JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

This picture was done before I had ever used Photoshop, so the textures were cut out of magazines and glued over a pencil drawing. The line-art is on the paper and on a celluloid overlay. The idea of combining photo-textures with hand drawn animation appealed to me but I could never get anybody else to go for it, despite pitching it on several different projects. This image was a style-proposal for a “healthy dog food” commercial.

Speaking of dogs, I am now working on a MINI COMIC about the dog I got when I was 7 years old. The basis for the tale is a story I had written down a few months ago but didn’t post here because it was too long for a blog post… but just the right length for a MINI-comic.

A mini seemed to be a good excuse to do things differently. So far, I have done the whole thing digitally, all drawn on my 15 inch Cintiq. This has allowed me to play around with ALL the elements - text line and tone - at a much earlier stage of the process than I am used to and I’m enjoying that flexibility. This the first time that I have made a comic this way and it was inspired by watching Ted Mathot working digitally on his Rose and Isabel epic.

The mini will be in landscape format and about half the size of the comics I normally do, at 4.25 X 6.5 inches. Because of the “wide-screen” dimensions, the fact that there is only one panel per page, and proportionally more text, the mini is looking more like a tiny children’s picture book than a standard comic book.

Apart from trying to get away from the clutter of my typical page layouts (which are really jammed with panels) my goal is to draw this one looser than the comics I have made before, but hopefully still have some appealing “drawing” in there. I had in mind the typical level of finish of the storyboards I do professionally, which can be rather scribbly at times.

Depending on how fast I draw, the mini will be either 32 or 36 pages and will be printed at KINKOs or some other copy shop. I will probably make about 100 or so to sell at COMIC-CON.

San Diego’s Comic Con is coming up, and thinking of Comic Con reminds me of booth-gals posing in the most difficult-to-wear costume of all time:

The gomer-showdown begins in less than 8 weeks, so I still have some time to prepare new stuff, most likely prints, sketches and maybe a mini-comic. Abismo/Nerve Bomb will be exhibiting in the same great spot as we had last year; BOOTH #1329.

Hope to see you all there!

I will be making some GICLEE (which I think is French for “ink-Jet”) prints of the illustrations in the Elephant book to sell at Comic Con. It is a good excuse for me to buy a nice printer, which I have been meaning to do for some time.

There are 60 or so illustrations in the book, including those that are just wallpaper for the text to lay over, but there are maybe 10-15 contenders for prints. Some of the illustrations I was most happy with may not be the kind of picture that someone wants framed and hanging on their wall… People getting stomped and elephants getting shot at for example.

I am having a hard time picking which ones to make prints of… If any of you good people who bought the book have suggestions for illustrations you think might make nice prints, please let me know. For those of you who don’t have the book, you can see most of the pics online here.

And while I am in the market for advice, if anybody can steer me towards a good colour printer, or even give me hints on what features I should look, for then I am all ears.

Recently there were ELEPHANTS IN THE NEWS book launches in both hemispheres, North and South. Dad launched the Elephant book (plus another book he has just written) at the official book launch in my home-town in Australia. The photo here is courtesy of my Aunty Marg who was instrumental in getting the book published, as it was she who who introduced my Dad to the publisher. Without that introduction the book would have been self-published, Black and White, and a mere shadow of the beautifully printed book it eventually became. So thanks, Aunty Marg!

The Northern hemisphere “launch” took place two days later, when I sold the Elephant book to attendees of the APE convention here in San Francisco (photo by Jeff Pidgeon). By a funny quirk of fate, my neighbour-exhibitor was Ryan from ELEPHANT EATER PRESS so I made sure to stack my elephant books as far from his table as possible to prevent my stock from being eaten before I could sell it. I am happy to say that the stampede of Elephant sales made this particular APE my best yet, financially speaking. Sadly, I had no booth-buddy this year as Rhode was at a wedding. Last year he missed Wondercon to attend a wedding, so if the pattern persists, NEXT year he will miss Comic-Con because of a wedding…

It better be HIS wedding next time. I’m just sayin’…

Even though I was running the table solo, I was far from lonely. At one point on Saturday a fellow, who I had never even laid eyes on before, came up to my table earnestly chewing away at a bowl of candy. After a pause, to swallow whatever tasty treat was in the bowl, he demanded a FREE HUG. When I told him that there may be someplace at APE where he could get himself a hug, but my table certainly wasn’t the place, he went away, with a confused look on his face, still chewing on his candy. A few minutes later he gave ME something to chew on when he returned holding the official APE handbook, opened to the Exhibitors page, and pointed to the listing for our table. It said “Abismo/Nerve Bomb, events: FREE HUGS. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.” Well, this was news to me as I had not filled out the paperwork myself for this particular convention. Rhode and I take turns on that… and this year it was HIS turn.

Next year when it IS my turn I will get him back somehow for these double-punk cheeky shenanigans…. Any ideas for creative-payback? Please add comments below (The winning suggestion gets a FREE HUG).

Without a table-partner, I had to be strategic with my breaks and I didn’t have the chance to walk around and do any shopping. Thankfully, some great books were brought right to me as I sat there. Jennifer Chang and EunJu Lee were first time exhibitors at APE this year and both had made some SWEET mini-comics that I was lucky enough to get copies of. Jennifer’s book stars KITOSAN the food-obsessed little character who was in her AFTERWORKS piece, this time he is showing us how to make TEA.

Blair Kitchen hooked me up with the first two issues of his hilarious goofy-hero comic, THE POSSUM! He isn’t a parody of another hero, he is gifted with his OWN truly silly super power and the comedy comes from him making the best of it. If you like action-comedy comics then take a look at this book full of chuckles and beautifully kinetic action sequences.

Here’s another one of the brush-pen sketches I did while sitting at the Abismo/Nerve Bomb booth at last year’s Comic-Con.

As to THIS year’s comic Con, I am still trying to figure out if I have enough time left to make something ELSE to sell, in addition to the new Elephant book (and selling some prints of the illustrations) especially as my work schedule wont leave a lot of spare time in the next few months…

I have already blocked out a lot of Rocket Rabbit stories, but past experience tells me that I wont be able to get any of them done in time for July and I would prefer not to rush them. So I had thought of doing a little book of pin-ups of established characters, but it seems like a lot of work on something that isn’t really “mine,” so now I am leaning towards a MINI-comic of some kind.

My apartment is now home to a herd of elephants. They arrived from New Zealand a short time ago and they will be staying with me at least until this weekend’s A.P.E small-press comics show in San Francisco. (To see all the elephant illustrations that I’ve posted in this blog so far, go here).

It is such a relief to finally have these books in my hands. I often have bad-luck shipping stories, but this time there were an unusual number of SNAFUs, even for me. Thankfully, that is all behind me now, and the good news is that the book came out very well indeed. The publisher and designer did a very nice job on the printing and binding. It isn’t exactly like anything I’ve seen before. The end-papers are glued to the cover as in a hardbound book but the cover itself is a lighter stock than a regular hardback, so it feels like something in-between. I like the size very much. Even though I had nothing to do with choosing the dimensions myself, it is smallish, roughly the size and shape of my self-published books.

As you can see in the above photograph (all kindly taken by Rhode) the publisher has also outdone himself in the display department, making some neato little customised book-stands that feature a sculpted representation of the elephant on the cover.

I will be selling my copies here in San Francisco at roughly the same time as the official BOOK LAUNCH, which is happening in my Home Town in Australia. My Dad will be launching this book, along with another that he wrote in the time I took to illustrate this one. I am sorry not to be able to attend the book launch myself in person but I have to be here to sell MY copies. This collaboration with my Dad has brought a lot of joy to the both of us and I do believe that some of the fun in making it has been captured on the pages, so I hope that some of you may get a kick out of this book too. After raising these pachyderms, now I am hoping to find some good homes to send them to. If any of you are interested, then see me at APE this weekend, at COMIC-CON in July, or E-MAIL ME.

The book is on sale now in Australia and New Zealand, but many of the stores that were offering it online down there have already sold out. Because of the demands made on the stock, I was only able to get about half the number of books that I had intended to order, so I am not sure how long these will last.

BUY NOW to avoid disappointment!!

Another quick Super-Heroine sketch done while sitting at my booth at a comics convention. This one is of my new favourite super gal; POWERGIRL.

I got a bit lazy with the hands and feet on this one, so I’ll tidy them up later.

I did this BATGIRL doodle (in grey brush-pen and pencil) along with a bunch of other super-heroine sketches, while sitting at my booth during last year’s Comic Con in San Diego. Rafael Navarro put dibs on this one almost immediately, but in the hectic swirl that is Comic Con, we didn’t get a chance to meet again before the con ended. However we finally got to close the transaction earlier this month at Wondercon in San Francisco. It is nice to know that she has gone to a good home…

This is the title page for my Dad’s book “Elephants in the News”. At one point I had thought it may have been a good design for the cover, but instead the publisher used an interior illustration that had been featured on the earliest mock up, because that image had become associated with the book in the minds of so many people.

This illustration was done in coloured pencil on Canson paper and then I adjusted the saturation and contrast in Photoshop. The rough sketch for it was already posted here.

Thanks to all the people who came by the Abismo/ Nerve Bomb booth at WONDERCON last weekend. It was a low key show for me (as I didn’t have any new books and I didn’t do any shopping) but it was fun, as always, because of the people-watching and meeting old friends.

See you all at A.P.E. where I should FINALLY have my new book on sale!

Here are some of the sketches I did while sitting at the Abismo/NerveBomb booth at last months Comic Con. Drawing famous heroes is a first for me, and I had quite a bit of fun doing it. I’ll post some more when I get time.

Speaking of Comic-Con, I was only recently able to get my hands on the stuff I purchased down there, my stash was packed up in some boxes that I couldn’t get to for a week or two, but now I am spending the evenings reading through all the stuff I bought…

The daylight hours are spent drawing elephants, and I still have quite a few to go. I’ll post some of those too, as they get finished in the next week or two. My Dad, (the author of the book), is in the USA for a visit, and we will visit some Civil War sites in Virginia and Maryland later this month, along with my brother Joey who lives out that way.

After that quick break, I will be back to drawing and colouring elephant illustrations… and hopefully I will have finished all of them by the end of September.

UPDATE: I posted some more Super-Heroine scribbles:
BatGirl
Powergirl