Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Mister Satan




I guess I have Batman on the brain. To avoid getting my ass sued off, I’ve switched to another Golden Age superhero, now in the Public Domain, who’s similar enough to Batman that I can draw obvious parallels, but not be confined to a direct parody. His name is—wait for it— Mister Satan! Seriously! He was created for Archie Comics back before it was Archie Comics and discarded when the company decided to become squeaky clean and wholesome. His companions are Devil Boy and Devil Girl, both my own additions.

Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Batman!







Okay, so here's my idea for a bootleg Batman comic. I expect it won't be very popular with fans of the ongoing Batman comics.

Eccentric Billionaire Bruce Wayne, motivated by the tragic murder of his parents, devotes his life to fighting crime in his home town of Gotham City. Wayne has devoted his considerable fortune and intellectual resources to the study of criminology and crime prevention. His Wayne Foundation donates enormous sums of money to Gotham's Police Force, infrastructure, school system, prisoner rehabilitation programs and civic restoration. For this reason, the Mayor and Police Commissioner James Gordon indulge Wayne's mania for dressing up in a bat costume and fighting street-level crime with gadgets. Bruce Wayne believes his identity is a secret, but really everyone who's met Batman knows who he is. It's painfully obvious. As long as the money flows and the crime rate keeps dropping (it's down dramatically since Batman's campaign began) the civic authorities are willing to play along. The situation became more complicated when Bruce adopted an orphaned teenager named Dick Grayson after the boy's parents were murdered. It's become harder to turn a blind eye to child endangerment, but so far, the kid has been well taken care of and nobody wants to upset the apple cart.

Batman's fists-first approach to crime-fighting may be a little silly, but Bruce Wayne is still an excellent amateur sleuth and the police, however reluctantly, sometimes will turn to his expertise. As a fail-safe though, Commissioner Gordon has made a deal to reduce the sentence of a certain long-serving prisoner if he'll agree to dress up as a super-criminal called the Joker and distract Batman's attention when the police really need him out of the way.

My story concerns Dick Grayson growing up and coming to terms with his adopted father's psychological problems. Batman is a kind of Peter Pan figure. A boy who never grew up and Dick needs to decide whether he can keep playing dress up with Bruce or if it's time to leave fantasy behind. I think this could be a bitter-sweet and funny little story about children and adults and how age isn't always the thing that separates one from the other. I don't want it to be gloomy or depressing, Bruce Wayne's mania is kind of sad, but his colorful world of good guys and bad guys is fun and exciting. I'll also need an outside character, a reporter or a federal agent, likely a woman, who can be the reader's entry point into the weird world of Bruce Wayne.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

TR!CKSTER and Book Launch

If you're in San Diego this week for Comic-Con, be sure to drop by TR!CKSTER. It's free! And you can pick up all three volumes of Much the Miller's Son there as well!

And if you're in Vancouver this Saturday, you really need to get down to Pulpfiction Books for the joint launch of Much the Miller's Son volume 3 and BATTLEKITTENS the art of Rebecca Dart.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Follow up to composition





The same layout template applied to Leiji Matsumoto's Captain Harlock, Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira and Akira Toriyama's Dr. Slump. This relates to: The Comics Journal.

Sunday, April 03, 2011

Composition and intuition

Here's a fascinating article about layout composition as applied to the classic comic strip Tintin. After reading it, I was curious about how much my own work follows those aesthetic principles. So I grabbed a pic from the article and layered it over some of my favorite pages from book 3 and look what I found out:







The thing I find interesting is that none of this was intentional. I didn't know about dividing the page into squares, circles and triangles, I just juggled the elements around until they "looked right". What this tells me though, is that it's possible to quantify what "looks right". These are of course just some of my favorite pages, and I haven't checked to see if all my pages conform, I'm sure they don't. But it's nice to see that when I think it's working, I can actually prove it.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Rebecca Dart

Rebecca is a good friend of mine. I used to work with her in the animation business. She deserves to be way more famous than she is! http://r-dart.livejournal.com/

Monday, March 21, 2011

Gingerbread Girl




Gingerbread Girl by Colleen Coover and Paul Tobin is a really fun and intriguing new comic at Top Shelf 2.0. It has a really interesting narrative structure as well as being cute, funny and clever.

Read Tom Pajak's blog




It's funny as shit and since he just put up a post about me, I'm hoping to create a feedback loop and bring down the interwebs: http://artbrute6.blogspot.com/ Tom, by the way, was my sounding board and co-writer when I was first brainstorming Much the Miller's Son. If you read my comic, you've probably laughed at his jokes already.



Me and two of the greats



These guys are my rock stars. Sergio Aragones of Groo the Wanderer and Mad Magazine and Jean Giraud AKA Moebius of Blueberry and Arzach.

Thursday, March 03, 2011

Jetboy sees print!



Check this out! My friend Monika Brozda got my four page Jet Boy story into a Dutch reprint magazine alongside Thierry Martin and a bunch of other great Franco-Belgian cartoonists! Download the PDF to see the whole thing!


Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Pre-order Much book 3

Hey everybody! Press time steadily approaches and even with the Xeric Grant, I'm on the hook for a big pile of cash. If you're planning on picking up a copy of Much book 3, please consider a pre-order. For $25 (shipping to the US and Canada included) you'll get the full-color, oversized, hardcover book mailed to your door with a personalized sketch inside. Paypal: stevelec (at) hotmail.com. Not only will you get a shiny new book, but you'll be helping to support my work. I appreciate it!

Steve

Saturday, January 08, 2011

Opinions needed





Here's another concept...


Hey guys! I'm working on the cover for book 3 because the Xeric people want to post a cover image ASAP. What do you think of this?

Steve

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