mudron.)

Way back in 2006, Bill Mudron and I founded "Serenity Tales," a site hosting “Firefly” fan-comics. For a couple of years, we updated it with stories set in the ‘Verse, written and drawn by friends and fans.

Given all the recent announcements about Dark Horse’s new “Serenity” comics, this seems like a great time to re-post the “Serenity Tales” archive to Tumblr in installments. It starts today, with Bill Mudron’s "The Black":

• Serenity Tales: The Black [ Part 1 ] [ Part 2 ] [ Part 3 ] [ PDF ]
• Serenity Tales on Tumblr

To Be Or Not To Be, Bub

In which I draw "The Wolverine."