Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Which Science Fiction writer am I?

I am:
Samuel R. "Chip" Delany
Few have had such broad commercial success with aggressively experimental prose techniques.


Which science fiction writer are you?

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Thinking of You

I saw the "Thinking of You" Video by Nora Jones on the NY Times website and it makes use of the comic innovation of the thought balloon as it's motif. An innovation that has been sadly abandonned by the two large comic book companies. You wouldn't want to enter into creating something without having at least a few of the tools available taken away from you, I always say. And clearly a concept that is embraced by other creative mediums must be abandonned by Comic book creators, right? Wouldn't want to use something that's ubiquitous to the populace's imagination.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Can't wait for that Spider-Man 3 movie-

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Awesome

Birthday Suprise

I just found out that I share my birthday with Wendy O. Williams, Rudy Guilliani, John Fogerty, Kylie Minogue and Sondra Locke. A weird crowd, most of us flawed in major, major ways.

Monday, January 15, 2007

GUTS!

I arranged the story so you can just scroll down and read it. All the pictures can be clicked on to get a bigger version. written by Myself and Mike Leung





























Friday, January 12, 2007

Sersi!


I did a painting of Sersi once; long ago, in an effort to get a gig painting a few trading cards of Marvel characters. It never panned out as far as work goes, but it was a fun thing to paint, and it's one of the few things I've drawn in color.

7th Portal Holiday stuff!

During the tail end of Stan Lee Media's days I did a few drawings to update the front page of the website. I thought, for an internet company, the website should be updated at least once a day, if not once a week and I took it upon myself to draw holiday themed drawings for the front page. They were fun.



The Hallow'een version had all the villians.



I stayed with the villians for the Thanksgiving shot.



And I went to the heroes for the Christmas shot.

Drawing of Thor


Done for a Marvel Licensing book. I'm sure it's lost to the four winds now, since Marvel abandoned hundreds of thousands of dollars of licensing artwork in the early 2000's. If I remember right the department had me copy the pose from something John Romita Jr. did.

Kotld


A fun character study for what would have been a new character in the second issue of SK8. Someday.
I remember doing this drawing in a Starbucks on Prince Street and Broadway. They had a table where you could sit, and the apartmetn I was living in at the time was so small.

Bats 15 minute sketch

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Two Face!


Back before I used quills I used to do nearly everything with a brush and a rapidiograph. The new stuff I'm inking for Marvel is with 100% Pigma Microns.

Animals/Spaceman


Sunday, January 07, 2007

Ka-Zar


Ah, Ka-Zar.
Again, you can click on any of the artworks here and get a larger picture.
I love drawing dinosaurs, I was obsessed with them as a child - I read everything about them that I could get my hands on - history books, picture books, I knew all the epochs, all the separate ages with different dinosaurs, knew enough to keep a T-Rex out of any story with a Brachiosaur (different time periods, locations) and was really happy with everything I knew about them -until we visited the Natural History Museum in New York and I realized that they were REAL. I flipped out for years, nightmares, night sweats, the whole bit.

I can see a little bit of the same behaviour in Violet - she's always loved to play "monster" and goes "rrrahr!" and runs about, and the other week she wouldn't go into the dark hallway, said she was scared of the monsters. I went down the hallway and turned on the lights and shooed them all away, but I was still struck by how quickly it changed for her -the whole concept of monsters. She wasn't afraid of the dark before, but now she is sometimes. I wonder if it's a sudden acquisition of imagination kicking into gear, or if it's preschool. The kids play "monster" and chase each other around. Maybe it's the addition of the chase, and a chase with other kids, that makes it real for her, I don't know. The kids play Batman and Spider-Man and Superman too, and Violet has somehow gotten Batman and Superman mixed up. I'm thinking the other kids taught her that one too, because when we go to the Comic Shop she points to Batman and says "Superman" and vice versa. I can't get her to change it, so I usually give up.

Another Jet Pack Pets Update


The first trade paperback of the Jet Pack Pets is still available from Amazon, and we're getting closer to another, I think. I did a rough count and there are around 100 pages of material for the second trade - I think we'll need about 130 or so, so perhaps at the end of the year we'll have enough to warrant a second trade by '08.

Comedy Central!


I did these pieces for Comedy Central - I don't know 100% what they were for - I think it was for a tour T-Shirt and poster of comdians called "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", with Dave Attel being the "Ugly" and Lewis Black being the "Bad". I heard that everyone fell about the place when they got a look at Dave Attel's portrait - in the words of the guy who commissioned the peices -"You really f@*$ed him up!" I used to have a hat like the one I drew for Lewis Black waaay back in high school. Yes, I used to wear cowboyish hats and felt 40's hats and all-star chuck hightop sneakers and tie-dyes with a brown trench coat and Watchmen buttons. I would have worn skinny ties too if I'd had any collar shirts.
I'd love to draw more stuff like this, but there isn't much call for cowboy stuff in the U.S. comic book market right now. Anyway, I think the best western stories done in comic book form in the last 25 years were probably the Blueberry Series - and that was done by the French. I loved how tied into historical events it was - very much a precurser to Deadwood, which I just absolutely adored - I thought the first 16 or 17 episodes of that show were spectacular.

I don't draw like this anymore part 2



More art in a way that I don't draw anymore.

I don't draw like this anymore


This is a drawing I did when I was in college in New York. We were sort of encouraged to draw like this - very fast, very rough. I certainly still like this drawing, although I don't draw like this anymore; I'm not sure I was being 100% honest with myself when I was drawing like this when I was 21 - it was more in the style of my illustration teacher, John Ruggeri.

Part of my discomfort with this style of drawing may have been with John's avid resistance to the idea of comic books as an artistic feild worth pursuing. Since I was a child I was always just a little bit early to the idea that there was real art to be found in comics, real artistic merit, and most people around me thought of comics as trash. I guess that's changed somewhat. Certainly since the Spider-Man movies made a killing, it's raised comic creator's profiles just enough that we can be seen as something more than horridly stunted adults. Why, some of them are even writing everyone's favorite TV shows...

I think I drew like this at the time because I wanted to be accepted, and I drew like this because I was a very quick study. I think I've suffered a little bit from not being able to nail down a style. I guess I reject having a particular lense to interpret the world through, and know that having a particular style can be a terribly limiting crutch. I don't know if it's that conscious, I guess I just don't like to be locked in - I think that's why I liked inking over Stuart immonen - I understood he wanted to push his work in a different direction and I went along gladly - it felt like it was such a release from the commonly accepted way of inking.

Years after I left college, I bumped into John Ruggeri on the street and we got to talking - he had hated comic books when I was in his class, but explained that John Paul Leon had softened him on the idea of real illustrators working in the comic field. I had recognized Ruggeri's style in John Paul's work immediately when he arrived on the scene and understood that John Paul had identified a way to work Ruggeri's style into comic books in a way that I didn't see was possible before. John had constantly tried to steer me away from comic book as a field of endeavor when he was my teacher, and I wondered if his conversion was based on having a student who adopted his style and then used it successfully in comics in a way that John could understand. I don't know - maybe I'm being over simplistic or cranky in some way toward my art school training, but I remember being upset that John had resisted my addiction to the field, but succumbed to the same point of view when it was presented by a very capable, and clearly enthusiastic, accolyte.

Self Portraiture!


This is a self portrait I did of myself at Stan Lee Media. It was intended to go up on their website as an introduction to all of their artists, along with a little bio. It was my self-written bio that halted production for a few days and begat the writing staff's participation in writing the biographies from then on. I think I had written something like "Scott Koblish's head was abducted from a vaugely uncomfortable life in New York City and taken to a far away planet where it was implanted into the plexus of a robotic body. As an emisarry for Stan Lee Media he was trained to kill, kill, kill, and has slaughtered his way across the stars in a doomed effort to regain his humanity and reunite his head with his body." I don't know why they didn't want to publish that one, I thought it was at least metaphorically acurate.
I later used this picture to try and get a date online. I didn't have a camera or a photograph of myself and I sent this picture. She didn't react well to the image - I think it went along the lines of "I will not play games with this, do not contact me again" or somesuch. Ah, yes, the world of dating.

SK8!


Here's the shot for the cover of the second issue of SK8, a second issue that will sadly never come out. I always liked the image, and had really looked forward to drawing the fight between Sk8 and Pennance, but I just don't have the time or the money to throw at a second issue. I still have copies of the first issue clogging up my studio, and my first attempt at selling the book was heartrendingly difficult. It was a fun book and hopefully someday it will find a second life somewhere. It taught me a lot about telling a story and setting up shots, and finding my voice artisitically - I think it may have even helped me land my job at StanLeeMedia. Perhaps I'll publish the full book here on the blog, maybe panel by panel. I think I have some stuff that has even been colored and never seen (since the book was published in black and white). I'll give it some thought, although i don't like the set up that a blog offers sequential art - reading from the bottom up can be rather frustrating, since scrolling down past teh whole story reveals the whole darn thing at a glance... It'd be nice to see it have a life somewhere, I'll talk to Matt the writer about it-