Memory Lane: Comics

For Illustration Friday this week, I'm showing some "Memories" of mine.

I just launched my own Web Comic called Backyard Frontier. It's a 5 day a week comic about a boy and an alien and their adventures as they try to make sense out of this crazy world.

Have a look and let me know what you think! Hopefully the new stuff is better than this stuff that's 20 years old.

The following strips are all of the work I did on a comic strip I was trying to create in High School. It's called Caesar and it's based on our dog that we had at the time. This was in the late 80s so I guess that would explain all of the big hair. [You can click on them for a larger view]

Illustration Friday: Detach

For this week's Illustration Friday, I thought I'd show a bit of a project I'm working on.



This is a frame from the introductory strip for a web comic I'm working on, The comic strip is about a boy named Denny who has an alien named Ed land (crash) his ship in a tree in his backyard. This family-friendly comic strip is about their adventures as Ed learns about Denny's world.

How does this fit in with the Illustration Friday theme? Well, Ed is detached from his people? It'll be hard to detach the ship from the tree? Maybe you can fill it in for me?

I'm developing the web site right now, and you can peek at it if you'd like to at www.backyardfrontier.com. I'm planning on a launch date of 9/1/08 for their 6-day a week adventures.

I hope to see you around then!

Star Trek: The Experience

I recently went to Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas. Wow, that was really cool, and really brought out my inner geek.






Ok, so I'll admit that my inner geek isn't ever that far from the surface.

I've just heard that this attraction is scheduled to be closed in the fall. Bummer. I was really hoping to take my family there someday. It sounds like Paramount will likely try to find a new home for it somewhere. That would be nice.

Groundlings Review: Movie Review: The Incredible Hulk

Groundlings Review: Movie Review: The Incredible Hulk

If you have bears to hug, hug them now.

Here's my Illustration Friday entry for this week. I was in a meeting this morning and thinking about the theme for the week and this is what I came up with for the topic "Forgotten".



This is perhaps the saddest thing I've experienced with my kids growing up. I think I get more attached to their toys than they do. Whenever I see my daughter's favorite bear from when she was 3 lying around (she's now 8), I always have to pick him up and put him on his comfy spot on the bed. I think that Jessie the Cowgirl's song in Toy Story 2 really affected me.

I thought I'd also include the sketch from this morning. I tried to blacken the lines with my pencil before scanning it so I didn't have to redraw the lines in Illustrator. I kind of like the way it turned out so I may try to do it that way more often because it was much faster.

Illustration Friday: Baby

Here's my Illustration Friday entry for the week.

This entry needs a bit of explanation. We adopted our two children. When you fill out the paperwork to adopt, they have you check boxes as to what your preferences for children would be. You have to answer questions, not only about what race you'd be willing to adopt, but medical or emotional issues you'd be willing to deal with as well. Filling out the form is kind of difficult because it's important to be reasonable with what you'd be able to handle, but at the same time, you don't want to be insensitive and heck, anyone who had a natural born child could deal with many of those kinds of issues anyway.

This cartoon came out of that process and the desire not to check any preferences but to just let cards fall where they may. This time, though, things got a bit out of control...

Like, it's Luke.

This is one of those drawings where I just started by drawing a circle for his skull, and then let my wandering mind fill in the rest of the details while I was in the process of waiting for a Sunday meeting to start.

This also brings up something I've been dealing with lately. My daughters will often ask me to draw Spider-Man, or some other super hero or cartoon character they're following lately. But without any reference material in front of me, I tend to come up with something that usually looks fairly bad—in my opinion.

I've realized lately that I do have a definite style when I'm drawing my own characters, so why not just do those other characters in my style? I know this might seem like a no-brainer epiphany, but it sure made a light go off in my head.

So, here's Luke Skywalker watching the binary sunset from my own "certain point of view."