Monday, June 25, 2007

Work, Work, Work


It looks like DRAW! 14 will be off to the printers in the next day or so, this mean we hope, that it will be available for the San Diego Comicon and in shops either that week or the next. I'll give a definitive street update when it's nailed down. On other fronts I have begun the design process on two comic projects, one with my buddy Greg Thompson and one with my buddy Jamar Nicholas. I can't get into them much now, but I can say one is more of a classic hero fiction and the other is more of a fantasy/slightly manga angle. The Thing illo above is one of my experiments with drawing the entire image in photoshop on my wacom and messing with the art in the filters. I might actually do one of these projects mostly on the wacom tablet. I'm very interested in trying to do some new comics in a new way to see if this can speed up the process and give it a unique looks, a different look than my more traditional "meat world" comics. One of the things about doing comics for yourself, and then later hoping they sell well enough to make you any return, is that you have to produce the work pretty quick or the financial model doesn't work. Anyway, as I get farther into these projects and I have something to announce I'll post some art here.

On other fronts, as I finish my Esurence job I will also begin in earnest my figure drawing book on men that I will co-publish through twomorrows along with Bret Blevins figure drawing book on females. Right now our goal is to have these books out later this year, maybe for X-mas. There are plans for 2 DVD covering the subject by bret and myself as well, and we hope we can get those done early next year. These will be in the same vein as the "From Script to print" DVD I did 2 years ago.

9 comments:

rob! said...

ooh, i love that pic! even the Yancy Street Gang would say its cool!

Yvon Doubey said...

As usual, I love !
Hem... The Think look so angry... I don't want to disturb him.

Michael Dooney said...

The figure drawing books sound great, what ever happened to the 'ACTING WITH A PENCIL' book that you and Bret were doing?

CCG Coordinator said...

Hey Mike,

Hope you are recovered from your China trip! Nice digital work with the Thing illo. Has a different look than your analog inking style - but still quite attractive.

Yeah, whatever became of the "Acting With a Pencil" book?

Any plans to do some Draw Magazine workshops? Some real hands on training would be cool! I know I have asked before but hope springs eternal!

What other cons are you doing this year? You probably don't remember but we met at the 2003 or 2004 Chicago Wizard World.

Take care,
Jonathan Gilpin

Mike Manley said...

Mike, the book as killed or seriously delayed when it became a huge iussue to get the rights to run some of the storyboards Bret and I did for the various cartoons shows. We were going to show examples of what we did on batman, Superman, Samurai jack etc. But we were never able to clear anything, so that pushed the book off schedule till we could basucally do all new material from scratch and that takes time. We have two figure drawing books scheduled next, male and female and they shoukd be out I hope by X-mas or spring for sure depending on schedules. Then we will do the AWP book next, the goal is next summer. there will be companion DVD's to go along with the figure drawing books that we want out next year too in a follow up to the DVD I already have out.

Mike Manley said...

CCG, See my answer to the AWP book above. Thanks I want to try doing a book with the digital process and have one planned. There is another project I hope to premiere in Baltimore, that's the next con I'm doing, WW Chicago is out again this year.

I have thought seriously about doing some workshops, especially with Bret. the issue is $$ vs Time. We thought of trying to do one around a con, maybe at a nearby hotel so it would make it convenient for fans to do both. the issue was how much $$ to charge to make it worth our while as well. most workshops are pretty expensive, I don't know how many fans or readers would be willing to pay $300+ a head?

that's why we were thinking of doing the DVD's and books instead.

But...if there were a serious demand or interest in a workshop....

Mike Manley said...

thanks Rob, A book with the thing is one of the few ideas that would intrigue me at marvel as I dislike most of the stuff today. mostly because it's fun to draw monsters.

Mike Manley said...

Yvon, Don't worry, he's really a peach :-)

CCG Coordinator said...

I attended a Joe Kubert Workshop back in the early 90's during the San Diego Con but they haven't repeated that since. I have some thoughts about helping set up something like this - can you reply to my profile email? Don't want to jam up your blog with all those details..
-Jonathan