· Art of Note Taking 6

English Lit. 303: The Death of Satan. An interesting interdisciplinary course on the changing attitudes in American culture towards Evil during the last two centuries. 

· Titan Returns

My sci-fi serial Titan is returning to the Study Group website starting today! Titan will be posting every other Thursday for the rest of the summer. 

· Art Of Note Taking 5

Notes from Russian Literature 372: 19th Century Russian Lit. I basically didn't know anything about the authors we covered (Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov, Turgenez, Shchedrin, Goncharov, and more), so I think I talked a little less then I usually do in class and thus doodled more.

Back with more notes next week, as well as the return of Titan!

· Stumptown Comics Festival this Weekend!

I've got a busy weekend ahead of me... not only is this my first Renn Fayre at Reed College, but I'm also exhibiting at the 9th annual Stumptown Comics Fest! Yikes!

The whole Press Gang team of Family Style, Study Group Comic Books, and Floating World Comics will be out in force at this weekend's Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland OR. This will actually be the first show where all thre Press Gang founding fathers (Jason, Zack, and François) will be present! There is a solid chance that the awesome will simply be too much and the Press Gang pavilion will burst into flames. 

In addition to all of our awesome publications, such as ELFWORLD, Study Group Magazine, D.I.Y. Magic, and much more, we'll also have all of the Good Ink titles from Scout Books which I've been editing, and bonus titles and art from some of our many contributors and friends. We'll have a wonderful array of creators hanging out and signing at our massive Press Gang pavilion including Zack Soto, Jason Leivian, François Vigneault, Benjamin Marra, Kaz Strzepek, Ian MacEwan, Andrice Arp, and more! 

Come by any time this weekend to visit!

April 28 & 29, 2012 • Oregon Convention Center • Sat. 10-6, Sun. 12-6

· "Jacks" on Study Group

While my space-economic-romance "Titan" goes on hiatus between Parts 1 and 2, my 2006 urban-hipster-tragedy "Jacks" will be running for the next month or so on the Study Group website. This early comic of mine has been largely out of print for a few years, so this is your chance to check it out if you haven't read it in its entirety. I looked over it in preparation for this run on SG, and I still liked it! Its a bit rough around the edges, and there's plenty of things I might change, but yeah, I'm happy to have it out there again. Enjoy!

· Titan Thursday

A new page of my ongoing sci-fi serial Titan is up today on Study Group! Check it out!

· Titan Thursday

A new page of my ongoing sci-fi serial Titan is up today on Study Group! Check it out!

· Titan Thursday

A new page of my ongoing sci-fi serial Titan is up today on Study Group! Check it out!

· Titan Thursday

A new page of my ongoing sci-fi serial Titan is up today on Study Group! Check it out!

· Titan Thursday

A new page of my ongoing sci-fi serial Titan is up today on Study Group! Check it out!

· Titan Thursday

A new page of my ongoing sci-fi serial Titan is up today on Study Group! Check it out!

· Titan Thursday

A new page of my ongoing sci-fi serial Titan is up today on Study Group! Check it out!

· Anaris, Elf Rogue

· Titan Thursday

A new page of my ongoing sci-fi serial Titan is up today on Study Group! Check it out!

· Review: Prophet #21

When the end of 2011 rolled around, I found myself wishing I had kept better track of the comics I had particularly loved in the year previous. With that in mind, and with the goal of sharpening my critical faculties over the coming year, I'm going to post some brief reviews, mostly, I imagine, of stuff I really dig, rather than stuff I'm hating on (this post has a little bit of negativity built in, but not much!).

I'm a late comer to the Brandon Graham bandwagon: I picked up an issue of King City (#12, the final one, it turned out, tho' I didn't realize it at the time), and was a bit lost and kina "eh" about what I saw. But leading up to the release of "Thickness" #2, I saw previews he put up online of his "Dirty Pairody" comic, and I was really looking forward to that anthology on the strength of that strip alone (when I actually got my hands on it, I was also blown away by Michael Deforge's "College Girl by Night," my nominee for story of the year). I loved Adam Warren's "Dirty Pair" comics back in the day, and Graham's hyper-eroticised version was a great extrapolation of that strip's cheeky sexuality brought into the light of day. It managed to have its cheesecake and eat it too, and this short dose of Graham's layered, punning humor turned me into a fan. I'm eagerly awaiting the King City collection, due in February, and I made a beeline to the comics shop to pick up the relaunched Prophet #21, with Graham writing and Simon Roy and Richard Ballermann on art duties.

Graham et al have crafted a messy, dirty, and downright nasty sci-fi world, and the reader is tossed right into the mix with as little prior knowledge as the title's eponymous hero, John Prophet. Emerging from a drill-tipped suspended animation pod, Prophet proceeds to vomit up a stimulant-filled pod, hack apart a five-legged predator, and chow down on his expired enemy, all without saying a word. Motivated by dreams, Prophet makes his way through a far-distant future inhabited by a mix of new lifeforms, like the already mentioned tulnaka and the hiber xull, a massive fish-like creature, and familiar, but disturbingly mutated animals, like wolves with parasitic growths and a whole colony of alien settlers. This is a post-human environment, where mankind has been reduced to the level of a farm animal, as Graham writes "The old land is harsher, now. Unforgiving." There are echoes of Planet of the Apes, but also After Man by Dougal Dixon and the ecological invasion themes of the War Against the Cthorr series by David Gerrold; this is a world where superhuman strength and an enhanced digestive track aren't the makings of a super hero, but basic equipment that's required for survival.

The first issue's narrative is remarkably focussed on environmental and bodily details; much of the plot concerns the food culture of this future earth, one of the most frequently recurring images is that of John Prophet casually chowing down on everything from bisected squirrell to the drumstick of one of the devolved humans the aliens keep as livestock. Sex also shows up in a way that jaw-droppingly subverts genre formula. If John Prophet is a later day Conan the Barbarian, a man of few words and great appetites, he's certainly far less squeamish than his literary predecessor ever was. If this is how the new Prophet storyline starts out I can't wait to see where it goes, the promised levels of body-horror and mind-bending storytelling seem like they'll certainly be far more "extreme" and genuinely transgressive than anything in the previous incarnations of the Extreme Comics titles.

Simon Roy's art is pleasantly chunky and raw-looking, and the realitive simplicity and boldness of his line is well-served by Richard Ballermann's colors, even when those colors muddle and confuse Roy's marks; the contrasts between the bright outdoor action and the dark and psychedelic scenes in the Jell City are wonderful. The art is highly suggestive of a well-realized environment and character-design without being fussy, and there's plenty of Graham's signature style here as well, with enumerated inventories and animate and personable opjects that will be familiar to readers of King City. I particularly love the cartoony, lumpy face they've crafted for Prophet's character, he looks like a disinterested lummox, and it will be interesting to see if the his character eventually bucks this initial stereotype or runs with it, I can imagine him being worth reading either way.

Prophet has all the trappings of an indie hit... I'm fascinated by this relaunch, and the Extreme revival in general. I came at the revival from the angle of Graham and Roy's Prophet, and to a lesser extent Joe Keatinge's take on Glory, and at first I thought the entire concept was a bit of a throwing in of the towel by Liefeld: "You know what, these characters really aren't going anywhere, and my era as an artist/writer is behind me... why don't I give 'em up to some hot-shot, crazy indie dudes and see what happens!" But now I see that Liefeld himself is taking on some of the art responsibilities for the new Youngblood comics (see a preview of all the new Extreme titles over on Robot 6), not to mention his resurgent career at DC comics... And the whole thing seems more bizarre.

When I went into the comics shop to pick up Prophet #21 (interesting, and I think, wrong-headed move to maintain the previous numbering in this case... And obviously a late change, the ad in the back advertises Prophet #2 as coming out in February), the front of the stack was wrapped in a Rob Liefeld varient cover that starkly shows the contrast between the old guard and the new. I hate to admit it, but I find Liefeld's art distasteful enough that if there hadn't been some of the lovely Marian Churchland covers in the shop I would have held off on making this purchase until I could find one (if you're a nasty snob like me you can also wait around fro Simon Roy's very nice 2nd printing cover, too).

Will there be any crossover between the fans of the new Prophet and say, Bloodstrike or Youngblood? More importantly to me, will there be any crossover in the plotlines of those other, rather awful looking books and this new run of Prophet? Let's hope not. I was excited to give some of the new DC titles a chance because I thought they would be largely self-contained, crossover-free stories, and that didn't last for long. I hope the folks at Image and Extreme know a good thing whe they see it and leave Graham and his co-creators their own private sandbox to play in.

· First episode of Titan up today

Two centuries in the future, the human race has spread across the solar system, colonizing and aggressively mining the satellites and asteroids to satisfy the Earth's insatiable energy needs. While the Terrans enjoy a new golden age of peace and prosperity on Earth and the inner planets, the Titans, genetically modified for generations to withstand the low gravity and harsh conditions in the off-planet factories and mines, suffer unseen and unheard. When productivity expert João da Silva is sent from Earth to the massive Homestead mining operation on the moon of Saturn, he finds himself caught up in the simmering tensions between the genetically-engineered Titan workers and their Terran managers. Mngr Da Silva must work against the clock to discover what is going on, before it tears apart the station and ignites a conflict that could change the face of the solar system.

Please check out the first four pages of Titan, available today on Study Group Comic Books, and check back in every Thursday for another installment... And please don't be shy with the comments here or on the Study Group site, I can use all the constructive criticism (and even encouragement) that I can get!

· Titan premieres Thursday on Study Group!

Hey there... I'm delighted to announce that I have a new, ongoing weekly webcomic over at the new Study Group Comic Books website, which is premiering today. Titan, a multi-part sci-fi tale starts up on Thursday, and will update with a new page every Thursday for as long as I can keep up that schedule! I'll be in wonderful company, Titan will be sharing space with serialized stories and one-off comics by folks like Michael Deforge, Zack Soto, Levon Jihanian, Jason Leivian and Ian McEwan, Farel Dalrymple, Jennifer Parks, Kazimir Strzepek, and more...

Go check it out, and return on Thursday for the first episode of Titan!

· I Cover Frank Cho's X-Men!

Oh snap! I've done another one of my drawings for the Covered blog... this time I'm tackling Liberty Meadows creator and recent X-Men artist Frank Cho... As always, I'm trying to tackle someone who's art I really enjoy, and yet is quite obviously quite different than my style... not to mention a super fucking draftsman! Frank joins an elite cadre of artists, in the past I've covered Adam Hughes and James Jean.

Anyone who knows me knows I grew up on the X-Men, and basically learnt to draw by badly copying Jim Lee, so its a delight to be revisiting those characters. Anyone who knows me will also tell you I'm a sucker for bodacious babes, which explains why my eye kept wandering back to this cover on the stands a few months back... Dude, Rogue's body be slammin'! Seriously, I had to laugh when I was marking up a copy for the purposes of reproducing the layout... Her cleavage is right in the center of the composition!

There's been a lot of talk lately about the intensity of the male gaze in the comics industry, and I have to admit I'm torn... No doubt that there's some egregious crap out there, and way too much of it, but I also guiltily like the cheesecake factor in comics, too. I think the thing that bugs me the most is that there's such a preponderance of a single body type in mainstream comics. Rogue's body, as Cho quite beautifully renders it, isn't impossible or anything... but when you walk into a comics shop that's the only female body type that you see, and I wish that wasn't the case. I mean, how sexy is Jaime Hernandez's work, with its multitude of female forms... not to mention the fact that they're more often than not fully formed characters.

Anyways, sorry to ramble... Please enjoy my little foray into superhero comics and my homage to Frank Cho, whose art I've enjoyed for many years now, and is obviously (in my opinion) not one of the worst offenders.

BTW, if you really love my drawing, I've got the original art for sale at my Etsy page.

· Press Gang Roundtable at Robot 6

I've been working with my pals Zack Soto (Study Group Comic Books) and Jason Leivian (Floating World Comics) on a new publishers group called Press Gang, which joins my lil' publishing house Family Style to their respectable small-press companies to create something a little bit more hefty and hopefully awesome. Sean Collins interviewed the three of us over at Robot 6, so check it out for lots of chatter about the pleasures and perils of collaboration, lots of previews of upcoming projects including ELFWORLD #3 and much more! We've got big plans for PG over the coming years, so stay tuned here, at the Family Style website, and the Press Gang Tumblr, too!

· Art of Note Taking 4

I think this wraps up the semester, unless I find a choice doodle hiding somewhere in my Pee-Chee folder. Next semester's classes include more HUM 110 (Greece & Rome), Post War French Cinema (in French! I'm a bit nervous about that), 19th Century Russian Lit, and aomething called American Studies: The Death of Satan. Hopefully all will be fodder for some good note-taking and good learnin'!

More from HUM 110:

More from English Junior Seminar on Invisible Man:

And some from my Encyclopedic Fictions class, which covered Moby Dick, Ulysses, and Midnight's Children. This was probably my most engaging and difficult class, which leads to less interesting doodles and notes, unfortunately.