Drawing aids

  Here's something that helped tremendously in drawing Army of Darkness--the Ash action figure from Mc Farlane toys!  I used it mainly for figuring out how his chest harness wraps around his body and detail on the chainsaw.  I also used it when drawing a 3/4 back view of Ash.

 Toys are great for this sort of thing.  All those details that perhaps don't quite come together from looking at a movie still (which I downloaded plenty of) or looking at the comic, where you may be perpetuating someone else's error.

 For those interested in the toy as a toy I have to say that it has very few points of articulation.  Nice collectable, tho, and as I said, made a wonderful drawing aid for the project.  I have since managed to break the blade off the chainsaw (oops!)

 As for the skull behind Ash, every artist should have one of these.  Very useful.

Anime Festival 08

  Belated Anime Festival photos (it was back in September):  from top-Ben Harvey, American manga artist; giant Mario; Badz-Maru plushie thing of some sort; Bleach cosplay; Gurren Lagann cosplay.

New Army of Darkness cover

  Here's the new cover for the Army of Darkness Holiday Special "Home For the Hellidays".  Somehow the first cover I did was lost.  I don't have it, the guys at Dynamite don't have it.  It's a complete mystery.  I could have just re-created the first cover to replace it, but having just finished drawing the story I now had a better concept, the culmination of which you see above.

 I think it all worked out well in the end.

Darfur

  Here's a project that came to me from Dr. Rafael Medoff of the Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.  It's about the genocide in the Darfur region of the Sudan.  I won't go into it here, you can google it yourself and check out the information.

  Neal Adams had done some material for them which he described as being done in a "documentary" style.  I eschewed that as much as possible here and went more for the in-your-face comics style, as seen in the first panel featuring the Janjaweed fighter on horseback.  The Janjaweed are a militia backed by the Sudanese goverernment that are committing the atrocities in Darfur.  A mother and child cower as their village burns behind them.

  The bottom line on this is that China and Russia are opposing that the Sudanese leader Al-Bashir be put on trial for his crimes against humanity for backing the Janjaweed.  This is because China and Russia get oil from the Sudan.  That's right folks, it's another WAR FOR OIL.

  This is just a tracing paper rough at this stage.  I'll post news of where it will ultimately appear when Rafi sells it.  The strip he did with Sal Amendola appeared in the New Republic.

Atomic Robo

 Here's my take on Scott Wegener's Atomic Robo.  Here Robo is suddenly attacked by Nazi Gorillas.  One of my earliest published comics stories was for DC's Weird War where I inked Ken Landgraf's pencils on a story featuring gorillas that were pressed into service by the Germans in WW II.  By the end of the story the gorillas turned on their Nazi masters, of course, and returned to the jungle.

 Oddly enough, I caught a show on History channel where they talked about gorillas being used as soldiers, not by Hitler, but Stalin.  Just a wacky idea some Soviet scientist had.  Turns out gorillas make lousy soldiers.  They're not nearly aggressive enough.