Ectoplasmic Color!!!

Here's our pal Johann Kraus in all of his gorgeous color.

Enjoy,
Mk

How to spend your Saturday evening

Here in the North country we spend it with family and good friends. G. Mike Dobbs has released his second book of the year, this one, a pictography of Springfield, MA utilizing his vast postcard collection of the area. It's a beautiful book with some amazing images. My favorite of course was the postcard depicting the monkey that burned down Springfield's City Hall. It's a true story, it's actually been published so of course it's real. Mike and his lovely wife Mary invited us over for a hearty cookout which also included Mike's mother Sue, Mary's sister Jo and family and also the likes of our Northern bretheren Mark (not the race car driver) Martin and Steve Bissette. They were accompanied by their wives Marge and Jeannie. The evening was filled with laughter, odd stories and wild accusations about Thomas Kincaid, Painter of Light ™. A good time was had by all, including Lucky the Wonder Bischon.

Woof!
Mk

Pencils awaiting ink

Here's one of the first pieces I did to get used to The Thing and Ulik. I'm not happy with the Troll Princess. I think she should be a little more Troll like but still come across as femine, but the writer wanted be to beautify her. I worked on another piece that you can see below with HellBoy and a different troll where I made the Troll Princess a little more attractive.

You decide!
Mk

Ben Grimm is tough to draw

That's all I've got to say about it. I worked up a third piece based on Bob Smith's Thing/Ulik proposal and I like how it turned out. I'll probably ink it over the next day or so. Tonight I'm off to see The Dark Knight (finally).



Enjoy,
Mk

Ecto and Sunny in Ink

Finished up inking the SunLord piece and I cruised through inking the Ectoplasmic Man piece. I love both of them and they are both good examples of my design style and how I approach different characters with a different style.




Cheers!

The Ectoplasmic Man goes to China

We've all read the history of Johann Kraus and how he became the Ectoplasmic Man, but what now? Well in my rambling brain I thought 'what if he went back to Chengdou?' So I've done my rendition of the cover of that adventure. I hope you like the pencils. The inks won't be far behind. Next up is a new piece for Bob Smith's Soldiers proposal. You might have seen earlier posts concerning this proposal. This time I'm going to go back and focus on the Ben Grimm/Ulik story line and see where it takes me.



Cheers

Beware the Lobsters Claw

Finished inking this piece a few days ago, got side-tracked by some digital coloring work for my buddy Mr. Jabberous, so it's time to post it and see what you all think?

Beware!

Etrigan in B&W

Here is the inked version of the Etrigan piece. Earlier I had posted the pencils, so for comparison check them out and see how faithful I was to my own pencils.

Cheers,
Mk

And they call him SunLord!!!

Here are pencils for a cover piece featuring my creator-owned character SunLord and his entourage. This is a character I started 7+ years ago, completed a few color pieces, had a great story line and then did nothing with. You can find older SunLord pieces over at www.masztal.com, but for now, check out the new and approved SL and let me know what you think.



And yes those are frog commandoes with big guns.

Mk

A Great Holiday!

We had a wonderful 4th of July weekend. My daughter came for a visit to celebrate her 12th birthday so we took a few extra days off, had some fun, some good BBQ (in the rain!), my daughter got real good on a new videogame called WarBlades and I actually got some time to draw something Oh, and we saw WALL•E. My wife and daughter loved it. They had a fun time with the characters and the wonderful animation.



Cheers

Shake it up

Take one proposal, shake it up a bit and you can then approach 2 different companies. Here's a HellBoy version of the Soldiers proposal. Change Ulik to Rulik, make some minor background changes and TaaDaaaa!

Ragnarrok!

The Thing

So not the easiest character to draw. You have to pay attention to the shape of his body and also shape the rock plates to help with some kind of modeling. This is a piece from James Smith's proposal Soldiers. It teams Ben Grimm with Ulik, a rock troll created by Jack Kirby. The short is full of grand imagery, intense emotion and wonderful character development. Stay tuned, maybe we'll sell this sucker to Marvel and we can finally see it in print.


Clobberin' Time!

Wall•E Did Not Disappoint

Well I was very happy with what the magicians at PIXAR turned out this weekend. Wall•E was a fun time, giving us laughs, heart felt imagery and a message...that if we keep screwing up our planet, we're not going to be able to live here anymore. The detailing and texture of this movie is as realistic as can be imagined. I can't say enough about this film...GO SEE IT!

It's Wall•E Time

I get excited about a few special movies every year, and the big one for me so far is Wall•E. I think Pixar has a smash hit on their hands and I think this movie is going to redeem Pixar in the eyes of the critics and fans that thought Ratatouille was a misfire.
Watch for the lil 'Bot to be Huge!

Whoa!

Back from Vacation and a Fenway trip

So we spent a wonderful week back up in Vermont. We visited more time up in Northern VT exploring Montpelier and Burlington. Are hearts, however, are wrapped around the Cooper Hill Inn in East Dover. Our first day there gave us the experience of snow squalls at a high altitude and it was amazing. We also brought along some Durian, which our hostess is quite fond of. We did not expect the Durian party that occurred and I was eating that stinky, slimy, pudding like fruit pulp right along with everyone.

We visited the Quechee Antiques Mall and I raided Steve Bissette's booth for some DVD's and books. We also hit quite a few used book stores, my scoring on Vermont native Joe Citro's book collection.
Once back we didn't want to return to the real world, however we had a nice surprise with a pair of Fenway tickets from my wife's brother. Awesome seats, a high temperature of 101 degress, but it was worth a little extra sweat to be sitting where we were.






Cheers!

One more before we Go-Go!

Flock cover #2. I love my splatter brush!


Cheers

Going On Vacation

It's our one year anniversary, see you in a week!!



Mark and Kathy

Mother's Day at Fenway

My daughter and I had a chance to take a stroll through Fenway yesterday as a Special Mother's Day event. We shared this time with about a couple thousand of our closest friends. If you ever get a chance to take one of the Park Tours, please do it. You'll be surprised how well this field has held up over the years.




Cheers

IRON MAN ROCKED!

'nuff said.

Cheers,
Mk

Flock 2_Final

Here's a revision to what would eventually be The Flock #2 cover. The original front-on shot was nice, but the powers that be didn't like it as much as the original side shot. I combined it with images of our heroes running through a steamy Florida forest. Color will be hopefully sometime later this week.



Cheers,
Mk

Finally...Color!

Life has been very busy the past week or so and it seemed like it took me way to long to finish coloring this piece, but it's done! I'm really happy with how it turned out. It took some experimenting with different brushes to get the feathers just right. I hope the wait was worth it.



Cheers

Terror in Ink

Stage #2, inked artwork ready for digital color. I've always been a tight penciller whether it be a piece I'm going to ink or someone else is going to lay ink down onto. No matter how faithful an inker is, sometimes minor things change, or in the case of either rough pencils and a dominating inking style, a completely new piece of art is born. In this Flock #3 cover, I made minor changes in the background. I decided to not fill in solid blacks to the bushes and parts of the building. Instead I used a loose hatching to help keep the background a minor element and let the Terror Birds stand out. Once I lay in the digital color, I will soften the background color and then change the background line art from black to a darker sepia so the Terror Birds will really pop. it will be an experiment that I hope works. My fear is that the cover will be too busy, and the main characters, Scarlet Rogue and Walks Backward, will get lost.


Stay Tuned

Terror Birds #3

Here's my take of Bob Smith's battle between the Scarlet Rogue (on the right), and Walks Backwards from the last 1/3 of his book, The Flock.



Rawwk!

Because all of the cool kids were...

I was hitting the blogs and I noticed Eric Talbot and Mark (Not The Race Car Driver) Martin both posted turtles pics today. Heck, I can draw me a turtle...so I did. The first is a piece dating back to 2000 from an abhorted Gamera vs Godzilla piece that failed. The other is one I threw together in about 15 minutes. the Classic convention sketch done in markers and black Sharpie.



Bon Apetit

Scarlet Rogue

And here he is in all of his badness. Blood dripping off of his beak, looking rather nasty at ya!


Cheers!

More Terror Birds

I was home this afternoon with some research material with me and I was determined to work on a frontal shot of those crazy Terror Birds. I was so happy with it so I inked it afterwards on a piece of vellum. Here's the tight pencils. Give me a day or so and I'll have the colored piece posted.

Cheers

It's Spring!

That means Baseball season is back and my wife and I can go back to our regular schedule of watching the Red Sox play. We have a real nice boss here and he gave us his blessing when the Red Sox World Series Trophies came to our local library and we could go see them and have our pictures taken. The event was in the brand new Chicopee Public Library and it's truly a beautiful building and all of the attendees were well behaved and the Red Sox reps were great along with Chicopee's Finest!

More Terror Birds

Did some doodling last night after laying out the entire proposed mini-series with my wife. She could tell I was very excited by the idea that I might get something published this decade! I drew out the rough on this, tightened it up a bit and scanned and P'Shop'd some greytones over it. Not bad for a teaser image or #1 cover.


Cheers!

The Flock and Bob Smith

A few months ago I mentioned James Robert Smith's The Flock here and how it was recommended to me by my VT amigo Steve Bissette. I read the book and was wildly inspired by it and I wrote Bob Smith. I asked him if he had any short stories involving the Terror Birds and if he ever decided to publish them as a chapbook, I would be interested in doing some spot illustrations. So Bob wrote back and thought that would be great, however, he also has worked in comics so he mentioned graphic novel. I said I would be on board if he liked any sketches I did so I finally got something I liked, sketched, and then colored and sent it off to him. He liked it and wanted to forward it off to his Rep so it's off in the ether-verse hoping to start something wonderful.

Cheers.

Melanie

Quite a few years ago I was renting a house with my friend Ken Parker. It was great and we both respected each others privacies and had a lot of fun in Westside. Now here it is a lot of years later, and we're both married to two wonderful women. I have a daughter who's going to turn 12 this year and Ken and his wife Dawn gave birth to Melanie Parker earlier this month. She's a bit early, guess she wanted to come out and play with all of us. I just wanted to welcome her here on Barkings and hope all who read this, think of little Melanie. We've got a lot of time and we're all very patient for her to come join us in front of the big screen TV in her daddy's Man-Town, watching Captain Scarlet and some John Carpenter movies.


Mark & Kathy

Toy Fair 2008 recap

Toy Fair 2008 and it was quite an event. I had never been so when I contacted Mike Dobbs to see if we could travel together, he was more than happy to share the ride. Let me just say that I've been to the Javitts center in NY before, but I've never been to a show that takes up the entire building. Both exhibition spaces were full of vendors all try to tempt you with the latest and greatest. Now I wasn't just there to have fun, I did have obligations to the JOB because they were after all picking up my train fare and expenditures. Packaging was first and foremost and also a chance to get a peek at what the hot trends are for the upcoming year. I saw a few pieces of packaging that were interesting, but nothing that was awe inspiring. As for hot trends, Disney is still highly represented, but the other big boys like Hasbro and LEGO were well represented. Hasbro even went to the point where you had to have a special invite to visit their showroom outside of the Convention Hall. Of course the big thing for me from them is the Cloverfield collectible vinyl figure. Now not being a member of the press I did not get an invite, but Mike did and he said it is a truly odd, grotesque piece of sculpture. Look here.
As for other interests, HellBoy had some great pieces at Gentle Giant, and Wall-E was there, just as not as much as I would have expected, but we are also 4 months away from the premiere.

My wife and I are fans of Dr. Who and the Daleks were making their presence known.
We also had a chance to stop by and visit with Richard Gordon, a wonderfully warm, talented man who is still sharp, even into his 80's. We also managed to make it over the the Virgin MegaStore and spend some cash. All in all it was a great trip, very tiring, but I got to see very amazing toys.

Cheers!

Toy Fair, NYC 2008

Toy Fair is held annually in NYC and it's the place for toy manufacturers to show of the greatest and next big successes to the masses. This wil be the first year I'm going, but the 2-3rd year that my JOB will have a booth there so that means free entry forme! It's not a big deal, but ti will be nice to grab my badge and wander along with all of the other men-boys drooling at all of the new geek toys coming out this year. I'm taking the train with my fellow Springfieldian Mike "Mr. Animation" Dobbs. He's a managing editor for a series of local papers and he's got the pulse on the toy industry for New England. I think we're both looking forward to it and I hope to have some awesome photos of the toys coming out this next year, I personally want a shot of Hasbro's Cloverfield vinyl figure. We're also looking forward to hitting a few book stores and meeting with Mike's friend, movie director/producer, Richard Gordon., Fiend Without A Face being one of my all-time favorites of his! So stay tuned and look for a Toy Fair re-cap later this week.


Cheers!

Sad Justice

My wife and I watched Waitress this past weekend. A very funny, warm, entertaining movie that deserves the accolades it's been receiving since making a big splash at the Sundance Film Festival a few years ago. Sadly, the director and co-star, Adrienne Shelley was murdered in NYC before the movie was bought up at the festival so she never had a chance to see the response to her film. The murderer has been caught and finally tried and sentenced. I strongly recommend this film, not only for the film itself, but what it meant to the actors and producers of the film. Please watch the Memorial piece on the extras on the DVD.

Sad Justice

ODEN, or how I messed with Norse mythology

I've always been a fan of mythology. Greek, Roman, Irish, Welsh, Chinese and Japanese, but what really got me excited was Norse Mythology. Oden/Odin, Thor Loki, Baldur, Hela, Fenris the Wolf, all had a spot in my heart and imagination. A few years ago, Matt Greenia asked me to contribute a story to his Massachusetts comic, Cellar Dwellers. I did a three page story focusing on this eye-patched, mohawk wearing guy who had a thing for hats. He popped up in my dreams and I couldn't get rid of him so I put that story together. Along came the Norse myths and the eye-patch was the trigger to help the character develop and helped me add supporting characters and my re-imagined world of Oden developed.
I've also been a huge fan of Golems. For what they stood for, how they were made, and there are a lot of ways, and also how they have been represented throughout history and film, thank you Paul Wegener. I had to have them in this story, so I present after way too many years and finally colored and re-lettered, the first three pages of a new Oden story. There will be more too come. Enjoy.