New Mad magazine sneak peek...
Plus- fun commissions, all while breaking in a new drawing tablet. Never a dull moment!
You may not know this, but this is actually a pretty significant election year.
Don’t ask me specifics, but I’m sure if you Google it, you’ll find I’m not mistaken.
The reason I know this is because the special Politics 2024 themed issue of Mad will hit comic shop shelves and subscriber’s mailboxes on October 9, and as someone who considers himself thoroughly in-the-know as well as neck-deep-in-the-weeds, I simply connected the dots. (It’s a gift.) This is also the backbone of my motivating civic duty which compels me to spread the word about how this upcoming issue of Mad comes complete with 20+ pages of all new content, including one drawn by me! Also, that whole election year thing.
Since it’s way too far off in the future, I can’t share much from what I contributed to the new Mad, but here’s a snippet of some art anyway.
The first here is just a small section of the inks- ancillary people picking their noses=comic gold. I only just now caught that misspelling of DISTRICT. Great. No bother there, that’s behind a word balloon, so having words there at all was more for me to have the complete inked page. Though it’s going to bother me. Not enough to dig into the flat files to cross that T, mind you, but…
And here’s the same random section, with its digital color. Pretty straightforward stuff. It’s really hard to not zoom in with digital and render the hell out of these things. It takes a lot not to zoom in more and more, adding higher highlights and deeper shadows. Reeling it in is definitely an art in and of itself. There’s another section of this same piece I’ll write about later where I wasn’t as successful at doing this- a gag that is just a little too small on the page I spent a little too much time and effort on and kinda gets washed out in the printed version.
From the Commission Files…
Here’s a fun one I turned in last week- a corporate job for an internal recognition of some sort. This will eventually go on t-shirts I’m told.
The theme was to somehow make these six into a band. I offered that it should be something 80s looking (though I don’t think anyone pictured was alive in the 80s!), and they thought that was hilarious, so that was that.
This one had a usually tight deadline (for me)- I inked and colored in two days. I’m a slow inker, so for me that was pretty good. Either I’m getting faster, or I just didn’t wanna stay up late. Probably both.
Here’s the raw scan on inks on paper:
As always, if you’re interested in getting something like this for you or your company, you can either…
…or head over to my Commissions page for more info:
New Studio Toys Dept…
I posted a few weeks ago that my Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 sustained some nasty damage during some routine studio maintenance (read: I was not being careful when moving stuff around like a doofus). I think I created some new swear words that day.
Well, I’ve found a replacement in a relatively new company, Xencelabs (pronounced SENSE-labs), and their Cintiq competitor, the Pen Display 24, about as straightforward a name as you can get.