The Creppertins--for August

Here is the newest Creepertins strip for the Delaware Valley Magazine, this time the kids are in full summer mode. The next time the strip appears school will be back in session and the leaves starting to turn...seems summers gone by pretty fast already.

Batman Brave and the Bold Trailer

The B and B team were at the Comicon of Friday for their panel where they premiered a sneak-peak trailer for the show.

I think it looks swell!

Power of Shazam-Pencils and Inks

Here is a page from one of the issues I penciled and inked on my long run on DC's Power of Shazam comic. You can see how loose I would get sometimes with the pencils if I new I was going to be inking the book myself, I could leave some of the drawing to the inking stage. I always liked that book and think both Jerry Ordway and Pete Krause did a great job on it and I had a blast. That was the last regular monthly comic I did before I started mostly working in animation.

Vampirella

One of the jobs currently in my studio is an issue of Vampirella, which I am inking over the pencils of my good buddy, John Heebink. John and I have worked together many, many times over the years, often on Elvira, and to me, the best thing we ever did as a team, Doll and Creature along with our buddy and writer, Rick Remender.

Since the deadline is tight (when isn't that the case in comics?) and John lives in San Fran, he scanned and put the pages on my server and then I downloaded them and printed them out in non-photo blue, and then inked them. I prefer inking the original pencils, but this works to save some time and of course $$$$.

I think this issue is out sometime in September or October.

Busy Times

Boy,things have been busy around these parts the last week or so. Between my regular Warner Brothers gig on batman, and my two teaching gigs at PAFA and DCAD I added another class, this time teaching a cartooning and illustration coarse at Moore College in Philly for their Five Fridays program. I am teaching a class of 9-year-olds, which believe me, can be a challenge when the class lasts from 9am till 4. But it's a good group if kids and they really did a lot of drawing and painting and we had a lot of fun.
Some of the kids paintings and drawings from the workshop.

They are all huge Spongebob fans, so my talent with imitating voices from cartoons went over big. I tried to teach them about some basic things like color and had them mix their colors using just red, yellow and blue. It's amazing how fast a few of them took to mixing up all kinds of colors. I took the job on a whim as they didn't have a teacher for the class, so my buddy Jamar who teaches at Moore called and asked me if I'd do it, and so I said yes and then just winged it.

Next week we are going to try tackling drawing some comics.

I have also been inking a Vampirella job over the pencils of my buddy John Heebink for Harris comics and trying to finish up the newest issue of Draw! It should be out I figure about the 2nd week of August.

Another thing I have been trying the last few weeks is doing dome alternative process printing with my friend Kelly who's teaching it as a class at DCAD. Since we both teach on Saturday, when I am done I go down in the lab and hang out with her and see what she's up to. The Alternative printing she teaches is really interesting and goes back to the very origins of photography. By treating various papers or glass slides with light-sensetive solutions you can make all kinds of great looking prints, contact prints, without having to use an enlarger. This is a Cyanotype print i did this afternoon of a picture I took in a an old Chinese city in Dali, China, built in 1390. I took this on my trip to China last year and I hope to make a few more prints like this in the future. Kelly is a great photographer and a good teacher, so it's always fun. I even made a print from a photo I took in my photography class in high school.

I always liked photography too, guess it runs in the mankey blood as my dad a great pic snapper as is my brother Marc.

More Batman Zero

Two more pages from my pencils on Batman Issue Zero, too bad my xerox copies are so-so. Somewhere I think I have much bigger copies, maybe I'll find then buried away in the attic. I sometimes wonder with there being so much batman material out there, if people sometimes just get tired of the ol' Caped Crusader?

House of Secrets

Sorry for the big break in posting in the last week, but between the holiday, starting to teach my new cartooning class at PAFA, my regular Saturday class at DCAD, my work on Batman, Brave and the Bold and my eight page comic job for DC featuring the Secret Saturdays--well, I've been kinda' busy.

As most of you know who have been reading my blog for a while now, I was one of the Storyboard artists on the new cartoon Network show, The Secret Saturdays, created by my buddy Jay Stephens, who I have a nice long interview with in the next issue of DRAW! And so, like just like every show on Cartoon Network that is produced and run here in the states, like Ed, Edd and Eddy, Samurai Jack, etc., the show eventually either gets it's own comic by DC, like Justice league, Batman Adventures, Superman Adventures or joins the pages of one of the anthology comics, currently the Action Pack comic.

Since I knew the cartoon was going to premiere this summer, last spring I inquired at DC about doing some stories for the comics featuring the SS. It turned out that yes indeed, DC was doing some comics, so I hooked up some work. The splash page above is from the splash of the eight pager I just finished penciling that will be inked by Jay. Originally jay was supposed to draw, and I ink, but since he's still super-busy with the show, we switched jobs on this story.

This story I think hits the comic shop in August of September. Below is my layout, drawn at comic size.

Mike Manley for President!

That's right true believers, the time is now! I am running for the highest position in the land--President! Movere over Obama and Mccain--let a real Man to the job.

Batman Begins

The page above if the splash I penciled from Batman 0.

It seems the more things change the more they got back to the same-old-same-old. I was reading about how in the comics batman is going to disappear or retire, or die or something. Basically Batman is going away...again, and is yet again going to be replaced by a new, younger Batman. When I read that I chuckled to myself, I mean, what, 15 years ago they did the same thing when I was drawing the title. Something which was very disapointing to me actually, as when I drew Batman I had to draw Azreal, not Bruce Wayne, and that frankly--sucked. I did enjoy Batman Beyond very much though, as that took the edict, MAKE A YOUNGER BATMAN and did it right, and fun, and that cranky old version of Wayne was the best ever.

There were few books I could say at that time I would have been jazzed to work on, and Batman was one of that handful. So getting the book to draw and then that whole storyline at the time was pretty disappointing to me. But batman Issue 0 was fun,because it was like an old Batman comics, one I read as a kid and it had the real Batman in it. Not some dude in impossible goofy armor.

I guess in comics things seem to cycle around in 10 years or so, so I assume Superman will die again next, or Wonder Woman, The Hulk, etc. That seems to often be what the creative types feel is left, kill off the character, bring back a new version, which we all know will only be around for so long before we return to the tried and true licensed up the wazoo version.