JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

This is a pinup for my friend, (and constant source of inspiration) Ted Mathot, the creator of the splendid Rose and Isabel graphic novel. I have to confess that getting this picture done kicked my arse… I did a million thumbnails trying to decide on a composition, and the one I liked most I simply was unable to draw… Drawing “cool” or “bad ass” doesn’t play to my strengths (”Dumb ass” is more my line).

I have seen some other lovely pinups of Ted’s characters done by the likes of Sam Hiti, Rod Guen, John Hoffman and Scott Morse, and of course Ted is an art-monster himself, so perhaps I was feeling the pressure a little… In any case, I am looking forward to seeing the finished book and glad that a pic of mine will be in there someplace.

Rose and Isabel is the story of two sisters who run off to join the Civil War in order to find their missing brothers. Book One was out last year, and Book Two featuring the conclusion of the story, will be on sale at Comic Con in San Diego this July.

In addition to Doing 160 pages of Rose and Isabel, Ted also wrangled the production of, and did a short story for, Afterworks 2, the 360 page colour anthology of comics done by Pixar artists being released by Image comics later this year.

Oh, and when he isn’t cranking out quantities of superb comics, Ted also excels at his very demanding day job as a story artist.

Afterworks 2 is fantastic by the way. I have seen the book mock-up and it will absolutely be one of the “must buy” comic books of this year. I did not have a chance to read any of the stories but I saw a great variety of cool art styles; it’s a visual feast. Contributors come from the Animation, Story and Art departments at Pixar. Some of them (Ted Mathot, Mark Andrews, Scott Morse) may be familiar to comics readers already, but there will also be a lot of new faces to the comics scene (Pete Sohn, Jennifer Chang, and Jeff Pidgeon for example). This book gives animation artists, who largely work invisibly behind the scenes, a chance to show you what each of them can do as individuals. I can’t recommend this book highly enough to you.

It seems a few years ago “anthology” was something of a dirty word in comics, and yet lately some of the best books out there are anthologies…

This is an old drawing, done a few years ago for the 1st edition of the GOMER GUIDE (that I mentioned in the previous post about OBI-Wanna-Be). Like that sketch, this one is based on something I saw at Comic Con.

The context was this: after a few hectic days within the walls of the San Diego convention center without a break, we went to a nearby mall to get some food and sit outside and get some fresh air. Ahhh… The convention is fun but overwhelming at times, so a moment or two away from the hubbub works wonders.

As I was eating, I noticed some of the other patrons in front of me go slack jawed as they reacted to something over my shoulder. I turned around and saw a bunch of Comic con attendees in their Star Trek outfits walking nonchalantly around the mall…

I actually saw this scene take place at Comic Con one year.

This illustration is for the next edition of the Field Guide to Gomers, a catalog of comic-convention goers, (and other dorky folk) that a group of us card-carrying nerds are compiling, in the spirit of “it takes one to know one.”

The first edition was hastilly put together by a group of us when exhibiting for the very first time at Comic-Con a few years ago. Despite being assembled at the last minute (while we waited for our other books to be printed) The GOMER GUIDE was a lot of fun to make and one of our hotest sellers that year. (see some pics from the 1st edition here and here)

Since then we have been able to identify and document quite a few other phylum and genus of “Gomers” (such as OBI-WANNA-BE illustrated above) so we are long over due for an expanded edition.

Here’s a VERY preliminary tone-pass of an illustration for the bizarre story of an elephant that trampled a poor fellow and then kept the corpse, carrying it around for days…

In collecting elephant news stories, I’ve noticed that many of them are grim. Mostly for the elephants; stories about poaching, or loss of habitat, etc. But sometimes grim for the humans who live with them…

UPDATE: The colour piece based on this line art can be seen HERE.