Once again I’ve been silent for a long time, with no posts to the website in awhile.

2021 didn’t exactly go to plan, and I wasn’t as productive in comics as I’d hoped going into it. Household stuff kind of took over for much of the year, and a massive house renovation that lasted 4 months had us crammed into about three rooms of the house with stuff and furniture that wouldn’t fit into the storage unit piled everywhere, with limited space to work and a lot of distractions.

I started getting back into the swing of things in September, first inking the majority of the last short story I need for the long planned anthology of my sci-fi and fantasy short stories. I’ve got a few more details left to figure out, including whether or not I use the existing cover for the much shorter existing digital version or do I draw a new one. I’m not quite ready to launch it yet, so I’ve got some time to figure things out, but hopefully it and another new/old short project will be out before my next convention appearances (still on hold for now).

I’ve also done a little bit of brainstorming and have started the outline and script to what may be my next Graphic Novel.

In other work, I was asked by my friend Michael Cohen to draw an alternate cover for the reissues of his 90’s series Strange Attractors. I was a big fan back in the day so I eagerly said yes. It was a lot of fun. I’ll post the coloured cover once it hits Previews. They are being published by It’s Alive Press.

I was also asked to ink Tom Fowler’s pencils on issues 3 and 4 of Refrigerator Full Of Heads from DC/Black Label/Hill House Comics. Isn’t that a mouthful! As usual it was a lot of fun working over Tom’s pencils. It’s pretty gorey stuff, but quite funny as well, and Tom is doing some of the best work of his career. It’s pretty amazing work and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series!

It’s hard to show my process, as I tend to build pages in stages, starting inking figures before all the elements have been drawn.

I took a snapshot of my progress every few hours, and I thought it would be fun to create a gallery of the steps so you could see a page build from my layouts to finished page.

In general, once the layout is tight enough, I ink the panel borders and do a first draft of the lettering before I start inking.

In the case of this page, I inked the main figures before starting to build the backgrounds, so pencils tighten up halfway through, and the first inset panel didn’t get tightened up in pencil until the rest of the page was inked and toned. If you look closely, you’ll see the size of the ship get scaled up about halfway through!

I’ve been working on this short story off and on since getting back to work after finishing up my run inking the Books Of Magic for DC/Black Label and it’s slowly starting to take shape.

It’s another older piece of sorts. 

Back in 2007 I was nominated for a Harvey Award for my work on The Chelation Kid (with Robert Tinnell) and made a last minute decision to attend the Baltimore Comic Con for the Awards ceremony. At the time I was inking the daily Mighty Motor Sapiens and producing a page a week of Wahoo Morris. I was looking for more comics work and wanted something a little more mainstream for my portfolio so I came up with this idea, did a bunch of rough thumbnail concept sketches, then managed to rough out three pages tightening up one before deadlines got to me.

The story sat without anymore work until many years later after I had switched to working digitally. At some point in time I scanned in the 3 pages and the thumbnails and cut them up into a 7 page Manga Studio file. 

It again sat untouched until 2018 when I finished up Wahoo Morris and started finishing up old pin-ups and then the 4 page Lady Of The Lake story. I imported the file into Clip Studio, then re-cut the sketches into a 12 page file, then had to drop it again as I started another year long run storyboarding.

I did pick away at tightening up the pencils on a few pages while whiling away time at conventions, and was intending to dive back into it when the storyboarding gig ended, but the the Books Of Magic inking gig fell into my lap and it got put on hold again. I did manage to solidify the layouts and letter the story (which also involved finally writing a script) during brief downtime this spring and summer. 

Anyway, I’m back to mostly working full time on my own comics for the time being, and I should be finishing this up in the next week or two. It’s taking a ridiculously long time, but I blame the penciller (Me) for leaving so much work for the inker to do.

Once it is done it will be the lead story in an expanded (48 pages) print version of my sci-fi anthology Vistas Unknown.

Here’s an overview of the work in progress.

Here’s some in-progress art!

I started this piece a few months back but it got put on hold while I worked on Books Of Magic.

I need a new convention banner, so this started out with that in mind but I expanded the canvas dimensions so it could do double duty as a print for the next Kickstarter campaign or an eventual cover.

With conventions on hold, the urgency of finishing disappeared so the piece is also on hold for the moment. I’ll finish it eventually, but I’ve got other things I want to get done first.

I’m not ready to show anything from the short story I’m inking right now so, here’s something to look at in the meantime!

My “refreshing” of the portfolio section of the website sent me down the OCD rabbit hole again, and a week later I have tweaked almost every page and filled in holes and fleshed out skeletons of pages that have been sitting unfinished since I designed this site in 2007.

I’m getting close to being done, but one thing that is endlessly frustrating me is the alignment of the site.

The theme I based it off of was a fixed width theme, which I kept, but like Wahoo Morris DotCom it floated in the center of the browser.

For some strange reason I wanted this site to fix to the left of the browser, but I’ve wanted to change it to a center floating design for a long time.

The problem is, I took a deep dive into css back in 2007 when I designed the theme, but I haven’t done anything other than some basic HTML code if I’m not satisfied with the layout options in WordPress, and I have no clue how I did it or how to reverse it. I’ve been able to get the site to move to right side of the browser, but nothing I do will get it to float in the center.

It is maddening.

I’m going to have to give up until I can get some help, because when it comes down to it, it really isn’t that important and I have better things to do.

Like draw some comics.

***EDIT*** And… a friend was able to help and it is now centered! Hopefully the fix will play nice with all the other elements of the theme.