http://sketchcharlotte.bigcartel.com/

The 2012 Sketch Charlotte will make its debut this weekend at FCBD!  24 pages of all new, all original material from members of SC.  The best part is that copies will be free while they last!  Contributors include Stan Ford, Herc Petmezas, Henry Eudy, Joseph Mitchell Jr., Adam Bastuscheck, Jeremy Brooks, Rico Renzi and Brandon Padgett with an introduction by Seth Peagler.  Be sure to stop by Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find in Charlotte, NC or Borderlands Comics & Games in Greenville, SC to get your copy on Saturday!

Speaking of FCBD, several members of Sketch Charlotte will be participating in this year’s event! 
 
Here’s where we’ll be:

Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find – 1957 East 7th Street, Charlotte, NC 28204 – (704) 375-7462
Guests include:  Bridgit Scheide, Chris Brunner, Jason Latour, Herc Petmezas, Brandon Padgett

Borderlands Comics & Games – 1434 Laurens Road, Greenville, SC 29607 (864) 235-3488
Guests include:  Stan Ford

Hope to see you there!

The Kickstarter project to get Jet-Pack Jenny and the Factor of 01 printed has been launched! Go here to contribute at a level that gets you some nice incentives!

It took me five years to finish the story, but I’m very happy with it, and I feel like it’s actually worth asking people to contribute to see it happen. I just need $400 contributed in order to meet my printing goals, but if more is contributed, I’ll be able to print more copies. No money will go to waste.I will be printing these in July and shipping out as soon as I receive them from the printer.

So what will the printed collection contain? It will be 40 pages, containing all of the strips printed three to a page, with the book measuring  8″ x 7 1/4″, making every strip so much easier to read than if I tried to print this as a mini-comic and do two to a page. It also frees up lots of room for guest artwork, annotations giving you a behind the scenes peek at the making of the comic and sketches from the making of the comic.

Just in case you need more prompting to donate and make this book a reality, here are the donation incentives:

• Donate $10 or more and get a copy of the book with a free head sketch of the lead character, Jet-Pack Jenny. This head sketch will be inserted on a separate 5″ x 8″ card.
• Donate $25 or more and get a copy of the book and a free full body sketch w/background of Jet-Pack Jenny on 8 1/2″ x 11″ Bristol.
• Donate $50 or more and get the $25 reward and a piece of original art from the story. All original art is in strip format. I don’t think I need to say that you’ll get your choice of which strip, provided it’s available. Two are no longer available.
• Donate $100 or more and you get the $50 reward plus an original drawing of Jet-Pack Jenny done to your requested subject matter, hand colored, drawn on 11″ x 17″ Bristol. In case you’re counting that’ll be two drawings and a piece of original art!

Your help in getting this published would be greatly appreciated, and hoping to have to draw a lot to show how much I appreciate it.

An experiment in style and technique.

peace

Worked on this a bit at Sketch Charlotte last week and finished it over the weekend. Have to say it’s my favorite of the bunch!

Pencil & Copic & Micron pens on 8-1/2″ x 11″ 70# tab stock

Well friends, it’s been 26 freaky weeks since we set sail on this here good ship Alphabeasts and today we finally dock at the letter Z. I knew from Ahuizotl what beastie I’d be doing at this final moment, a creature I’d first seen late at night on a pre-cable television broadcasting 20 year-old shows into my 12 year-old brains. This guy here then is a Zanti Misfit as featured in the December 30, 1963 episode of The Outer Limits called, appropriately, “The Zanti Misfits.” I was something like negative 11 years-old when the episode first broadcast but had the good fortune to grow up watching WJZY (channel 46) on the regular in the days before my folks were willing to pay for television and I caught a rebroadcast somewhere in the latter days of the 1980′s. I’ll try not get on too big of a tangent but I look on those pre-cable days very fondly. There were only a handful of channels but they were chock full of old Tarzan, Godzilla, Lone Ranger, Kung Fu and cheesy horror pictures. WJZY showed old Star Treks, Twilight Zones and Outer Limits from about the time my parents would go to bed until midnight or so when the channel would go off the air to a Jimmy Durante clip. (“…and good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are…”) Anyhow, I regularly stayed up nights during the summer to watch these old shows. I loved the Outer Limits best of all because it was almost always freaky. I don’t have distinct memories of all the stuff I watched but I can recall very clearly the night I saw The Zanti Misfits. It’s one of those stories where the twist ending is a moral along the lines of “the human race: what a buncha assholes.” Those misfits really got me and that episode remains one of my favorites to this very day. Um…I should also say that I augmented this illustration with a nod to a fascination from high school regarding a whole other set of Misfits.

Pals, I have SO ENJOYED doing these Alphabeasts drawings week to week for the last half a year. The incredible art produced by the contributors to this project has been outrageously beautiful from the very first day. I’m proud to stand with this very talented and dedicated crew. The biggest of ups has to go to project organizer Andrew Neal who dedicated himself tirelessly to collecting the entries from all over the dang place and arranging them onto the site with handy dandy tools to search by letter and artists and so forth. It was a lot of work and he proved himself super capable of conquering the challenges week after week. Andrew runs one of the best comic book shops in the State of North Carolina (and I know ’cause I live in North Carolina) so, if you are ever in Chapel Hill,  do your eyeballs a giant favor and stop in at Chapel Hill Comics to experience the wild sensations of comics shop excellence. I should, I know, link to all my great friends from the project but time is short at present so here’s some virtual fist bumps to fine folks like Isaac Cates, Sam Wolk, Lupi McGinty and AZ, Ben Towle, Leah Palmer Preiss, Rich Barrett, E.C. Steiner, Christian Sager, Caitlin Lehman, Brandon Padgett, Tom Davidson and the probably dozen more friendships that have been made or firmed up over the Alphabeasts Project. It’s been a wild ride, friends, now let’s all catch some Zzzzzzz’s.

Last week was just too fulla crazy important, super stressful stuff for me to find time to get my Y Alphabeast down on paper. So, regretfully, here is a very rushed version of Yoshi from the wide variety of Super Mario Brothers video games that kept my little brother completely preoccupied all through the 1990′s and early 2000′s. I, myself, do not play vidja games or even have much interest in them but an opportunity to have Mario paraphrase Bruce Willis is not to be missed.

If you head on over to the official Alphabeasts site, you’ll see that Xenomorphs have truly ruled the day so far as the letter X goes. So I figured, hell, why make this a stand up fight? Let’s have ourselves a bug hunt. Frankly, these things are just too damn cool for me not to take a stab at drawing one, even if it might be at the expense of raising the ire of ol’ H.R. (Mr. Giger to you all). Those savvy bastards among you will surely recognize the world’s greatest Bill Paxton quote floating around as an extra.