Dan Hipp and Craig Thompson pay respect to the late Maurice Sendak:
JH Williams III shows of the cover to Batwoman 12:
Peter David talks about Obama and the marriage act:
I’ve been saying for ages that I didn’t buy for a minute the notion that President Obama had any problems with gay marriage. Not for a moment did I think that a guy whose parents, less than half a century ago, would not have been allowed to marry in some states, would believe that legally keeping people apart who love each other was an acceptable way of doing things. But I think that he was concerned about the political backlash. Me, I think he should have said screw the backlash and just been honest. Then again, that’s easy for me to say, because I wouldn’t have had to worry about going all-in on my political ambitions with this issue. He probably felt he needed to save his political capital for health care, which we all know is rock solid steady and couldn’t possibly be overturned or set aside.
In any event, whether Joe Biden’s honest answer to the question was a trial balloon or simply forced Obama’s hand, it was obvious that his foot-dragging toward an inevitable “reversal” of his “evolving” opinion was going to have to happen sooner rather than later. Based on surveys, the GOP is (once again) on the wrong side of this issue, and the people who pointlessly hate the idea of gay marriage were likely not voting for Obama anyway.
Jeff Lemire shares some new art from 'The Underwater Welder':
Brian Wood shares a pic of his workbooks:
Jeff Smith received an letter from a nine year old - click the link to read his reply. here's the letter:
Check this out: A father sent this e-mail (through the company that made the documentary about me).
I answered it as honestly as I could. I thought I’d share…
Here is the letter:
Jeff,
My youngest son, Devan is 9 years old, and has been an admirer of your books for a while. He wrote a letter to you and didn’t know where to send it. So I told him I would find an email address and email you his letter.
As his parent, I feel he is too young to have an email address, so here it is.
Dear Jeff Smith,
I don’t mean to offend you, but I do not like it when you swear in your book “Bone” Back from Boneville.
I just want to tell you that I do not believe in swearing.
To tell you the truth, I love your “Bone” books because they are interesting and funny, but I do not like the book when it swears.
Once you are done reading this note, please remember to try and write back.
Devan.
Eric Canete posted a couple of great new pieces, including this one:
Brandon Graham shares some pages of his sketchbook:
Bryan Lee O'Malley answers some more fan questions:
Q. How long did it take you to create the art form that you wanted to use for the characters in comic? Did you fuss around a lot having many trial and error sessions before you got something you were pleased with or have you always drawn this way?
(AND)
Q. How did you find an art style you felt comfortable using? I’ve been having difficulty developing a style. I’m essentially just trying to find a style that feels natural to me. I just want to get to a point in my work where I don’t have to think too much about how I’m going to draw a leg, nose, etc. Do you have any advice? Thank you
A. hmm, i was just talking about this on twitter today. When i was a teen i copied other artists stuff, I spent some years drawing Anime Style, i got really obsessed with Paul Pope and tried to draw just like him (that’s when I started using a brush). Eventually all those influences and attempts to copy other artists piled on top of each other, and at a critical moment I ended up drawing a whole comic. 96 pages of Hopeless Savages comic for Oni Press. It was really really hard. But from the beginning of it to the end of it, I basically learned to draw for myself. I broke myself down as an artist and started over.
No matter how cool and stylish you think your art is, it’s going to be sucky and horrible and mutate a lot when you have to tell a whole story, drawing lots of stuff you don’t care about (houses, cars, trees) and new problems you never worried about before (drawing someone from behind, from above, drawing someone hugging someone else, kissing, touching, fighting, etc).
In general i think a lot of young artists use the “character design and style definition” period as a tool for procrastination. This period is undoubtedly important. But it has to end as soon as possible, because you have a story to tell.
In answer to the other person, you’re going to be thinking really hard about how to draw every leg, nose etc possibly forever, but at least for the first few years / 300-500 pages of comics. Drawing is a nightmare. Get comfortable with it by doing it. You can’t get perfect before you start.
Peter Nguyen draws Conan:
Dustin Weaver draws Bane on a dinosaur:
Mike Mignola and John Arcudi interview each other:
MM: After the first couple of Hellboy short stories ("The Wolves of Saint August" and "The Corpse"), I realized how many stories there might be about Hellboy's past, but I think things really started to take off with the second miniseries, Wake the Devil. I put a lot of new pieces on the board with that one—Roger, Hecate, and the Baba Yaga show up, Edward Grey is mentioned, and we get all that fun stuff with Zinco and the Nazis. Now it was clear this thing could go in a bunch of different directions, and there were suddenly a whole lot of characters that wanted to be fleshed out. At the same time I was starting to realize I didn't want this to be a team book—I wanted to deal with who Hellboy was and where he was going. I saw the potential for a whole lot of different stories, but since I was the only guy doing the book I just didn't know how much I'd actually be able to do. So I tried not to think about all that potential.
It all started to change when we did the B.P.R.D. spinoff book, and what started out as an experiment worked. When I wrote Plague of Frogs—that was like Wake the Devil—I introduced a lot of new stuff and gave the impression things were going somewhere. And then, really, when you came on board after that everything started to take off. I started to see just how big the story was, and that it might actually (with the help of a lot of really great artists) be possible to get that story into print. And with you firmly in charge of the ongoing story line, it's freed me up to focus on the history—that's what I've had the most fun with the last couple of years—creating these characters and events in the past and seeing how they relate to the ongoing story. Seeing things from the past, like the Heliopic Brotherhood (which started out as a joke), impact three or four different titles in a pretty organic way—that's pretty exciting to me.
Recently we finally came up with a couple of different ways to do stories set during World War II, and your Edward Grey book (Lost and Gone Forever) happened because you just wanted to write a western for John Severin—so is there some other period of history or some event that you've been wanting to write about that you might bring into the Hellboy universe?
JA: You know, there is one era that's always been on my radar, but I never thought about it in relation to the Hellboy universe until you just asked. The turn of the twentieth century! You got all kinds of things happening. The burgeoning automobile business, the birth of manned flight, and most importantly the invention of a ton of things that really made the twentieth century so, so different from the previous one thousand years. Light bulbs, motion pictures, phonographs, radio, and the people who developed them like Tesla and Edison. Bigger-than-life inventors who were also huge personalities in the press. The thing that strikes me about it most is that it was a time where magic and technology were overlapping in the public eye.
Phil Noto is drawing a bajillion variant covers at the moment, including this one:
Francesco Francavilla does Jaws:
Skottie Young daily sketches his thoughts on Liefeld's Lobo:
Rob Liefeld is a comic book cheerleader, played a huge role in my early days of reading comics and has always been a very vocal supporter of me as a professional creator. So my following post is meant in good fun.
A lot of people are up in arms about a lot of things in comics these days. There seems to be a new hot button topic every other day. My twitter feed reads like some sort of Sorkin episode. Everyone is talking so fast while a camera is sprinting behind them as they walk from room to room battling the finer points of who owns what, who screwed who, what company is more evil than the other, and so on and so on. I love Sorkin, but sometimes it just gets to be too much. Then I listen to a podcast with Rob...
... and I have decided that he must be stopped. (again, not really. Take it easy everyone)
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