Mike Mignola spoke, moderated by Christopher Golden, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston on Thursday, April 3, 2008. He talked about how he became an artist, his influences, Hellboy and what projects he’s working on now. If you have a chance to hear him speak, I recommend it. He’s genuine and very funny.
Three points that stuck with me:
- He has a “working stiff, blue collar” work ethic. He’s always at his art table, seven days a week.
- Went through a long phase where he wanted to be a different artist, (draw in a different artist’s style,) every two days.
- Created Hellboy (as opposed to the mainstream superhero stuff that was prevalent in the early 90s comic market) because he wanted to do “what he wanted to do” and get paid for it.
My notes from the talk and several of the images he showed in his presentation are after the jump.
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Panel from Page 4, 03/17/08
Page 4 of what? Can’t say because I haven’t thunk it all out yet. For now, pretend he’s a leprechaun. Make your St. Patrick’s day merry and bright.
Now, I sentence ye to the wearin’ of the green shoes:
Funeral For a Friend. 01/28/08
My submission for the Channel Frederator “Throwback Thursdays” contest.
There’s a great story in the first 22 issues of the 80s Marvel G.I. Joe comic that follows the Joes dealing with eskimo (inuit?) tracker/mercenary Kwinn. He becomes a “friend” of sorts of Snake Eyes and they cause all sorts of mischief. It ends badly for Kwinn, but he gets some good revenge with “a grenade fallen from a dead man’s hand.”
Snake Eyes and Wild Bill give him a burial at sea, which is the scene for this little illustration here.
Wolverine and Superman. 1/14/08
This fall on ABC, the New Adventures of Logan and Clark! No, not really. They’re just posing and emoting.
I read Superman Annual #13 today, and the story at the end of the book, “The Best Day,” is everything that is awesome about Superman: family, kindness and hope. It helps that it was drawn by Renato Guedes. It’s a short story about Superman and Supergirl taking the Kents, Lois and Chris to a planet for a picnic.
The panels at the bottom of this page touched me. Kara is always trying to impress Clark, and Martha’s there to put her at ease. More and more, these types of moments are worth more than ten pages of Wolverine’s berserker barrage.
Just in time for Halloween, Graham Annable has released a spooky Grickle cartoon:
Check it out:
In the future, music will be the only thing that matters anymore.
Images from Graham Annable’s “The Last Duet on Earth”
Be sure to watch Space Wolf, too. (Thanks to Kevin for telling me about that one.)
I mentioned the Sinestro Corps War recently. Holy crap, this is cool:
While searching for places to post my Green Lantern stuff, I was pointed to the Crit Forum at ComicBloc, where I stumbled up on this excellent illustration from Dan Schoening and Mike Jungbluth.
DZ: Your work on the characters starts off as simple pencil work, correct? What application do you polish the “statues” up in?
DS: They all start off as rough pencil sketches. Depending on how comfortable I am with it at that stage I may either clean it up with a 2b pencil or scan it. The next step is to import it to Flash. There I use the line tool to “outline” the designs. After I’ve outlined the character, I’ll start coloring it up. After the colors are laid down, I’ll erase all the lines and I’m left with the finished piece. The idea behind this coloring process is to use color to define shape and volume, instead of black (or colored) lines. After the character is colored, I’ll toss it in Photoshop and add any slight shadows or special f/x. - From an interview with Dan at The ComicBloc.
I think his use of Flash as an illustration tool is an efficient way to achieve the shape-based art. I still think Flash has the most intuitive drawing tools of any vector-based app.
Looking at his art (and he’s posted a lot of it out there, lucky for us,) you really have to ask yourself, “do I really need all those black lines complicating things?”
The caricature illustrations of Hermann Mejia always make me laugh. His drawings are monstrous and remarkably accurate! These images are from Mad Magazine #481, dated September 2007.
This one of Tobey made me laugh out loud in Border’s. That’s one of the silliest faces he’s making, yet I can see him looking just like that in the movie.
Tobey gets creepier as the comic (and Spider-Man movie series) goes on. If Gollum had hair, I believe he would part it in this fashion.
Yes! This is exactly what I was thinking about Dunst while watching Spider-Man 3! Either her eyes are shrinking or her cheekbones are taking over!
Doesn’t it look like a fun job to ruthlessly make fun of the filthy rich through cartooning?
Here are a couple more places to see Mejia’s art:
