Cannibalizing my youth

[avram]

Looking at the artists at the Anime Expo today made me think back on the art I did when I was younger, how I could just draw all day, churning out endless amounts of stuff. I dug up one of my old sketchpads to see if I was any good. There’s some cool stuff in there. I think I started this pad in my junior year at RIT (1987-88), and kept adding to it when I was at SVA (the next few years), so these are ten to fifteen years old.

The early stuff is mostly some ideas I was playing with for a comic strip set in the school. (Not all — I don’t remember what that soldier figure on the left was about.) Some pretty unimaginative stock stereotypes, but I kind of like some of the rendering. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think I must have picked up some Don Martin facial expression tropes. At least I’d gotten well past my blatant Phil Foglio ripoff period, which covered most of high school.

I suspect these aliens were inspired by Matt Howarth’s work in Those Annoying Post Brothers; I think I read my first issues of that in my junior year at RIT.

Majoring in industrial design at RIT, I learned how to render with markers. For years afterwards, markers with colored pencils for shading were my primary coloring method. I think I had a story built around this robot — actually a military cyborg, a human brain stuck in a robot body. The guy is suffering from an incurable disease, and volunteers for the project, and the guy’s hoping a cure for his disease will come before too long so he can take up a normal life when his tour of duty is over. The brains go into suspended animation when the cyborgs are offline, and there’s a global nuke war, and he doesn’t come back online till long after, when new humanoid lifeforms have evolved out of various animals. At one point the guy dreams that he’s Walt Disney. I think there were also supposed to be ghosts of human beings floating around, because the afterlife gates got overwhelmed and shut down when billions of people died in too short a period.

A trio of fantasy characters. I’m not sure why the dwarf is wearing a Volkswagen hood ornament for a belt buckle. I think the yellow character on the left was a lizard-man based on Chinese dragons. Have you noticed that I keep drawing characters in very static poses, as if I haven’t figured out what to have them doing? I still do that. Here’s a rare exception:

I don’t remember what these others were about, but from the way I drew the bear, it looks like I hadn’t forgotten about Foglio:

Comments

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

Damn. Now I have a yen to dig up all your old letters, scan the pics, and put them up. ;) I bet you've forgotten what those looked like. ;) I know for one thing, getting a letter from you always made my day. And in fact, they made the rounds too. During Chemistry I would pass around your letters so all my friends/classmates could check out your super cool drawings. ;)

Folio and Foglio

[webbob.livejournal.com]

I was around when Phil Foglio was just a beginner fan artist, and these drawings are at least as good as most of his fillos in fanzines. I think your work has better control of the line than that early Foglio stuff, and that bear's characteristic Foglio posed seemed to be the only pose he could draw, sometimes.

Off the top of my head, I think you could do a good comic book series with the basic idea of the single leftover cyborg soldier being haunted by the spirits of the famous. Were it me, I'd be inclined to push it into the future, make the final war and the spiritual chaos both due to the same cause (like a Vancian attack by Sandestins of the Seventh Chord of the Ninety-third Internecrotic Plane).

The combination of the Doom Patrol brain-in-a-jar archetype with the Spectre and the Spirit (? red-skinned android/golem who could migrate to reserve bodies as the ones he was using got too chewed up to go on) give you some nice opportunities for weird fantasy, and the ghosts of greats idea would give you lots of scope for inner dialogues.