Funny Faces Comic

Anybody who knows me knows that comic books have always been my first love. When I was a kid, I dreamed of drawing Batman, Superman, all the big guns for Marvel and DC. As I got older, though, I decided I really only wanted to do my own characters. My good friend Ted Tucker and I even used to self publish our own book, Lunar Donut, many years ago so we could do that kind of thing. The book was doing pretty well, for a small press title, until real life set in, and we went back to our "day jobs" of drawing caricatures. But I'm still the biggest comic fan you're likely to meet.

For the past few years I've been very involved in the National Caricaturist Network, and have written and drawn an autobiographical strip (another love of mine) for their magazine, Exaggerated Features. the strip is entitled "Funny Faces". Sound familiar? After a few years of this, I have enough pages in the can that I'm thinking of printing up a comic of all my strips so far.
Here is a very loose mock up of a cover idea. Input appreciated. I'm about 85% sure I'm going to do this soon. Just a little concerned of being stuck with more boxes of comics in my garage...Lunar Donuts have been in there for years.....

Brady Number Fun

My daughter, Brady, did this sketch today, and I thought I'd share. She tells me it's of a line of people waiting at a movie theater concession stand. There's a lot going on here, and it takes a minute to look at, to appreciate it all. What impressed me was that there were people of varying heights, varying races, and varying clothing and hairstyles. Plus, there's some really good hands here. Not to mention that there's background! There's a checkered floor, a counter with a cash register on it, a movie marquee with times on it above their heads, and way in the back (perspective!), there's an arcade with a driving game in it. Good grief! I don't do backgrounds NOW half of the time. And she's not even EIGHT yet!
Keep reading, though, because this gets weirder.

David Cowles, a friend and huge inspiration of mine(www.davidcowles.net), was in town with his daughter a few weeks ago to see Disney. We had dinner with them one night, and Brady bonded with them over a game of "number fun", drawing on the "To Go" bag as we waited for our check. What you do is someone draws a number, and gives it to the next person, who has to figure out how to make it into a drawing. I was surprised that Brady was holding her own with them. At the end of the meal, David promised Brady to send her some "Numbers Homework" in the mail. True to his word, a few days later, a small sketchbook arrived in the mail, each page with a different number on it. Some were easy, but some were pretty hard...like the number "seventeen"...SPELLED out. I was impressed again with Brady's creativity, and she did about half of the book in one sitting (she'll finish it soon, David, and we'll send you some of the drawings!). SO....I decided to give her a project of my own. We have a "Summer Fun Sketchbook" that we're keeping this year, and I gave her some "Number Fun" pages to do in it. This drawing of the crowd at a movie concession? It started out as the number "Fourteen". See here for yourself:

Here it is again, superimposed over the final image:
I was impressed with the drawing itself, for the reasons I pointed out, but now I was speechless. I have no idea how she came up with all of this. Wow

More Travel!

Here's one from the latest batch of the TravelSlut drawings. She's put this character I designed on business cards, stamps, all kinds of stuff now. And the websit's soon to follow. It's cool when a great client really likes your work and runs with it, using it like this.

Super!

I LOVED this movie! Is it perfect? No. Is Routh as good as Reeve in the part? No. However, all in all, this is a really good film. Not as good as I would like, but much better than I had hoped for. I really thought they were gonna butcher it. But Bryan Singer has created a great film, and a fitting homage to the first two Superman movies from the 70s. Please, if you haven't see this film yet, go see it NOW! And if you have, go see it AGAIN! We can't let something like Pirates of the Caribbean 2 beat it at the box office.