More comicses!

Got out of work at a reasonable hour today, stopped off at the Strat and Jim Hanley’s. At the former I managed to make my save vs spending, though I was tempted by both BESM Dungeon (man, that’s just one letter off from being far more, erm, actually almost a mainstream pursuit nowadays) and the revised version of BESM 2nd ed. At the latter...

Spaghetti Western by Scott Morse
$11.95, 136 pages, Oni Press
Yay, a Scott Morse book! This has great, loose monochrome art, printed in sepia but clearly painted as a combination of wash, solid color, and opaque white. The lines are very juicy and gestural, and the characters have great expressive faces. The book comes in a slipcover that I’m a little annoyed at, because it’s prettier than the actual cover, and I don’t wanna throw it away, even though it’s a pain in the butt to put it back on the book after reading it.

Carnet de Voyage by Craig Thompson
$14.95, Top Shelf Productions
“What, a new Craig Thompson book?!” I thought. “This is not ‘the Next Book’”, reads the disclaimer in front. This is a travel diary Craig drew while going through Europe this past spring. Still, Craig Thompson, so it’s gotta be good. And damn, that Top Shelf sure do put out a purty cover. (What you can’t see on the website is that the cover’s on a nice textured card stock.) And it turns out Thompson and James Kochalka were signing at Jim Hanley’s yesterday, but I knew nothing.

Ooh, the third Courtney Crumrin book is due out in September!

A bee for Mamishka

I was originally gonna post this as a comment in mamishka’s journal, but it came out so nice I just had to show it off:



The linework is yet another Japanese brushpen, one with a tip made of separate nylon strands. It’s like a Niji water brush, but it comes pre-filled with ink. The color is Photoshop, but some new tricks: using the more exotic brushes, at 100% or 50% opacity, and then blending.