Hey low,

One of the books I’ve been working on got solicited last week.

I’ve been working on an Empowered one shot written by comic book hero Adam Warren.(Due out on March 26, 2014)

It’s been a huge deal to me to be able to work with an artists whose work I’ve been a fan of for so many years.

I was looking at old Kung fu posters for ideas on the cover. I love those orange tentacles on the far left. I also too some of that one for the logo style. I eat posters and steal their power.

and my roughs:

And some pages

I don’t like working off of text scripts so I asked Adam to do layouts for me. Here’s his layout of the above page:

along with typed out text so I can letter everything right.

I had to get a new pen to do the bolding in the lettering. That is a new and alien thing to me.

Warren’s layouts for page 6

and my (almost) finished take on the page:

One of the things I was having fun doing in the first couple pages was drawing background characters based off of Adam’s first Dirty pair issue.

Like sooo

I like pulling from the work I saw of Warren’s for his newest work.

And that new Empowered came out this week. It is a realllly good one.

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Here’s some sketchbook stuff:

and my Mom wrote a new book that I did a cover for: (my mom writes books)

You can get it here.

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I read some comics this week:

I really liked Connor Willumsen’s Treasure Island. It’s online to read ( here) but I really liked how well the printed version of it works.

It starts with 3 two page spreads showing how each of it’s 3 main characters spend their days.

I like how well these give you a visual map of the kind of people who they are, especially in relation to each other.

I like how he shows this Skype call, a later a movie the characters are watching in small distant boxes. With the panel becoming the dimensions of the screen it’s on.

and the same when he shows email conversations. The whole book has such an impressive use of space. It reads like something taken from experience.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my own work lately, and how past having an agenda to tell a certain kind of stories or to come up with things that I find fun –I feel like it’s important to me to leave work that captures the feeling of moments of real real life. I think this Treasure island book does that well. It makes me the best kind of jealous. The kind of book that makes me want to try harder.

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Also I got a newer color version of Buichi Terasawa’s Cobra! ( that was serialized in Super Jump in 1995 )

I find the colors on this stuff really interesting in that it tries to look like animation.With cell shaded characters in front of more rendered backgrounds. It’d be cool to see more western books attempt that

This book has some fun ideas in it.

There’s these arm missiles with their own guidance systems .

Guns with faces.

A lazer hammer:

This creepy harem guard that’s just a head on a flying saucer:

This castle with legs on wheels:

and (drumroll..) glass tits with fish inside of them.

good night!