Fall Continuing Ed Courses at SVA

My fall courses in Figure Drawing and Cartooning are enrolling right now at the School of Visual Arts.
Come see me at the information session this Tuesday evening. Tell your friends 'n stuff like that, please.

Cartozia Locales

Here are some images of exotic places I've created for the Cartozia series. Here we see denizens of Microbia (a very tiny country) and scavengers in the land of Smithereens, where everything gets blown to.

These appear in the first two issues. Nifty, eh?
Cartozia Tales is an exciting comic anthology by a crack team of plucky, up and coming young talents, celebrity guests, and a token old guy (guess who?).
Cartozia needs you! Pledge to our Kickstarter so more issues can happen. Every person who pledges even a dollar gets a pdf of the first issue right away. Tell all your friends.
Pretty please.

Come Draw with Me This Monday

The fifty-fifth meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposiumwill be held on Monday, August 19, 2013 at 7:00 PM at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in room 1104. Free and open to the public.

Scheduled Presentation:  Panel Sequence Workshop.  Cartooning instructor, Tom Motley, will present a slideshow and discussion on cinematic sequences in comics, followed by a related cartooning worksheet. This will be a fun sequential art exercise to stimulate comics professionals and fans alike. Drawing skills are welcome but not necessary.

Osamu Tezuka, Shintakarajima (New Treasure Island), 1947, revised 1984.

Cartozia Tales-- subscribe today!

By Thursday, we'll be launching a Kickstarter campaign for Cartozia Tales, at which point the subscription price will go up a few dollars to cover Kickstarter's cut. Subscribe before then and you'll give the project a boost and yourself a break. There'll still be crazy cool perks for subscribers to pledge for: original art, additional comics, cameo appearances, and more.

The Two Old Men of Kwantapafayo. What are the consequences of that game they've played for centuries?

Cartozia Tales #1

I just received my contributor copies of the first Cartozia Tales. It's a delightful project featuring outstanding contributions by Dylan Horrocks, Shawn Cheng, and many others. Order it from the website: http://cartozia.com

This is an illustration I did for one of our promo postcards. It'll run on the back cover of a future issue.

An evil fairy princess or something...

Last week I had my students compose comic pages from a live model and I couldn't resist joining the fun.

A Knock on the Head

I contributed these two pages to a "choose your own adventure" style group comic show, written by M. Sweeney Lawless, that opened tonight at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art.

They stretched my pages (grrrr), which is something I hope they'll correct by the time you show up. Anyway, here's how they should look:

It's a fun show. Come see. There should be a Flickr page coming. I'll add that link when it appears.

From the Archive: The Tale of the Tattooed Woman, 2008

This is one of the comics I adapted from short stories by Rikki Ducornet from her 1994 collection, The Complete Butcher's Tales. We put them in a section titled "The Butcher's Comics" at the back of The One Marvelous Thing.

My idea was to use the tattoos as ersatz comic panels so that, in revealing them, her confession would also be a seduction. How'd I do?

Astute viewers will also find the tattoos from the Lydia song, right where they're said to be.

Suspect Device pages

These are the pages I contributed to Josh Bayer's new anthology, Suspect Device #3. I've posted the third image here already, but here it is in context. 

Josh's device is to assign contributors panels clipped from classic comic strips --this time from Popeye and Little Orphan Annie-- and to have them put one panel at the beginning and another at the end of the page. The artist then creates a comic to connect the panels. 

Josh started this as an exercise for his cartooning classes but it's since exploded into a huge jam project featuring many of the most exciting cartoonists in the field.

Buy the issue here.

June 8 & 9, 2013

Come see me this weekend at the Grand Comics Festival. I'll be selling these handmade comics and many others, original art and prints, too!

My summer classes are enrolling right now at SVA

Come take a class with me. I'll be nice, I promise. I'll teach you stuff. Check it out:
http://www.sva.edu/continuing-education/illustration-and-cartooning/cartooning-courses

Portfolio 2013

This is my current illustration portfolio, which I'll display here until I finish rebuilding my website.

First are examples of cartooning combined with hand lettering:

Next are book illustrations from The Golden Ass:

More book illustration and wild figure drawing:

...and inventive pages in a mix of styles:

Skillful and ingenious, right?

Tragic Strip: Universal Sentiments & Volapuk

This strip ran in the March issue of The Brooklyn Rail, but with a spelling error. The Menominee for "I love you" is ketapanen, not ketapenan as I first had it. Here is the corrected version.

Raunchy Limerick Favorites (again)

The new issue of Yuck!, #7, has just come out in Australia and includes these 5 pages of my Raunchy Limerick Favorites.

I posted most of these before, when they ran as a Tragic Strip, but you should be able to see them better here. Depending on your browser, if you open each page in a new window, they'll appear 1200px wide, which is pretty clear. 

Recent Tragic Strip: Real Men Play Barbies

Be mine?

http://yourdailydoodle.tumblr.com/post/43079381316/be-mine

Dueling Models

I had a fabulous time last Wednesday at Dare to Draw at the Society of Illustrators. They featured two athletic models choreographed into battle poses.

I really enjoyed the snarling faces the guy made throughout but, even more, I was grateful for the way the woman could rarely suppress her smile. It reinforced the feeling that the mock violence was all in fun.

I don't know these people and can't presume to speak for them, but to me it felt indicative of sexual difference. The man seemed able to invest his imagination fully in the drama while the woman couldn't shake her sense of the silliness of it all. This kind of imagery is for boys, and the girls just play along.

There was one beheading pose that I found particularly hard to deal with until I was able to connect it in memory to that episode of Sherlock where Irene Adler is about to be beheaded but her executioner reveals himself to be Sherlock in disguise.



In this decades long epidemic of murderously suicidal young men committing huge atrocities all over the world, please please please keep it unreal.