Odd and Ends

Darkhawk figure is in the house! I still haven't seen the Guardians 2 yet, but I hear this figure is hot right now. Still no word from Marvel about and so I had to buy my own copy.


Its been a bit since I updated here and I have been super busy with the strips and the end of the school year. But let's face it, when am I not busy?  The two strips have me at max capacity so I have hired an assistant Mimi and pulled in the help of my buddy Scott Cohn to help on backgrounds to gain some time.

                          Mimi sorting the piles of comics and then there are all the paintings

Mimi starts the full time crunch this summer and has already been working for me a few months, mainly putting my art in order, but she has pitched in a bit on the strips too time/school allowing.


Then Mimi challenged me to try my hand at drawing a manga style drawing, so I did. Not sure how manga-ish it is but it was fun to just wing it.

I also had my final class of the year for the After School Program at PAFA, it was a fun yer full of great kids. Budding artists all! The student show is hung this weekend.


One of the cool things I came across on a recent Ebay hunt was a year (1957) of Judge Parker strips by the original artist Dan Heilman to did the strip into the mid 60's when Harold LeDoux took over full time. I heard that he was helping Heilman along from the 50's doing backgrounds etc. Hellman had a journeyman_Caniff based style which was very common up until the 60's when that style faded away more and more with few exceptions like Frank Robbins. Its interesting to see what the strip was like before Sam Driver entered the scene and to see Randy, the son of the original Judge as a kid, along with his sister who was evidently written out of the strip decades ago. Randy is now the judge as the original Judge Parker retired about 10 years ago during Eduardo Baretto's run. the strip was much more serious and the storyline I have is about bullying and juvenile delinquents which was very much a topic back in those days like the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle. The Strip has steered far away from any topical or social cometary based storylines that I can see for decades and is much more a typical soap these days.

 I have also been warming up some mornings by doing a few Phantom Sketches which I will ink up and sell via Ebay, so stay tuned for the links. I have a few more and might do up to a dozen and then post them all.

Then on a quick break I went  to the great Howard Pyle show hosted by Drexel University where Pyle taught illustration classes for two years before he opened his own school in Wilmington DE, where he taught the likes of NC Wyeth. 

its a must see show if you can make it

April 3-June 18
Paul Peck Alumni Center
3142 Market Street
Open Monday-Friday, 9-4 p.m.
Free and open to the public

A great show featuring Pyle, NC Wyeth, Rockwell, Lyendecker, Parrish and more.