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Everything I’ve been up to!

Building Doctor Baer’s Home

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The Blender model of the Doctor’s house is almost done!

It’s very reassuring to know that I now have his house as an asset to drop into any scene in future stories. I wish I had done this with the first book.

I’m feeling so emboldened by this I’m considering making the entire setting for the next story in Blender. It’d really only be like 20-30 houses, some cliffs, and an abbey on a hill. I’m watching the clock, though–if making the setting cuts too much into thumbnailing time, I’ll have to ditch it. This first five weeks of teaching full-time has been instructive for me in the sense of knowing how much time I’ll actually have for art production.

Read more about Doctor Baer here!

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Super Comics Challenge at CXC 2023!

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The game show where cartoonists match wits and pencils returns in-person to CXC in 2023! Join Raina Telgemeier, Coni Yovaniniz, and Rafael Rosado for some fun drawing games where the prompts are provided by YOU! Sunday, October 1,3-4pm at the Columbus Metropolitan Library Downtown branch. Check out Cartoon Crossroads Columbus for more information.

Check out a bit of Super Comics Challenge held virtually in 2020 featuring Gregg Schigiel, Gerimi Burleigh, Aaron Polk, and Elizabeth:

Super Comics Challenge at CXC 2023! Read More »

Doctor Baer Thumbnails are Underway

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And here’s chapter 1 of the next Doctor Baer book in sticky note thumbnails (my first guess at how the pages will look). I’m slowly adapting to teaching full-time and squeezing in time for personal projects. I found myself stopping and breathing to shut down the anxious little goblin sitting on my shoulder, shouting that I should maximize every minute. I’m hopeful that in the coming weeks I’ll find some kind of comfortable rhythm.

I’m sharing the entire process of making this book, including audio essays on my experience making it, over on my Patreon for Teams Pickles and up, by the way. You can sign up here!

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From the Sketchbook: New Doctor Baer Story

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I’ve recently finished a draft for my next Doctor Baer story. My plans are to serialize it as a webcomic, so I’m free to share as much of the process as I want.

Which is to say, if you don’t mind spoilers I’m sharing every step of the process of making this comic on my Patreon (Team Pickles and up!).

Or you can wait for the pages to appear here on the blog.

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Negotiating with Baba Yaga

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Another development piece for a short Doctor Baer story. In some of the stories featuring Baba Yaga her house is surrounded by a fence capped by human skulls, whose eye sockets glow eerily. I’m playing with that image to see what it might look like if Baba Yaga had some sentient skulls who assisted her similarly to how the Wisps assist Doctor Baer.

I’ve also updated the runes on Baba Yaga’s mortar. In the previous drawing I was aping some approximations of ancient Slavic script, but I remembered that I was sitting on a mystical alphabet I designed over 20 years ago:

Which appears at least twice in Two-Faced Statue.

Baba Yaga’s mortar got updated with these runes:

I’m not telling what it says. But I do plan on releasing a lot of Doctor Baer merchandise with this writing on it, so observant readers will eventually figure it out.

I’ve still got a lot of work to do on the outline, but my goal is to begin thumbnailing by the end of August. I’ll share what I’ve got as I go!

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The Immobilizer – Four Million Years Later, episode 22

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See: a Wheeljack invention that WORKS! Witness: Ironhide feel SAD!! Behold: a new flesh creature that can handle business Rosie-The-Riveter style!!! All this and Bumblebee visits the arcade!!!! (Sorry for Jerzy’s randomly-ramping-up-loudly audio in this one. I’ve taken away all his Bumblebee toys to punish him.)

Watch the episode before listening to our commentary:

The Immobilizer – Four Million Years Later, episode 22 Read More »

Baba Yaga, Pickles, and Taft

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Here’s another development piece for an upcoming Doctor Baer story. Practicing drawing new characters and new vehicles!

I’ve been consuming a lot of media around the Slavic witch Baba Yaga. One of the many fascinating features of the character is she flies around in a mortar. I thought it’d be fun to try to put my own spin on the vehicle.

It started in my sketchbook:

Once I got somewhere interesting I moved to Blender and built a crude 3d model:

Which I was able to import into Clip Studio Paint and position in the perspective I wanted:

And from there I penciled overtop:

And then inking, coloring, and etc.

I’m excited to be playing with new ideas for the characters, but anxiety is starting to build. If I want to create and serialize a brand-new Doctor Baer story next year, I need to get most of the writing done before the school year starts. Come late August, I’m working full-time as a teaching artist, which means I’ll have 1.5-2 hours per day to work on this at maximum. I’ll need every one of those hours to pencil, ink, and color the pages, even with these handy 3d models.

My hope is that the deadline will force me to commit to some ideas and get some momentum going. I’ve found that’s my only ally when it comes to writing/thumbnailing. It just takes so much to get it going.

But little pieces like these give me a promise of what could be if I just put in the time to work on it!

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Traitor – Four Million Years Later, episode 21

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Uh oh! Has somebody SWITCHED SIDES?? Behold: Cliffjumper cliffjump to conclusions!! Listen to young Jerzy discover the meaning of two different phrases!! And Hoover shows he appreciates easily-contented characters with no drive!!

Watch the episode before listening to our commentary:

Traitor – Four Million Years Later, episode 21 Read More »

Mercenaries on the Move

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Here’s an image with a few stories behind it.

Story one: the pub date for The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue has been pushed back for a third time. It’s now coming out in Fall 2024.

Story two: I’ve been teaching myself Blender so I can design some 3d model vehicles for upcoming Doctor Baer stories. You can output a Blender file to Clip Studio Paint as 3d material. Within Clip Studio Paint you can manipulate the model to set it in just the position you want, and you can even copy the rulers from that model into a drawing layer.

Here’s the blender file:

The bike I designed myself. The gorilla skull was purchased from Turbosquid.

I demonstrated how this all works on a recent live stream:

But who are these characters, and why should anyone care? I mentioned a while back that I was working on an outline for another Doctor Baer story, and that I wanted to put these mercenaries in it.

L to R: Shenandoah the barbarian, Dick the gizmoteer, and Kobros the creep.

The news about my book’s pub date got me thinking of getting something in motion sooner than later on another Doctor Baer story. Between the time of this writing and October 1st, 2024 are approximately 300 workdays, not counting holidays. Given my fall/winter schedule I can comfortably commit an average of 1.5 hours per day towards a new story. That puts me somewhere between 75-100 pages finished by the time Two-Faced Statue comes out.

Rather than have a half-finished graphic novel, I’m thinking of creating a shorter standalone story that I can serialize online leading up to the book’s release. It would certainly be a more compelling way to remind everyone that I have a book coming out next year.

So this image sums up my excitement around making lemonade out of this latest setback. I may not get to see my book in print when I had hoped, but I can use the wait time to come up with an exciting story with a giant thug of a cat, a two-headed cobra, and a little gadgeteer monkey who make life difficult for Doctor Baer.

More to come as I figure out what the story will be! But you can subscribe to the email newsletter or support me on Patreon to get more frequent and in-depth updates.

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The first drawing of Boulder

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Twelve years ago I sat down to do a live stream (I think on Justin.tv?) and drew a bunch of 3×3″ sketches on bristol. No expectations, no purpose, just drawing whatever came to mind. This was one of the drawings.

Not long after that I challenged myself to create a minicomic from scratch in about a week. Just an hour or two a day. And this bear drawing helped inspire the character of Boulder, one half of the titular team of that minicomic:

Boulder and Fleet: Adventurers for Hire Mini-Comic

I was making a lot of different kinds of adventure comics up until that point. Silver and the Periodic Forces, Switch Runners, The Replacements. They were all fun and imaginative stories, and a lot of fun to make. But I think this is the drawing where my interests shifted back to something I loved as a kid, which was drawing what C.S. Lewis called “clothed animals” stories. And my style started pointing to what my friend Dan Mishkin described as “action whimsy.”

Since then I’ve made a number of minicomics starring these clothed animal characters. And a number of graphic novel pitches. So it feels like the culmination of something to say that in autumn 2024 my middle-grade graphic novel The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue will finally be released.

I need to sit down to do more drawing without expectation. I’ll bet there are more meaningful twists and turns my subconscious has to offer.

The first drawing of Boulder Read More »