SEPHILINA, the Nauti Girl

 Conventions, MY Projects, Nauti Girl
Jul 152010
 

I have been a hermit for the past few weeks and I’m just now coming up for air. The reason for the lack of posts here on the blog, not to mention my lack of human interaction out there in the real world, has been that I have been hammering away making a new book for COMIC CON. And I am pleased to say that I am finally DONE. Not a moment too soon. Whew!

It is a 40 page FULL COLOUR mini-digest sized at 5×7.25 inches, laid out in the LANDSCAPE format. About the size of one of those paperback MANGAS, but turned on its side (and nowhere near as THICK!) 28 of the pages are for a comic story and the balance are a Guest gallery in the back plus sketches of my own. I am pretty proud of this little book. I’ve seen the proof and it has come out very well; KENESS has done a wonderful job on the printing.

I’ve wanted to do a full colour comic book for ages but could never make the numbers work; my sales are low and the minimum print order (to get a low cover price) is usually very high. So my conundrum was to either A) go for a high volume/low unit price but be saddled with both a large investment and unsold stock (which I’ve done many times before) or B) spend less money for less volume but have an alienating cover price. Doing this book at the digest size made the full colour option affordable (both for me and my customers).

Part of the breakthrough for me has been finding a wonderful printer, who is both local and patient in answering my many questions as I formulate a plan for a new book. A few months ago, I began talking to KENESS printing, about pricing for a colour book. Based on those discussions I planned a reformatted, expanded and coloured version of an old 10-page SEPHILINA story (originally done for the BABES in SPACE anthology). Though I had a plan and a great quote, I wasn’t sure if I could actually get it all done in time. However, I recently had a HIATUS in my paying work, which gave me some spare time, and a chance to go for it..

My only regret is not making the book a little bigger. I was maxed out in the vertical (for a digest) at 5 inches but I actually could have made the horizontal about an inch wider, and I am not sure now why I did not. If it goes into a reprint I may expand it to 5×8. However, my REAL hope in a reprint would be to do a much bigger, re-formatted PORTRAIT style book. Both pages in any given two-page spread can be stacked two atop one another (ie; to become ONE page) if I ever get enough pages done to justify a big, album style book.

At the beginning of this project, I had roughly half the drawing already done, but even so, the remaining work was quite a bit to do; the half that was already drawn had to be reformatted to the LANDSCAPE format and then coloured, and the OTHER half had to be both drawn and coloured (not to mention written!) and all those fiddly dialog-balloons had to be dealt with… Even with the freedom to work on it full time for a few weeks, I was beginning to feel that I had bitten off more than I could chew, and worried that it would not get done in time for this year’s COMIC CON. But, happily, I made it. It is always fun to do Comic Con but it is an EXTRA satisfaction to do the show with a new book in hand.

So if any of you will be at COMIC CON next week please stop by BOOTH #1329 to visit myself and my old booth-mate RHODE MONTIJO. I will have this NEW BOOK, plus some buttons and prints that I have never sold at Comic Con before. Rhode will ALSO have new product; his charming new children’s book, THE HALLOWEEN KID. Awesome!!

Oh, and a heads-up; one consequence of my recent grind-stone, not to mention the fact that Rhode and I now both live on separate coasts, is that we haven’t been able to wrangle any crazy BOOTH THEME this year. Hopefully the joy in seeing our new product will offset the disappointment in not seeing us dressed as robots this time around? I hope so.

See you there!

 Posted by James Baker on July 15, 2010  21 Responses »

Sephilina BOOK

 Friends, MY Projects, Nauti Girl
Jun 162010
 

Lately, I have had my head down; jamming on a 40 page book for Comic Con next month, hopefully (time permitting) my first self-published book in FULL COLOUR. As a starting point, I have expanded and re-formatted an old ten page SEPHILINA story that I did for the BABES IN SPACE anthology (put together by Benton Jew & Ed Reynolds) several years back. After some re-writing, re-laying out and drawing additional pages (mostly a new beginning and ending) That story will now be 28 pages long. The balance of the 40 pages will be filled with sketches of my own plus a PIN-UP section in the back.

Most of the Sephi Pin-ups were done years ago (in a thread on the DRAWING BOARD) but one of them is being worked on now. I asked JULIA to do her take on the character and I REALLY love what she has come up with. Here is a sneak peek:

It is so much fun for me to see other artists do their version of my characters especially when the end-result is so appealling. JULIA is also posting step-by-step progress of her SEPHI PIN-UP on her BLOG so keep an eye on that… OK, back to the grind-stone for me!

 Posted by James Baker on June 16, 2010  5 Responses »

KAT and TELLY

 Conventions, Drawings, MY Projects, WRITING
Oct 252009
 













You are welcome to download this mini for free.

 Posted by James Baker on October 25, 2009  17 Responses »

Cloaking the Ship

 Drawings, MY Projects
Jul 032008
 

Here is another picture from my spare time project about a dog from outer space. This image is from one of the later books, where he returns in a fancy spaceship to visit the friends he made on Earth in his first adventure when he crash landed. You can see him here cloaking his space ship, which is parked above the rooftop of an apartment building that has a view very much like the view from the roof of the building where I live right now.

 Posted by James Baker on July 3, 2008  1 Response »

The Dog Star

 Drawings, MY Projects
May 172008
 

This is an image from a story I have been thinking about, off and on again, for years. It is about a dog from outer-space that gets stranded here on Earth.

The idea of an animal from outer space isn’t new, but I think my version is fresh enough to be worth the effort it would take to tell this particular story. I had a pretty good head of steam on this project when I first thought of the idea many years ago. I generated a lot of sketches, artwork and writing. Most of that was lost in my first ever experience with a frozen hard drive, and with it was lost a lot of the momentum behind the project. Recently I have been thinking more about this old idea and writing some new versions of the story.

Backed up, this time.

 Posted by James Baker on May 17, 2008  3 Responses »

In Space

 Drawings, MY Projects
Mar 192008
 

I once had an idea about a hypochondriac robot and a manic monkey/dog (a genetic-hybrid) who travel the galaxy selling useless products to aliens. Like door to door salesmen. Their space ship is the size of a small country but most of the interior is filled with cargo, so these two live in a cramped little command module. There is a lot of travel time from A to B in outer space so there’s plenty of time for these guys to really drive each other crazy in there.


I’ve always been a sucker for cartoon science fiction stuff, but this idea is really about sharing space with someone… Sharing a bedroom with your little brother or a cubicle with someone at work. It was inspired by staying in an apartment full of guys and the frictions that result from having room-mates; all those little annoying brouhahas over who ate who’s stuff in the fridge and so on. Just put all that button-pushing and passive aggressive shenanigans “IN SPACE” with robots and monkey/dogs and there you go. Sort of a Silent Running GlenGarry GlenRoss Odd Couple Ice Station Zebra type thang… for kids!


Anyway, it still makes me chuckle when I think about it so I guess I’ll blow the dust of this old idea and do a comic story someday….

 Posted by James Baker on March 19, 2008  1 Response »

The Tiniest Bear

 Conventions, Drawings, MY Projects, WRITING
Mar 012008
 
A long way away from wherever it is that you live right now, there once was a tiny little cottage at the end of a long and winding trail, deep inside a forest of tall and tangled trees.
Inside this cottage there lived a family of misfit bears. There was an enormous polar bear, a gigantic grizzly bear, a huge black bear, and even a teeny tiny Koala bear.
As everybody who knows anything about bears will tell you, koalas aren’t REAL bears. This koala was even less real-er than the others, for it was actually a little girl. Though not a real bear, the little girl had many excellent bear-like qualities.

She could dance just like a real dancing-bear. She could wrestle just like a real wrestling-bear. Also she was cranky when she woke up in the mornings, just like a real bear!
But best of all, like any real bear, she liked bear-hugs. The bears would hug her right back, though not at full bear-strength (they didn’t want to break her). Those bears loved the little girl as much as if she was a real little bear.
Even though she always cheated at cards.
The little girl felt more at home with those bears than she’d ever felt before and she enjoyed playing with them all year long.
Then one day, the first fall of snow painted the forest in white and announced to the world that winter was beginning.
The bears began to yawn. As everybody who knows anything about bears will tell you, bears sleep ALL through the winter.
The little girl did not feel sleepy. As everybody who knows anything about little girls will tell you, they DON’T sleep all through winter (unless it is night time, of course). The bears worried that the little girl would be lonely while they slept all winter.
So before they went to sleep, the bears gave her a present. They said “We will be asleep for a while. You may feel a lack of bear in your life. Open this if you feel lonely before we wake up.”
The bears each carefully hugged the little girl good night, and then they all went to sleep. As soon as they were snoring, the little girl felt terribly alone.
The little girl opened her present. It was a TEDDY BEAR. As everybody who knows anything about teddy bears will tell you, teddy bears have many excellent bear-like qualities, but they aren’t real bears.
Teddy Bears don’t need to sleep all winter (in fact they don’t sleep at all). So the teddy bear could keep the little girl company until the other bears woke up in the spring.
And best of all, teddy bears like bear-hugs. The little girl loved that teddy bear as much as if he were a real little bear.
Even though he always cheated at cards.
 Posted by James Baker on March 1, 2008  12 Responses »

WonderCon 2008

 Conventions, MY Projects
Feb 262008
 

My WonderCon sales were low this year. As to the socialising, I went to a “costume party” where about 6 people out of 200 actually wore costumes (Rhode and I being 2 of them). So the fun I had at this year’s WonderCon came mostly in making a new book.

Nothing but fun in the Abismo/Nerve Bomb booth!

After spending years using a fiddly time-consuming process on writing, thumb-nailing and inking my self-published comics, I have recently been looking for a looser, faster style. In order to find it, I have been trying to make MINI comics in a few days as opposed to months as has been the case before. The fast turn-around is in order to stop myself from noodling but I have a hard time keeping drawings clean, clear and appealing when working loosely. I haven’t yet found the style I am looking for, but I am liking the exploration.

I first tried this new approach last year when a professional project ended earlier than expected and I had two weeks worth of extra time before COMIC CON 2007. I decided to make a mini-comic, and in order to do that book quickly, I resolved to work about as loosely as I would normally do my professional story-boards, only draw one panel per page, have proportionally more text and no word-balloons. This removed a lot of the fiddly parts of comic-book layouts and the end result felt like a tiny picture book (at 5.25 inches wide and 3.5 inches tall). A lot of the drawing was very rough, yet I found the whole experience very satisfying. Best of all, I managed to get a 36 page comic book done in just under two weeks, a story about the little dog I got when I was 7 years old entitled, JOCK.

Drawing comics on the first day of WonderCon

More recently, I decided to make a comic even faster, in a 3-day weekend. This was partly Inspired by some 24 hour comics that I saw done by Benton Jew and Anson Jew. Rather than working 24 hours in a row, I would work an 8 hour day for 3 consecutive days on the President’s Day long-weekend. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to come up with anything I liked in the 3 days that I had set aside. I had a lot of variations on a few ideas but could not figure out which idea I wanted to do. So at the end of the weekend, I abandoned the notion of having something new done in time for WonderCon, which was less than a week away.

Then, on the following Wednesday morning, the ideas I had been toying with the previous weekend clicked into place in my mind and I quickly wrote out a simple little story that I liked a lot; a silly fairy tale about a little girl who lives with a family of bears, entitled THE TINIEST BEAR. With WonderCon beginning only two days away, I knuckled down to see if I could get this idea down on paper in time to sell at the con. In order to do this, I once again decided to work very loosely and at an even smaller size. The finished book was 2.75 inches tall and 4.25 inches wide. These dimensions meant that I could print a whole 16 page mini comic on one sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper (front and back) meaning that I could afford to do it all on my slow-printing ink-jet printer at home.

As it was, I needed 3 days to get it done and I took my laptop and Cintiq in to WonderCon on Friday to do last minute drawing at my booth. I worked on the drawings that same night and printed the pages out on Saturday morning, doing the page trimming and stapling at the Con itself, where the tiny books finally went on sale, as fresh as any comic book could possibly be. I have been “down to the wire” many times but never before to the point that I am actually working on the book at the show where I sold it!

Derek reads a freshly stapled Mini Comic

I was pretty happy with the story that I had written, and overall I had fun with the “3 day comic” approach. However, in order to get the artwork done in that time-frame, the drawings were very scribbly, which meant that customers weren’t immediately taken in by the artwork when they picked up the book and flipped through it. However, those few who took the time to actually READ the story usually bought it. Maybe next time, I’ll set aside more time for a polishing pass… I would still stick to the 3 days for writing and blocking-out the book and then have another 3 days to finesse the drawings add some tones and make the end result a little more palatable for the customers. It would still be satisfying to get something out under a week.

As to THE TINIEST BEAR, I plan to expand it to the proper length for a story book (24 pages, or maybe 32) and republish it myself, maybe even a colour version for this year’s Comic Con… and perhaps even submit it to a publisher as a proposal for a children’s book. I have more ideas for stories about the little girl and her bear posse… On the other hand, perhaps I might devote the time I have left this year to do other things instead… I have some comics stories that I would love to get cleaned up and put into a new comics book…

THE TINIEST BEAR; a scribbly-scratchy Mini comic

we shall see…

 Posted by James Baker on February 26, 2008  4 Responses »
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