CulturePulp.

'The Un-Inventor' minicomic. Now on sale.

A new short story written by Erik Henriksen, penciled and lettered by yrs. truly, and inked and colored by Bill Mudron.

Henriksen's script tells the story of a chaser of patents who brutally simplifies his life with his newest creation. (And maybe also with drinking.)

12 pages, full color. $3 (plus shipping). For sale online here.

Also available in Portland at these fine brick-and-mortar retailers:

• Excalibur Books & Comics
• Floating World Comics
• Reading Frenzy
• Bridge City Comics
• Books with Pictures
• Cosmic Monkey Comics

 

Press release? Press release.

As posted on the Sequential Art Gallery website:

On Thursday, Oct. 6, Sequential Art Gallery + Studio will feature comics and illustrations by cartoonist Mike Russell — including the debut of a new short story written by Erik Henriksen and illustrated by Russell with frequent collaborator Bill Mudron.

“The Un-Inventor: Comics by Mike Russell + Industrial Blight & Tragic” will feature:

• “The Un-Inventor” — a new short story written by Erik Henriksen, penciled and lettered by Mike Russell and inked and colored by Bill Mudron. Henriksen’s script tells the story of a chaser of patents who brutally simplifies his life with his newest creation. Copies of the full-color, limited-run comic will be available for sale at the show.

• Wall-sized displays will also reveal the work that went into two of Russell’s non-fiction comics collaborations — including an episode of “CulturePulp,” Russell’s 2004-12 comic strip for The Oregonian, as well as a four-page memoir strip written by Sarah Sprague for Birth.Movies.Death magazine that recounts the month Sprague spent in line waiting for “The Phantom Menace” in L.A. in 1999. Each wall-sized display will reveal photo-reference and Russell and Mudron’s not-entirely-serious working method.

• Also on hand: one-off prints, collaborations, posters, covers and illustrations by “Industrial Blight & Tragic” — the joke “studio” name Russell and Mudron have used when working on comics together over the past decade, occasionally bringing in additional collaborators including local comics artist Adrian Wallace.

• The show will also feature original pages from Russell’s webcomic “The Sabertooth Vampire.”

For more information on the show, visit sequentialartgallery.com or facebook.com/sequentialartgallery.

ABOUT MIKE RUSSELL

Mike Russell is a writer and cartoonist living in Portland. His comics projects (many of them collaborations) include “The Sabertooth Vampire,” “The Uninventor” “CulturePulp,” “Mr. Do & Mr. Don’t,” “Opera, Drawn Quickly,” “Jaxxon’s 11,” “Augie, The Littlest Reaver,” “Serenity Tales,” “Santa’s Lil’ Gimp,” “Take My Love,” and several educational comics (most recently “Clusters and Your Economy: An Illustrated Introduction.”) He’s also created beer labels, an album cover and a comics-convention identity system.

His writing, interviews and/or comics have appeared in Dark Horse Presents, The Oregonian, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Willamette Week, The Portland Mercury, In Focus Magazine, The DVD Journal, Bookslut, and other publications.

You can find his work at CulturePulp.com and SabertoothVampire.com.

[UPDATE 10-6-2016] Thank you to Stuart Tomlinson of KATU News for visiting with artist Mike Russell and curator Kaebel Hashitani at Sequential Art Gallery in the week leading up to the opening reception! You can watch the video and read their summary of the show over here: Cartoonist Mike Russell’s First Thursday gallery show is a collaborative effort.

Opening-night photos and promo stills from the show can be found here.

Tabling at Rose City.

I'm a guest at Rose City Comic Con this weekend (Sept. 19-20), in Booth 813 with my Periscope Studio-mates. (The show floor map is here.) I'll have the following merch on hand:

• Sabertooth Vampire t-shirts, in men's and women's sizes ($15).
• Brand-new editions of the first two "Sabertooth Vampire" minicomics ($4 for Vol. 1, $6 for Vol. 2).
• Sabertooth Vampire die-cut reusable fabric stickers ($3 each) -- I picked up a few prototypes of this when I bought my new booth banner last week. They're crazy-durable -- you can wad them up in your fist and unfold them with no ill effects.
• "Pete and Brucilla" and double-sided "Super Cosplay Dance Party" prints, with custom envelopes ($5 each).
• "Sabertooth Vampire vs. Barista" postcards, made in collaboration with my friends at Barista (free!).

Also, barring some sort of con wifi disaster, which never ever happens, I'm now set up to accept card payments.

Can't make the show? Most of this stuff is available now on my online store.

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.

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 ]

'The Best Film You've Never Seen' and 'Deep Red' at the Hollywood, Oct. 15.

On Tuesday, Oct. 15, I’ll be talking with Robert K. Elder about his new book "The Best Film You’ve Never Seen: 35 Directors Champion the Forgotten or Critically Savaged Movies They Love" before the Hollywood Theatre’s screening of Dario Argento’s "Deep Red." Details/tickets here.

 

New in the store: prints. New at the Rose City Comic Con: me

So I just added "Pete & Brucilla" and "Super Cosplay Dance Party" prints to my online store. They’re printed old-school on thick paper on a press , fit nicely in a record-album frame, and look great in a kid’s room. They also come in a custom envelope while supplies last. And I totally priced them to move at $10 a pop.

I'll also have these for sale at the Rose City Comic Con on Sept. 21-22. Come on by; I'll sketch you something.

• "Pete & Brucilla" 12x12 print
• "Super Cosplay Dance Party" double-sided 12x12 print
• CulturePulp: The Store (culturepulp.bigcartel.com)

Oh, hey, in comic-book stores today

This 2004 CulturePulp comic turns up in the back of David Chelsea's new book Everybody Gets It Wrong! (And Other Stories) -- which collects his stunning 24-hour comics.

(I watched him make one of those 24-hour comics. He used perspective grids and finished three-and-a-half hours early. His discipline was jaw-dropping and sort of humiliating.)

David's book is available via your local comic shop, Amazon and TFAW.