Flaming Artist

Here’s another drawing from 2002 I found while flipping through an old sketchbook

These are drawings I found while digging through a journal from 2002.

On this page, the editor, the author
and I got into trouble because I feared that the audience might not
appreciate the important revelation that it was Colonel Thorpe who
targeted the teen whore on pages 6/7 for murder by Father Fischer,
who then mutilated her and removed her sexual parts while he was at
it. I insisted on a re-write where we would actually show the removed
sex parts and her unborn child instead of implying it. Bob and
Andersen accommodated me in this.

Unfortunately, I was contacted by the
book’s third editor, Will Dennis, earlier this year. He informed me
that the group editor thought that panel 3 was much too disturbing
and controversial and that we had to pull back. We ended up with the
image shown, returning to the original script.

This is the re-drawn panel, conforming
to the original script. The page was composited in Photoshop.

I’ll be signing my new graphic novel Fogtown at Meltdown Comics, 7522 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles 90046. The date is Saturday, October 23, 2010 from noon to 2:00 p.m. Please come by!

Frank sneaks onto Madame Tse’s freighter where he discovers her partner-in-crime, Colonel Thorpe.
This is a nice, Toth-influenced page.

Ironically, given the name of the project, one of my biggest failures in these pages was my depiction
of fog. Portraying atmospheric effects is one of my general weak areas that I didn’t have the luxury of time to overcome.

This is a dramatic and eerie close-up on Bone’s mutilated face. Another influence on “Fogtown” was
the work of cartoonist Russ Heath (“Sgt. Rock,” “Haunted Tank”). I especially like the work he did for the early 50’s  horror anthologies, “Strange Tales,” “Journey into Mystery” and “Menace.”

I find an excellent way to check my art for mistakes is to flip the page over and study it on a light table.
I draw on the reverse, flip the page over, and draw again on the front, working back and forth. This allows me to see my art more objectively, a difficult thing to do in my line of work.

Here is page 131, and a computer scan of the reverse side of Page 131.

I debated with myself whether to do the shadows from the blinds in black in or save it for the gray tones. I decided to do them in black because I was uncertain if the artwork actually would be gray toned and opted to make the graphic novel work in black and white, leaving the gray toning as an unnecessary gloss.