Rose and Isabel
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…
