I don’t think all these figures are related to the vampire stripper project. A couple of them look like they probably are. The rest? I think I was just drawing random nude women. I find that one of the best ways to figure out how clothes will look on a body is to first draw the body itself. From there I can figure out the way cloth will hang and stretch.

This is the last of the sketches from the vampire stripper project. Frank Miller’s Sin City had seen publication a few of years previously and Miller’s high contrast black and white work was very appealing to me. I was (and always am) also looking for ways to draw more quickly. Slow comic book artists don’t produce a lot of work. Usually I do a rough sketch with a light pencil, do a tighter drawing with a darker lead and then ink on top of it. This piece was inked straight from the rough sketch.

This is the non-stripping half of the vampire duo. The writer thought she was too butch.

The whole butch/femme paradigm is mostly lost on me. I mean, I get the idea, I just don’t frame the world with it. Some people are better at hammer and nails stuff than others. Some people revel in the foofy. Some people are delicate and graceful. Others go through life like water buffaloes. No one way is specifically better or more attractive to me. The only wrong way to be to be an asshole. And even they can be fun to draw.

Another 1995 sketch for the vampire project. The thing about comics, especially for the artist, is that even a short story involves drawing a lot of pictures. So it really helps if you’re in love with story. A really fast artist can charge through a story that he/she is uninterested in and be ready for something else fairly quickly. An artist being paid a living wage can stand to work on something he/she isn’t enamored by. But if you’re an artist working for free you really want to be grabbed by what you’re drawing. You’ll have to find time to draw the story in between work and socializing and chores. And you won’t make that time unless you’re working on something that lights you up. So it’s a good thing that the writer and I didn’t see eye to eye on what his protagonists should look like. I liked the story. It was something I would have enjoyed reading. But spending months drawing it? That would have been hard. It’s the sort of project I would say no to now. A dozen years ago I hadn’t learned that skill.

While we were putting together the first issue of the magazine version of Glyph we had a bunch of other projects that we were considering for Labor of Love publishing. One of the writers we were working with had self published some comics and was looking for an artist for a graphic novel he’d written. Despite being about stripper lesbian vampires it wasn’t a pure pulp story. He wanted it to be both arty and commercial. I did some sketches of his main characters (showing over the next few days) but they weren’t really what he was looking for. The women weren’t the sort of sexy he was looking for. Just as well I suppose.

I tend to be only vaguely interested in the US standard of sexy in real life. In art I see no reason to try to reproduce a version of sexy that I’m not interested in.

I can easily imagine myself sitting and drawing a spray nozzle that was lying in front of me. In fact, the spray nozzle would have to be laying in front of me for me to draw it. It’s not an object that I’ve committed to memory. It’s harder to imagine sitting and drawing a sandwich. But here’s the evidence.

Let’s see, on the left we’ve got some sketches of Jericho Silvertree, a fellow that looks like a walking skeleton. He wears red sunglasses, a white cowboy hat, white suit and spats. In the middle, a little guy with a shaved head. He’s mad because he’s not really little, he’s just drawn that way. On the right we’ve got Moe dancin’. And at the bottom right we’ve got a fellow who is shocked, just shocked! by it all. Or maybe he has indigestion.

Today’s sketch is an alien with no backstory. It might have had one when I drew it but I don’t know it now. It doesn’t belong to any of the major species of my mental universe. I like the design though so I’m sure I’ll figure our something for it someday.

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The covers for the Complete Annotated Oz Squad, Volumes 1 & 2 are finished. The first volume is now available at Lulu.com. The second should be ready for sale in the next couple of days. You can take a look at the covers in all their glory on my Oz Squad history page. I’ve also updated the Who’s Who page to include Betsy Bobbin and Dorothy Gale.

Interestingly, you can get a copy of The Wizard of Oz through Lulu. I didn’t check to see if it came with illustrations or not. There are at least a couple of other Oz items there – a movie script for Wicked and a sequel to the Wizard titled, excitingly enough, Return to Oz. I’m not recommending either one. The Wicked script can’t be official or authorized. The first chapter of Return seems to be plagarized from the first chapter of the Wicked novel. I’ve no problem with fan art and stories but I think it’s in bad taste (and not legally smart) to charge for them. Put up a website and give it away.

Here we have Moe and Lili as they looked when I was doing Bonecage Graffiti.

Moe made his first appearance in my sketchbooks back in 1988 or 89. At the time he was just an illustration of a drunk guy with dreadlocks and a trenchcoat. Shortly thereafter he acquired his buddy Detritus and I drew my first comic featuring the two of them on a kitchen wall in Cotati, California.

Lili first appeared in The Highly Unlikely Adventures of Moe and Detritus #8, not physically, just as a reference to Moe’s friend with all the weapons. I don’t remember how she became a seven foot tall Puerto Rican amazon. The name came first. Lili Veracruz. I had a friend who was a five foot tall Puerto Rican amazon. Maybe she inspired Lili. It seems obvious that she had but I’d never associated the two until another friend asked about it. My friend is just a much sweeter person than Lili has an interest in being.

Random sketchs from 1995. The mask with the nails in it seems to be favorite theme of mine. I first saw the nails-in-the-head motif on an African fetish in a museum. The idea was that you’d write a wish on a strip of cloth, wrap the cloth around a nail, then pound the nail into this wooden head sculpture and this would induce/request the spirits/gods to grant the wish. Clive Barker was apparently inspired by the same idea when he created Pinhead