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.