Yesterday was the Minnesota Microcon, had a great time. Sold some books, sold some art, bought some comics. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon even though it was eighty degrees and sunny out. Anyway I’m posting an image of a character that I whipped up recently for a small project for the convention season. Not giving much away yet but here is The Death Mask. I see him as kind of a funky Avengers villain meets Skeletor from He-Man. I added the crossing bolts on him after seeing the car in Grindhouse. Thought that was pretty kick ass.

Brent

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Ah, the spoofing of monster truck, you can use it for anything. Weddings, funerals, comic conventions. This Sunday at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds will be the annual Microcon put on by the fine folks at Midwest Comic Book Association. This will be my third year attending and it’s a blast every year. It’s from 10am to 4pm. Six dollars to get in with a dollar off if you bring a canned food donation. I’ll be there with copies of Horrorwood, some other goodies, and doing commissions like always so please stop on by. Here’s some photos of the event last year.

Writer Brandon Terrell and myself looking at something that I’m sure was totally awesome off camera. Probably this guy who draws the band Kiss at all the local shows.

Inking a commissions piece for a guy who wanted a Bizzaro Green Lantern.

The final result.

Hope to see you all there!

Brent

I’ve decided I got too much art sitting around here so I’ve decided to give this new thing I’ve been hearing so much about a try. I think the kids are calling EBAY so if you are interested in some original art of mine, feel free to sit around for the next ten days and get it as cheap as possible.

Spider-Man pinup

Captain America pinup ( I received an email from a private buyer that I couldn’t pass up. So long Cap!)

Hellboy pinup

Iron Man pinup

Superman pinup

If this goes well I might put some original comic pages up, maybe some Horrorwood stuff, not too sure but I’m in a spring cleaning mode with my art right now.

Brent

Last Christmas I got The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy Dailies & Sundies 1931-9133 volume one. I’ve cracked it open here and there. Read Max Allan Collins introduction and most of his interview with Gould himself, but hadn’t gotten into the dailies until about a week ago. The presentation is outstanding and makes me really want to continue with the series. IDW took a good look at the collected Peanuts books that have come out previous (with much success) and made a great decision to keep the size and design of the Tracy book to look like a great companion piece.

I guess they will be doing the same to Terry and the Pirates soon as well. The quality of the books have been so good f they keep these up I’m going to be having to buy the complete Family Circus. Damn you Bill Keane!

I got into Dick Tracy like any young kid in the 90’s, with the Warren Beatty movie. Something I’ve never understood about comic movie craze we have now is why they don’t have someone selling comics outside theatres as impulse buys to people just leaving or going to the movie. When I left Dick Tracy as a kid they had the Kyle Baker mini series they did around the time of the movie available to buy right there. The following week I went to the comic store and bought as many Dick Tracy comics as my allowance could afford. Interesting note, growing up in a small town in Illinois I had a regular barber named Carl who used to also cut Chester Gould’s hair in the Woodstock Illinois area, the home of the Dick Tracy museum.

Here’s a head sketch of Dick Tracy I did the other day. I pumped out a few pulp character sketches a few weeks ago that I’ll be posting here in the coming days or weeks.

Brent

So I’ve been going through my computer the last day or so trying to find old projects that can be trashed. I need to start deleting stuff as our computer is getting pretty full. Looking through some stuff I came across some jobs that for whatever reason fell through. Happens sometimes, hopefully you don’t get too far into it before they decide to drop it. Most of the time it happens at what is called the comp stage. A comp is essentially a sketch, but usually with color thrown in. Why they don’t just say sketch who knows, maybe cause they usually pay more when they say comp over sketch. A comp is also usually a storyboard as well, but maybe not drawn as tight but both usually end up getting colored, but not always. Make sense?

Anyway here are some sketches, comps, or storyboards from jobs that never got finished.

Here’s is a sketch that was suppose to be for a college. It was for their Women’s studies program and I think they wanted to spice things up a little. They had me do a couple sketches of women out on the town, doing a DJ set, pouring drinks at a bar, and something else that really empowered women, probably cheer-leading. Anyway the project fell victim to deadline as whomever was in charge of deciding the final art couldn’t decide on a direction and eventually it became too late.

This project was for a fantasy roll playing company, they wanted a Flash Gordon like mechanic guy to star in this futuristic game about fixing up vehicles. I can’t remember much about this one other than President Bush was suppose to be in the game and that the project ended as the company went under.

Sorry for the bad scan here. This was done for a local design firm for a new restaurant at the Mall of America. It was from the creator of Rain Forest Cafe and it was suppose to be a giant dinosaur themed place. I think the project is still happening but the first one will not be at the Mall of America. These were fun and I wish I gotten to do more on it one but sadly when the project moved out of state the design firm had to cancel or delay the project.

Let’s call this guy Client X. Client X and I had worked together before. It went ok. It’s tough working for a place that doesn’t have an art director sometimes, as you end up guessing what they want as they have a harder time communicating what they like and what they don’t. Sometimes it works out great, sometimes it doesn’t. Sadly this one didn’t. This project was for a company that has a catalog and they wanted their main character to have comic panels running throughout the catalog. About 12 panels long. I had done this in the their previous catalog and now it was time to start again. I figured all the problems we had before would be solved as I had established the look of the main character previously and they had a sense of how things will end up seeing the last job we did. Well for whatever reason communication stopped. Take in consideration there was a designer working for a production company, working for the client, whom I never spoke to before and all the sudden it became a mess and I had a heck of a hard time talking to anyone that could give me a head’s up on the project. Finally I found out some of the client’s legal troubles one morning thanks to Wikipedia and instantly thought I’d never see my money. Thankfully I finally did and me and Client X will not be doing any future work together.

Brent

Ok, so I know it’s been a little less than two weeks, which means it’ll be on DVD in a month but I finally got to see the damn thing. I gotta say it was a pretty awesome movie going experience. The fake trailers were my favorite part.

I thought Death Proof was going to be the best film but I was way wrong, Planet Terror kicked it’s ass easily. Though the car was pretty sweet. I just thought Death Proof was a chance for Quentin Tarantino to show off his record collection.

I’ve heard that it’s tanking pretty bad at the box office but it’s hard to imagine people thinking that intentionally bad movies will be a huge success. Sad but true. I have to say though there was probably less than 25 people in the theatre but it was probably the loudest, most responsive crowd I’ve ever been in for a movie and not in that bad cell phone ringing, nobodies paying attention kind of way.

I think the movie did exactly what it should do and that’s make me wanna go find some of these older films that inspired Grindhouse and watch them, especially this one I found while looking for pics online…..

Here’s one of my own personal favorite characters ever, The Prowler.

This is a redesign of the original costume I did a while back. Here is the cover to his first appearance back in the sixties. Also a little info about him.

The Prowler was a new kind of character, and is yet another example of the brilliant imagination of the old Marvel team. Maybe he’s corny, maybe he’s silly, but for sure he was new and different. He was suggested by John Romita Jr., and the original story came from the steady scripting pencil of Stan Lee.

Hobie Brown was a young inventor, working as a window cleaner. In order to make window cleaning easier, he invented some special equipment, specifically…

1. Wrist and ankle bracelets which hold cartridges of cleaning fluid.
2. Steel Claws for climbing walls.
3. Special boots for climbing.