Saint Catherine

Here's a very quick comic I doodled out when I went to Italy last summer.  I am almost obsessed with the reliquaries and I took photos of over 100 different ones.  I think I am going to do a book of paintings of them.

Drugs are stupid

Here's a few pages about drugs that I drew in class.  I'm ashamed to say that it's a true story.  I am thinking of doing a whole mini with stuff like this, but I don't want it to seem like I'm bragging about this stuff, even in a self-deprecating way.

Rejected!

Here are three pages that were too dirty to make it into the last book, somewhat incomplete.  Also, they were too gag-oriented, and badly drawn.  Enjoy!

on the rainbow

So Cheese, of House of Twelve renown (www.houseoftwelve.com), who is sort of my comics mentor, has suggested that in my last few pages I've lost some of the "subtlety" and "restraint" that reviewers (like the good people at inkstuds and comics reporter) seemed to enjoy.  I would be inclined to agree.  In horror movies there are two schools of thought: you either show only glimpses of the monster and blood spattering the walls, or else you show everything, all the gristle and gore and titties and whatnot.  Most artistically outstanding horror movies are of the first type (Rosemary's Baby, Nosferatu), and they tend to have a lot more dignity and subtlety.

I would love to be able to pull off something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where everything is shown, but half the story is left unsaid.  I'm not sure whether to push on with the ugliness thing and risk loosing the finesse that people liked in the last ish.

Apropo of nothing, here's the rejected cover for the first issue:

Buy it

Where, you ask, can you get Milk Teeth, Jelly Roll, Nine Monsters etc. ?  Well, you can order them from www.fatback.etsy.com, or you can buy then in New York City at Forbidden Planet, CosmicComics or Jim Hanley's.

unfinished pages

Here's a couple of pages from a work in progress, Unicorn Hunt.  This is the only creature I plan to revisit in any form, but I wanted to do a little more with the unicorn.  Unicorns are so interesting because, at least in the west, they have been used to represent male power and sex, but also as a metaphor for Christ, and 

you see both of those in the classic Unicorn Series tapestries at the Cloisters in Inwood, NYC.  You have the seductive element and the purity/sacrifice element.

I just watched Ingmar Bergman's "Virgin Spring", and I found the Pagan element really compelling, this sort of barbaric sexuality, in contrast with the primitive Christian humaneness.  Have you ever seen Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left"?  I don't know if he did it on purpose, but it is almost exactly the same plot as "Virgin Spring", but the murderers are bloodthirsty 

rapist hippies.  

Anyhow, so I wanted to throw a Pagan view up against the Christian unicorn allegory.

New Monster!

As promised, here's a monster from the second issue of Milk Teeth.  I created it, of course, at the NYC Natural History Museum, where I was drawing from the dinosaurs and rhinoceri.  I get a very strong feeling that's like joy and dread together from some of the animals there, particularly the prehistoric giant mammals called the "megafauna".  With the dinosaurs gone, the shrews and other tiny mammals had nothing to limit their size, and there was an explosion of monstrous mammals, like sloths the size of grizzly bears and giant anteaters.  I get very excited picturing them alive and walking around on this planet that had been completely burnt and poisoned by the recent meteor crash.

The issue I'm working on now will be mostly big, powerful monsters like that.  Since it's about scary things, it will probably also be a bit more raunchy and violent.

SPX

For those of you who don't remember, I had a blog half-heartedly going for a while that sort of died before it was really born.  I still used dial-up until a month ago, and my connection was like in the Flintstones, when Wilma opens the dishwasher and there's a hedgehog or something slowly crawling on  little treadmill to power it and it shrugs and goes, "eh, it's a living."  And also it shut down a lot.  Well, now that I have joined everybody in the Jetsons future with it's whiz-bang quick internet, I will have no tedious connection to blame for my laziness in updating this sucker.

Still reading?  OK, so I just got back from SPX, which was pretty great this year.  I saw a lot of new stuff from people I already liked (like Liz Baille and Dongery) and some new stuff like Mammal and the Buenavista Press stuff that I will never be able to afford.  They've got some nerve asking $30 for a comic book, cool though it may be.  Is that how you know comics are really art- when you can't actually buy them?  My favorite find was a mini "Creator Showcase" from "Team 8 Press" featuring Tom Batten (script) and Matt Deans (art) with some really great monster art and weird, interesting writing too (check it out here). 

"Team of 8" is a little too close to "House of Twelve" if you ask me, but it's good stuff.  There was also a new D&Q sketchbook called "Milk Teeth" that was far inferior to my comic by the same title.  And also a guy selling a series called "Gellyroll", which is like my mini series, "Jelly Roll", but with a 'G', see?  It's getting to be too hard to be original in this here scene.  This is how you end up with comics called "Lift Your Leg, My Fish is Dead" and other such nonsense.

"Milk Teeth" #1 sold really, really well (buy it on www.fatback.etsy.com) and I have started work on #2, which will feature monsters instead of magical creatures.  I accidentally threw away the fully penciled first 4 pages (noooo!) but I'll post 'em as soon as they're re-done.