St Charles Place - Complete

Bringing It Home

I don't know if  you've noticed, but I have not been posting a lot here lately, mostly because I haven't actually been drawing as much lately. Time I would normally spend creating new comics has been mostly dedicated to putting together a book of some older comics I drew in a blank book many years ago. These comics are a precursor to my Drawing Breath comics, still being a sort of illustrational journal of my life at the time, but rather than drawing myself in the starring role, it's a bit more Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with my comic characters - Gerb, Longleg the dog, and Wormy the worm - commenting on what's happening in my life from the sidelines. I call it Home Gerb Companion ~ Le Chronique de Comique.

 

So I've been spending many afternoons and evenings flipping through this journal and, with Palama the platypus aiding me by holding open the book, photographing each page in turn then cropping and fine tuning them. This is why on some of the pages you can see distortions of the drawings as if they are curving toward the binding of the book. Sometimes Palama couldn't keep the book entirely flat. 

I am not always the center of what's happening as my characters come to terms with living inside a book...

...But they do celebrate with me my achievements...

...And they console me through my challenges...

Drawing women has never been my strong suit, which Gerb knows and sometimes exploits by hanging out with the Amazons when he doesn't want to be drawn. At the time of the comic, though, I was married to a fellow artist, Bobbi Blackwell aka Mrs. Cartoonist Dude, and I would just have her draw the necessary panels if needed...

She is not the only guest artist. As it turns out, Longleg is also a cartoonist whose work occasionally ends up on the page, as a comic within a comic, which is always fun...

And sometimes Newmar, Bobbi's teddy bear, would get a hold of the book and attempt to draw his own adventures, seeing as they were so much more adventury than my own... 

The fun thing is that, if it were Newmar drawing, I'd pencil it with my left hand and ink it with my right. If it were Longleg drawing, I'd pencil with my right hand and ink it with my left.

So, as production of new comics experiences a bit of a lull, you can rest assured that I am not idle. Soon this new book will be available for purchase, and meanwhile you can check out my other graphic novels and coloring books here on my Blurb Store.

 

Spider-Me

I've long talked about how being a Shaman, especially at times when I had another day job, feels like what it must feel like to be Peter Parker - Living two different lives in two different worlds. Even today, as a full-time Shaman, I'm still learning to integrate the realities and truths of shamanic life with the logistics and limits of the 'mundane' world. 

In a previous comic from twenty years ago, I drew Longleg the dog carrying a hefty stack of library books with fictitious titles to be checked out, then asks for some books he has on hold, including one entitled "Living a Quantum Reality in a Newtonian World" (highlighted below).  That in a nutshell is what I'm describing, and I'm secretly hoping that someday someone (perhaps me?!) actually writes that book. 

By the way, his library account number is actually the phone number (plus area code 320) of Gary's Pizza in St Joseph, Minnesota, which made up the major proportion of pizza consumption during my college career at near by St John's University (which is why I still have it memorized all these decades later).  

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The Saga of Didrik - Complete

Now that I have finished this particular adventure of Gerb and the gang, I wanted to put all the pages together in one post. Ta-da!!

 

Saga of Didrik page 19 plus one

Finally, as was my stated intention a couple posts ago, here is the final page of my Saga of Didrik story! It is the first of many stories I wish to compile into a collection of archery stories and myths from around the world. WOOOOHOOOOOO! 

Please click on the Didrik label below to read the complete story series, keeping in mind the updated First Page is posted here below the the final page -- Kind of an Ouroboros (symbolic images of a snake eating its own tail). When I drew the first version of page 1, it had been a while since I'd drawn Gerb, and I found the original drawing a little too stiff and unsatisfactory. Now that I've been drawing the gang for almost 20 pages, I've loosened up somewhat and gotten more into the flow of drawing him, so I wanted to redo that page, and the result is what you see below.

But first the last page of the series...

...Then lastly the first page of the comic...

Thank you for reading! <3 

 

Purple Pachyderm in "A String and a Purr"

In honor of Free Comic Book Day I wanted to share a comic book I drew 20 years ago (apparently, according to the dialog, while I was still married) starring Purple Pachyderm - one of my favorite characters to draw since childhood.

Happy Free Comic Book Day! And thank you for reading!