I’ve never put together a dedicated inking portfolio.

Given that I started my comic career as an inker, and the majority of my work-for-hire comic book work has been as an inker, that might seem odd.

The truth is I never really pursued inking work. It was just offered to me when I showed my portfolio of fully inked art.

I’ve done my share of test and tryout pages at an editors request, but I’ve never attempted inking other artists work as an exercise or as portfolio pieces with the purpose of showing to land inking work.

I’ve been toying with changing that.

I got my hands on some scans of Nick Derington’s Doom Patrol pencils, and I must say, these pages were a lot of fun to work on.

Once I finished these up I started inking some Teen Titans pages by José Luis García-López that I found on the internet a while back. But, I lost steam as I realized I had pressing work on my own projects that needed doing.

I might return to those pages when I have some more downtime and see if I can’t put together a proper inking portfolio someday. In the meantime, this is a gallery of a few of the new samples, and a few pages of my published inking work.

The new Diamond Previews catalog came out yesterday with Wahoo Morris Book 2 listed for preorder and Book 1 offered again.

If you aren’t familiar with it, Previews is the product catalog for items available for order to any Comic Book Shop worldwide that carries North American comics.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Book 2 was a spotlight item on the order page and that it got a write up as a staff pick!

Very cool!

If you missed out on the Kickstarter (or wanted to avoid shipping charges) you can now preorder both books at your favorite Comic Shop with the order codes below.

I’ve been on a pin-up kick since finishing up and getting Wahoo Morris Book 2 printed.

The impetus started as an exercise in staying busy while sick with the flu, then it just became an exercise in fun while playing around with some styles I haven’t tackled in a while.

Continuing the theme of my last post, all of the pieces I have been working on have been finishing up earlier ideas and sketches.

The following three pin-ups (now finished) were all rough sketches that I was going to include as-is in my upcoming art book. While I was on the kick I figured why not finish them off.

Now that they are done I thought it might be interesting to show what the old pieces looked like before “finishing” them!

The Conan and John Carter sketches date back to 2010 when I was attempting to follow along with the ComicTwart sketch blog and was actively keeping a digital sketchbook.

The Tarzan/La of Opar piece was on the back of a location design from one of the animation studios I worked at in the early aughts, so it is the oldest unfinished idea I’ve used.

I have dozens of similar pin-up ‘ideas’ scribbled on layouts and in workbooks going back to the beginning of my career, so I could keep this process up for months, but I think it’s time to get back to some sequential story pages.

Whether I continue/finish any of the partially done stories in my archives, or start something brand new is a decision I’ll probably wait to make until Monday morning!

I went down a bit of a rabbit-hole lately, going through my stacks and stacks of old comic art and stories going back to my earliest months in High School. I was looking for stories and art to include in pdf anthologies I was putting together as bonus rewards for the Wahoo Morris Kickstarter.

One thing that struck me during the process was how prolific and full of ideas I was at a younger age. I would start multiple stories at the same time, finishing some, abandoning others.

The better I got, and the more ambitious I got, the greater the tendency to abandon a project and start over from scratch or move on.

Honestly, that didn’t change much as I turned pro, except that I’ve never had problems finishing if there is an outside influence, like a deadline or paycheck!

And I no longer start the same idea over from scratch again and again.

But my archives are full of half-done or briefly sketched out ideas for short stories and pin-ups I never quite got around to finishing.

Though, lately, I seem to have reversed my inclinations.

I’ve been stalled out on starting something new for ages. And the ideas just are not flowing.

But, after a slow startup, I seem to find it easy to finish off old loose ends.

I’ve been sick this week, and unable to concentrate through the fog and fever, I’ve tried to keep productive with some busy work.

I started by fleshing out my sketch for the back-cover portion of an intended wraparound cover to Sîan #1 and then picking away at the inks until it was completed. This one has been on the to-do list for awhile as one of my next to-be-published projects is a full-colour single issue of Sîan. Drawing a billion coins on the floor of a treasure vault was a little challenging while dizzy with a fever!

I then pulled out a sketch I had started as a potential cover to a planned pin-up/art book before changing my mind and abandoning it. I originally started drawing it last fall, so it’s not that old of a project, but it was based on a doodle I made on the back of a Katie & Orbie location design from around 15 years ago! I finished penciling it, then inked it, and will probably end up using it as the back cover to that proposed book.

Then, wanting to keep busy, I pulled out this abandoned pin-up I started over 10 years ago for an Edgar Rice Burroughs Fanzine a colleague was involved in at the time. It was of a scene from the novel the Cave Girl, and I was trying to do my best J. Allen St. John impersonation!

Deadlines got in the way and it sat unfinished until now.

I imported it into Clip Studio yesterday and inked it from scratch just for the hell of it. It really has no purpose, but it can replace the pencil and partially inked version that was going to go in the Art Book.

And to keep the momentum going, today, I pulled out 3 other old pin-up sketches and started fleshing them out as well as pulling out a 3 page story I started in 1997 that was supposed to be my first submission to Mythography but was abandoned when I couldn’t shoe-horn the plot into the allotted 3 pages. If I can flesh it out to 4 pages, then the planned anthology book of my Mythography and Forbidden Book stories will be a few pages longer.

And maybe, just maybe, getting a bunch of finished art done in a short period of time just might start to knock loose some of those mental blocks that are still getting in the way of the new ideas starting to flow again!

For a number of years I have jokingly referred to the tower of overstock books and comics in the basement as the “Mountain Of Broken Dreams”.

For a long time the dream of being a successful self publisher/comic creator seemed out of reach and the sheer volume of dead stock in the basement was a daily reminder.

Tuesday night, in anticipation of the new books arriving, I removed all the boxes from the pallet in the basement and reorganized and re-stacked them. I put the boxes of single comics to the side and lay down two solid layers of Wahoo Morris Book One boxes on the pallet and a single row on top near the back end. Then I re-stacked the dead-stock single comics as an end cap at the back in one teetering row with my 4 remaining boxes of the Free Comic Day Book easily accessible.

Today I filled in the space with three layers of Wahoo Morris Book 2 and put my active convention stock boxes on top. As is, I can access a good chunk of all the different books I’ll need without having to go digging. Previously all my Free Comic Book Day Books were on the very bottom of the stack! Very poor planning.

So, now the mountain needs a new name as it is no longer a “Mountain of Broken Dreams” and is instead a mountain of saleable books. It might take me a few years, but the only thing stopping me from whittling the pile down is my sales technique! Now there is only a teetering and towering “End-Cap of Broken Dreams”, but I’ll eventually use all those books as give-away teasers, so they’ll go too!

I now see a “Mountain of Possibilities”.

And I’m starting to plan the next layer!