A Mid-Autumn Night's Dream

My new short comic "A Mid-Autumn Night's Dream" is up at Act-i-Vate Comix: the online comics collective where you can check out many independent comics. I'm very excited to be part of this website, and will be uploading new comics the 15th of every month starting today! Here's a sneak peek at one of the pages. This is a 5 page self contained story about a lost man in the enchanted forest.

You can read the web comic format at http://activatecomix.com. It's currently the first one on the front page. You can also view the full page version of this comics at my deviantart site.

Sword

I've been away. Now I'm back.

Sailor Pen again

Warm up with Sailor Pen...

Costume test

A costume test idea for the new Lilly story. I'm getting to it, but there are so many other things happening that I've found it hard to get into the regular rhythm required to sneak an extra page out a week. Bear with me.

Woman with a canonical hat

In an effort to assuage Tim's depraved conical hat fetish. Here's a woman with a conical hat.

Remember when we used to post conical hat women?

Water colorings

Blacks and white warm ups...

Black Panther & Storm

So I'm doing another drawing for the Women of Wonder Day Charity event . We at the studio have been doing this for some years now and some of them have been posted here , here , here , hereish & here ( there are a bunch more )
So I was asked if I would draw Storm & Black Panther this year ( Marvel Universe characters created by Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby respectively ). Apparently the 2 of them are married now, which makes sense as they are both African nobility and they presumably have a lot in common. These 2 are probably the most well known African characters ( as distinct from African-American ) in mainstream comics and as such I'm quite fond of them both. Africa tends to get a pretty raw deal in the popular media, which is something I'm sensitive about as I lived in East Africa for 7 years.
One of the most interesting , and under-appreciated things, about Africa is its sheer size and diversity. In terms of human biodiversity alone I have a closer genetic relation to Emperor Akihito than Djimon Hounsou has to Nelson Mandela. So in this instance I've decided to make the 2 characters quite racially distinct from each other as if they came from 2 very diverse corners of the continent ( and Storm is half American .) Storm's Mum is from one of the northern tribes of Kenya I'm assuming , so right up near the Somali border where the people are quite tall and fine boned lets say. T'Challa I've always assumed was a west African king which would make Wakanda somewhere near Benin or Togo possibly. People over there tend to be broader, with strong features, something you can see in the African American people you see on the streets of New York today. Their ancestors were probably kidnapped from West Africa during the slave trade so that makes sense.
Anyway I wanted to do a smaller more intimate moment between two characters who love each other rather than some thundering scene of impending violence. 'Cos that's how I roll .
This is a work in progress......

UPDATE: I swapped it out for a more finished version.

Back from Vacation

Trying to warm up:

Finding a character

I'm working on a lot of pitches at the moment. I'm trying to use actors to give me an 'in' with drawing a certain character. So in this case I opted for Ashley Judd. I'm not saying that the final character will look like Ms. Judd, just that she will be informed by her. Characters tend to be very mutable at the beginning and arrive at their ideal shape with a bit more drawing.

I'm constantly fighting myself to make hair bigger I find. Even if I add more, it's never quite enough.

Not warm ups....

...but I haven't posted here lately so...

Sergio Toppi R.I.P

In memory of the great Sergio Toppi who passed away this week. Thank you for all those beautiful lines Maestro.
Now would someone get all his books back into print ASAP. Thanks.

Warm up face