Pride Pugs 2015

Love conquers all.

And so do pugs.

It's amazing to see compassion, love and reason conquer bigotry, hate and fear.

The pugs agree.

Life Through a Cat's Eye Lens #3

Our sleep patterns are even more strange to them, rest assured.

Life Through a Cat's Eye Lens #2

It's all just a game to them.

Life Through a Cat's Eye Lens #1

     In celebration of the upcoming game in the next year, I decided I should get back into drawing and releasing comics on a regular basis to keep my pen sharp.  Let's call then warm up comics. It's been a while since I've done any kind of sequential art - so this should be fun!  Let's dive right back in.  I expect I will be rusty and clunky for a while, but it's high time to start putting more illustrations out there - even if they're questionable by my standards haha.

     This comic is about cats.  Specifically my cat.  Although my cat isn't actually orange, rest assured, this is a daily ritual that repeats on an endless loop throughout the weeks, months, and years.  Welcome to my world.

Abe Sapien Skanks

Abe is deep into the ska / crust punk scene.  He's so deep he's underwater.

Spiderman Joins Instagram

Spider-Duck lips, because if Peter Parker was a teen today he'd be snapping' selfies all over the place.

Far From Home 1 - 6

A comic I was dabbling with several years ago, trying new techniques and tools along the way --> I'll post the rest soon :)

 

Far From Home 7 - 12

Far From Home 13 - 18

Veggie Concepts : for my upcoming graphic novel

A few quick (and poorly colored) sketches, I was trying to suss out some potential shapes and faces of ... well, vegetables.

Nicholas Cage is hilarious, unintentionally.

I would even say he's one of the best unintentional comedic geniuses of our time.

- Cage Faces -

 

- Wicker Man Comics -

Disclaimer: These are actual scenes that happen in the movie, the dialogue and scripting is verbatim from the film and not written by me.

Catface / Dogface

Day(s) at the Dentist

Cosmic Waves - Silver Surfer Warm up

Silver Surfer meets Epoc - Caption:  "Wheeeeeeeeeeeee"

Grendel Prime

The Rare and Elusive Gotham Penguin

Samurai pg.1 teaser

Raphael Hopes

     As you can see I went a little more on the serious side for this one.  This was actually a two-day warm up, I did some quick line art yesterday and finished up the blacks and grays today.  I was going to do color but ... anyone who really knows the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles doesn't need colors to tell who Raphael is.  He was always the most real, and most tragic turtle, if that's possible... he was also the most human.
     My man (turtle) desperately wanted to be part of human society, in fact he wanted nothing more in life than to just fit in, and disappear into a crowd.  But he never could.  His underlying story arch (in my mind at least) always centered around this... he was the ultimate outcast- much  more so than other super heroes who could simply take off their disguise, or suppress their powers.  He spend his entire life fighting to protect humanity, with the simple hope that they, in return, would not attack and dissect him on sight.
     The first time I read Sin City I was actually reminded of the feeling I got from TMNT comics early on.  Heavy, heavy blacks, dark plot lines, defending a city that might not be worth defending, quite literally living in the gutter.  It's not easy being a Turtle.

     TMNT holds a very close, very special place in my heart- tucked up in the left atrium somewhere, I believe.  I had a very tender relationship with those four turtles, that rat, and that red haired lady for all of my young life.  Through a lucky quirk of fate and relations, I met and was in the company of Peter Laird a few times when I was a budding young doodler, at my extended family's home, in western MA.
      At that age however (I was seven or eight I think), I was far too bashful to speak to such a god-like figure, so I kept a deliberate distance from him.  He was friends with a family member of mine through one of his friends or relations, you know how these things end up... so after a slack-jawed introduction on my part, I simply observed him from a petrified distance.
     Still, at 7 or 8 even "knowing" someone from a shy several yards away was like standing next to some kind of unbelievable, forbidden magic.  This was the creator of the TURTLES- the thing behind the toys I played with every day, the cartoons I watched every Saturday (and taped religiously on VHS), the comics I secretly hid under my bed- this was THAT GUY. To my child-brain, the fact that I (by proxy and proximity) KNEW this man, made everything Ninja Turtles specifically MY THING.
     I made it a point of pride to know everything a young child, and TMNT enthusiast COULD know about the Turtles, at that point in time.  We're talking right around 1990-1993, just when the Turtle craze was at it's height - just PRE- Secret of the Ooze, or possibly just after the second feature film was released.  Meeting this Creator Man had already blown my young mind, so now the void left in that wake needed to be filled with knowledge about the Turtles, their world, and their history.  In turn, this became a big part of who I was, and who I hoped to be.
     Pre-internet remember, at least for me.  I never even heard of an internet until I was at least in double digits, so this was info you had to hunt down in the source material.
     Of course the Turtles changed a lot, quickly, in the years to come.  Now there is almost no trace left of the original, black and white comics, full of violence, dark humor and suggested cross-species attractions.  I'm not sure what the TMNT are now, I can only judge them and draw them by what I remember know in my little kid heart.

     Raphael is the best, no question.  All snark and sarcasm to cover up the giant hole inside himself - all the while jump kicking things in the face and wrecking house with two pointy metal sticks. Leo may have been leader in name, but Raph was the leader in attitude.  Cowabunga Dudes! Turtle Power!

Fune Kage Concept

The Lonely Samurai, an unfinished project with an old friend of mine.