Dragonfly

In Japan, dragonflies are the symbol of courage, strength and happiness. This one was specifically done for my wife Kathy as a Christmas present, and hangs in our bedroom. It seemed somewhat appropriate for today.

TMNT Groupshot

Yesterday the artists here were contacted by Gary on behalf of 4kids. 4kids is putting together a 25th anniversary animation special about the Turtles and they were wanting submissions from all the associated artists. This is the piece I did for that purpose.
I had to smile at the similarity to the recent Nobody cover. It seems when I get a composition in my head, I'll sometimes reuse it several times. Notice also, a few shared design elements.

Please allow me to rant a little here. This was done as a freebie. In this year, when Mirage is paying 7 figures to a company to advertise and promote the Turtles anniversary, I find it vaguely insulting that we, the artists of Mirage, are expected to do this stuff without pay. Why is this? I want to know, who else is working for free? What is it about artists, that the work they do, has a stigma of having no value? I'm not sure why this is- perhaps drawing is thought of as common, or they see it as being effortless. That Mirage itself has participated in this attitude, I find somewhat sad and more than a little ironic.

Tales 60/Cover-Inked version

Done this morning, it's now ready to go to Steve Lavigne for coloring.

Tales of the TMNT 60/Cover

Another pencilled cover- this one done yesterday. This is for a Dan Berger story titled "Nobody Does It Better".

TMNT 31/Cover

I hesitated to put up this post. The reason why is that Volume 4 is no longer being published on any sort of schedule and I really didn't want to open a can of worms with regards to when the book is going to appear or why it's not coming out regularly. But as I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that most people already know about the situation with the TMNT title, and either accept it or don't. I honestly don't have any information to give you or even insight to the forces that affect the publishing of the book. That Pete chooses to keep it alive, even in this stunted form- you gotta give him some credit for.
That being said, what I want this blog to be is a public forum for my work and I don't want to edit that.

This was pencilled last Friday.

Paleo: Loner/ Page 5

Years back, I published a comic called PALEO: Tales from the Late Cretaceous. It was a ton of fun- I love dinosaurs and I've always been a fan of comics such as TYRANT and AGE OF REPTILES. Sadly, neither of these books are published any more and PALEO has also been among them. Much like dinosaurs themselves, these types of comics seemed to fade away into non-existence.

But not really.

I had a story that I wrote a while back that probably would have appeared as PALEO 9. I took this story and rewrote it and expanded it and ended up with a 72 page tale that now will be published as a TPB. I'm not sure when this will happen as the book is only half-pencilled at this point but I hope that it will be later on this year. I inked 3 pages yesterday and couldn't wait to share them. This is, of course, the title page- I'll post more as time goes on.

Casey

I do sketches at shows but sometimes I get contacted here at the studio to do a drawing for a fan. This was for a guy from Tennessee who wanted me to do him a Casey as he appeared in Volume 4- Issue 24.