Iron Zod Bender

So, there's still a delay on the print versions of Burning Building #3 and #4. I'm hoping they'll be all done by the end of the week, and I'll post here when they're available to order. I have been keeping busy however with a couple of other projects. Some months ago, I promised to be in a zine and I've been putting together a comic for that for a while now. It's been taking me a long time cause I'm trying a different style for the art. The story I'm doing features a bunch of portraits of famous characters, and in order to get likenesses right, I wanted to try a style that was a little more involved and precise, but still minimal and abstractly exaggerated. This ends up looking like caricature most of the time, which is fine, but something I've never been very good at. So what should have been something that would only take a week, has spawned into several as I tried dozens of sketches of the same character to try and nail the likeness and the new, more illustrative, style I was trying to capture. Here are a couple of the final sketches I made before moving into the final art.

I'll make sure to post on here with the specifics of the zine when the project's all done.

Doing this was pretty challenging for me, and fun, and I'm hoping to try and build a new illustration portfolio out of the style of these drawings, so we'll see how that goes.

As for other comics I've been reading, I just finished up the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Wow, what a great book. I've said before that I'm not really familiar with the Duck comics, and I've never read the Barks stuff, but this collection, by Don Rosa, was so much fun, and so well done, I wish I had started reading them as a young lad. This book was a good place to start, I think, as it gave me a breakdown on the Scrooge character's life, as he exists in comics, and outside of my beloved Duck Tales universe. I do ponder on how my comics development might have differed had I been reading these when my comics tastes were developing. But alas, I was reading Youngblood instead. (sigh)

By the way, I saw the new Hulk movie with Ed Norton. It was pretty damn good, and a might better than the Ang Lee version with the terrible Nick Nolte Absorbing Man crap. The new one has solid acting, pretty good story and really nice special effects. The skin tone of the hulk was creepily real with dark green blood pumping through the veins just under the surface. I've been told it's not as good as Iron Man, which apparently is the best movie ever made.