Monthly Archives: November 2023

Skook Words (and Pictures) #46

Posted on by

It’s BLACK FRIDAY!

Shop! Shop! Shop!

I am, at this point, constitutionally required to include a link to my Redbubble Store so you can, as also constitutionally required, buy gifts for all your loved ones. And yourself of course. Because you should be one of your loved ones. So I’m told. Repeatedly. So, if you love yourself, you will buy lots of things (featuring my designs) for yourself.

Or, you could, like me, ignore the marketing hype and remember Black Friday as the day in 1929 when the stock market crashed and stock brokers rained down from the upper windows of brokerages. But that would be both depressing and anticapitalist and unconstitutional. (Also, the big crash started and was bigger the day before, deemed as Black Thursday. But that means checking history before posting and I never do that. Mostly.)

(Also, that was in September. Almost one hundred years ago. Ancient history. This is November. The day after American Thanksgiving. In 2023. When we no longer have to go to a store to shop. We can run up our credit cards via online shopping experiences. Yay!)

These Days …

I’ll be at work today, delivering some mail and a lot of parcels. Some of my workday will be in the dark. Yay.

Lovecraft Kids

Everyone grows up. Even characters in Call of Cthulhu games. If you play one of the Morgan Family Cousins, you’ve got a choice of adulthoods.

You could grow up to live in a high octane pulp milieu –


The above illustration is in the Eldritch New England Holiday collection. For the fun of it I added some colors and mocked it up a comic book cover. That version is the illustration below. As I look at it now I think it would be fun to carry the design further and mock it up as an old pulp magazine cover. But that’s a project for another time.


Alternately you could grow up to live a more sedate life with less wild action and more normal activities. You’ll still deal with the occasional indescribable horror but that’s to be expected. The illustration below was used both in the original Eldritch New England Holiday Collection RPG manual and as the cover for An Eldritch Legacy, a collection of short stories each starring one of the adult cousins.

The physical art for this illustration was done in black and white with ink and markers. The critters that the portal Tillinghast Generator brings to light were done on a separate layer and added in Photoshop. I gave Oscar, the writer of the book, a choice of colors for the extradimensional wild life.
Oscar went against tradition and, instead of a standard purple, he picked the sickly green. Mark Shireman, the layout artist of the book, made this snazzy GIF of the image.
Shireman also designed the final cover of the fiction book.

An Eldritch Legacy: The Cousins Come of Age, Edited by Brian M. Sammons & Oscar Rios

Ten years later, we rejoin the six cousins of the Morgan Clan from Dunwich, Arkham, Kingsport and Innsmouth, now in their early twenties. Each continues to face challenges as the malevolent forces of the Cthulhu Mythos surround them and, in some cases, reside within them. We are proud to offer this sequel to Children of Lovecraft Country.

  • Dreams and Nightmares by Peter Rawlik—Artist and gallery owner by day, secret paranormal investigator and spirit medium by night, Donald Sutton does his best to make sure these parts of his life are kept separate. After a particularly frightening investigation he decides to take a break and begins spending more and more time in the Dreamlands. However, when taking photographs at a Kingsport Congregational Hospital for their annual Christmas party, he encounters the beautiful and mysterious stranger, Ms. Aspinwall. Not only does she know his secret, but she desperately needs his help with a haunting in the hospital’s Mariner’s Ward. But the winter solstice is a dangerous time for spirit mediums, especially in Kingsport, because the veils between realities become perilously thin.
  • Warden of the Dark God by Glynn Owen Barass—The rolling hills of Dunwich have always been a mysterious, sometimes dangerous place. When children go missing, Gordon Brewster is the one who finds them. While still working on his family’s farm, he’s become an expert hunter, tracker, and a member of the Believers, a local collective of arcane practitioners dedicated to defending the people of Dunwich from eldritch threats. However, things come to a head as an ancient evil, slumbering and once locked away in an alien ruin, begins to awaken with a need to sate its endless hunger. Donald teams up with his best friend, Pauly Johnson, and Marie Bishop, leader of the Believers, to put a stop to it.
  • Separate Lives by Christine Morgan—After spending her youth struggling with memories of past lifetimes, Gerdie Pope has learned to control her gift to become a world renowned clairvoyant. Now living in Lily Dale, New York, a haven for mystics, psychics, and practitioners of folk magic, her peaceful life is interrupted. First by a challenging client, a young girl with vivid “memories” of another life, one far stranger than any Gerdie has ever lived. Next by an unwanted visit from a relation on her mother’s side of the family, the degenerate side of the Whateley Clan. They want her to return to Dunwich and continue her grandfather’s, the late Wizard Whateley, work.
  • A Dark Legacy by Brian M. Sammons—Edward Derby, the youngest associate professor at Miskatonic University, must respond to a sudden personal matter while on his first summer break. After receiving a call from Marblehead, he learns that a house once owned by his long deceased father suffered damage during a recent storm. While the house belongs to Edward, he’s until now refused to explore it, afraid of what he might learn about his enigmatic father. He learns he has a lot in common with his father, a fellow mythos investigator and scholar, as mysterious deaths begin. To resolve this crisis, he must defeat a foe his father never could.
  • George Weedon and the Secret of Infinite Horizons by Lee Clark Zumpe—Life is good for George Weedon, starting quarterback for the Pittsburgh Pirates. However, some things never change, and dark mysteries somehow keep finding him. This time he’s asked by his team’s owner, “The Chief” Art Rooney, to locate some friends who’ve gone missing while staying in their newly built vacation house in the Allegheny Mountains, a strange sprawling mansion called Infinite Horizons. The designer had a mental breakdown shortly after the building was completed and was committed to an asylum. George sets off with a small team in hopes of solving yet another eldritch mystery.
  • Blood and the Turning of the Tide by Oscar Rios—For Alice, a Deep One Hybrid and leader of a band of Innsmouth refugees, things keep getting more complicated. While she established her band successfully in Port Jefferson, New York, keeping them safe is another matter. Her band struggles under the rules she’s placed on them. Some desires, it seems, are just too strong to deny. As she struggles to maintain control an old friend shows up with a dire warning. A federal agent is on their trail, threatening everything they’ve worked so hard to achieve. Alice must bring her people together to face this threat when they’ve never been more divided.

Also – Cats!

The new, updated edition of Cathulhu is available now at drivethrurpg.com.


Both Michael Bukowski and I contributed new color illustrations to the book. He did most of the eldritch horrors. I did more mostly mundane (but still dangerous!) menaces – like little yappy dogs!

And that’s it for this week.

What are you waiting for? Go buy things!

Or don’t.

It’s okay. Giving your cat a lap, taking your dog for a walk or hanging out with friends is better for both you and the environment.

Stay warm. Stay well.

See you in seven!

 

Skook Words (and Pictures) #45

Posted on by

Fridays come and Fridays go but diamonds are forever. And a girl’s best friend.

A man’s best friend is his dog.

No wonder the sexes don’t get along.

That one sex is from Mars (a freezing desert) and the other is from Venus (a burning hellscape) might also be a problem.

Or maybe some folks just think too much about fitting diverse groups of sentient apes into easily defined boxes so they don’t have to think much any more?

Uh…

Anyway. It’s Friday. This is the Newsletter.

Nonsense abounds!

These Days …

It’s dark when I go to work. It’s dark when I go back home.

Yay.

Lovecraft Kids

The final scenario of in the Eldritch New England Holiday Collection was –

Christmas In Kingsport –
Our six protagonists gather once more in the home of their Great Aunt Nora, for what they expect to be a very boring Christmas Eve.  However they are rescued by their beloved older cousin Melba, a carefree flapper and black sheep of the family, who takes them on adventures undreamed of across Kingsport and Beyond the Walls of Sleep.  But what begins as a magical holiday adventure soon turns into a nightmare for the cousins, as they are targeted by demons. They must solve a mystery before Christmas morning, to return peace on earth and good will towards certain members of their family.

Talking to Myself (Part the Next)

Scene: The Studio. The Cartoonist sits in front of his computer. To the left of his keyboard is a cup of room temperature coffee. To the right is a fat, orange cat. It’s asleep on a stack of “important” papers.

The Salesman enters. He’s carrying his own cup of coffee. It’s fresh and hot. He sips.

Salesman – “Are you doing anything useful?”

Cartoonist – “I’m thinking.”

Salesman – “So … no?”

The Cartoonist looks at the Salesman. The Cartoonist rolls his eyes.

Cartoonist – “Ha. Ha. What do you want?”

Salesman – “I want you to draw a comic that’s easily marketable but I’ve mostly given up on that ever happening. So, instead, I’d like you to clarify something you said last week.”

Cartoonist – “I don’t remember what I said yesterday. Last week might as well be last century.”

Salesman – ” ‘Punk rock. Zines. Getting the work done and getting it out.’ What did you mean? You didn’t really explain it.”

Cartoonist – “I was trying to articulate the philosophy driving Red Storm Elegy.”

Salesman – “That’s still a terrible title.”

Cartoonist – “Would you prefer Sunk Cost Elegy?”

Salesman – ” …. maybe?”

Cartoonist – “Sunk Cost Elegy it is. Anyway – the philosophy …”

Salesman – “Are you going to want me to write a manifesto? Manifestos are so 20th Century.”

Cartoonist – “No manifesto. Are you planning to listen? If not I can go back to staring at my monitor.”

The Salesmen sips his coffee. He makes the “lips zipped” motion over his mouth.

Cartoonist – “For the last couple of years I’ve been having a hard time doing comics. Which is frustrating because doing comics is pretty much all I’ve really wanted to do since I was a kid. I’ve done a lot of art but it’s primarily been single illustrations because – ”

Salesman – “Because the cats sit on your drawing table and demand your attention?”

Cartoonist – “That’s part of it. When it was just Kemo and Sabé they weren’t on the drawing table as much. After Sabè died, Kemo got on the table more. We got Crunch with the idea that Kemo would pay more attention to him.”

Salesman – “That didn’t work out the way you planned.”

Cartoonist – “No. Crunch and Kemo play but when he’s not playing with Kemo, Crunch likes to be close to me. Like, on my drawing table or my computer or the papers next to my mousepad.”

Salesman – “You could get rid of the cats. Or at least put them in another room when you want to work on art.”

Cartoonist – “Sometimes I have put them in another room but that’s not a solution. We have cats because we like cats. And this isn’t really about the cats. This is about working around distractions. There will always be distractions. So how do I do that?”

Salesman – “I’m assuming you’re going to tell me.”

Cartoonist – “I do all my art digitally. At least, all my comics. I still like working with pencils, paper, ink, markers and paint. I’ll keep doing physical illustrations. Maybe I’ll do enough of them I can start doing art shows. Or something.”

Salesman – “That would be a good thing actually. That I could market.”

Cartoonist – “I will be creating my comics with my Wacom tablet in Clip Studio Paint and, until I master CSP, Photoshop. The big advantage to working this way is instant access. No more having to get out the paper, set out the ink, find the brush or the pen. No more scanning in pencils and converting them to bluelines. No more clean up. I just open the file and start working. In the past I’ve always felt like I needed at least an open half hour or more before it was worth working on art, now I can just take advantage of random five minutes. I don’t have worry about ink drying, either on the page so I don’t screw up an illustration by smearing the ink, or on the brush so I have to wash it.”

Salesman – “Yay. You can work more and faster. Yay. Technology. What does that have to do with punk rock and zines?”

Cartoonist – “It’s … hmmn. I’ve known a lot of creative types who get caught up in making their work perfect. One of them justified it as “bad art is forever” and he didn’t want “bad art” in the world with his name on it. But “bad art” is subjective. Stuff that is considered genius now was panned by critics when it was first produced. Stuff that is considered bad still has fans who love it. I rarely finish anything to perfection. I just get to a point where noodling more will make it worse. The art isn’t perfect; I can see things that could be improved but I don’t know how to improve them without starting from scratch so I call the work done and move on.”

The Salesman sips his coffee. He makes a puzzled face.

Salesman – “It sounds like you’re saying that you’re okay making bad art.”

Cartoonist – “Sort of yes but also no. I’m never going to try to do bad work. I’m saying that I will always make the best art I can and then move on. I will always see ways I could improve but I’m going to leave it up to others to decide on whether it’s bad or good.”

Salesman – “So … punk rock and zines?”

Cartoonist – “Passion and enthusiasm and ephemera. Part of idea behind punk rock was that you didn’t worry about whether you could sing or play your instruments, you just formed a band and played music. Zines were (and are) made by people who just wanted to make a publication. Nowadays there are tools and programs and services that will allow you to make something that looks pretty professional but, back in the day, it was all cutting and pasting and xeroxing for, maybe, a few dozen copies of something.”

Salesman – “You’re not telling me things were better back then?”

Cartoonist – “God no. I’m using punk and DIY creation as a reference. I’m saying that I not let my ignorance stop me. About learning as I go. I’m talking about doing art without concern for perfection or commercial appeal. About finishing a project in order to finish a project.”

Salesman – “The phrase ‘without concern for commercial appeal’ disturbs me. You started this year planning to do Mighty Nizz comics. I get that your flow was interrupted by concern for other people’s health issues and the Billi 99 kickstarter stuff but Nizz is probably the most commercial thing you’re thought of it. It’s simple. I can sell simple. Your other things … they’re a mess. They require explanation. People these days have the attention spans of fruit flies.”

Cartoonist – “My brand is “weird stuff that requires explanation”.

Salesman – “Your brand? Talking about ‘brand’ is my wheelhouse.”

Cartoonist – “So figure out a better way to describe it. Might Nizz is still on the table. So is The Surrilana Depths. And Kaiju Weather. And The Witch Engines. And a bunch of things I’m not going to mention because I already sound too ambitious to myself. Sunk Cost Elegy is the first album.”

Salesman – “First album. That’s what the European cartoonists call their books. I can work with that. Sunk Cost Elegy: a Scifi Samurai Western. By David Lee Ingersoll. Is this going to be a webcomic or a print book?”

Cartoonist – “I’m aiming for print but we’ll see. And it’s more of a Punk Scifi Neon Noir now. And I’m thinking of using a pseudonym. ‘David Lee Ingersoll’ is a mouth full. “Moebius”. “Madonna”. “Prince”. Single name pseudonyms are cool.”

Salesman – “You make the art. Leave the branding to me.”

 

 

Skook Words (and Pictures) #44

Posted on by

Greetings and salutations, Beautiful People!

Halloween has passed, Thanksgiving looms and the distant thunder of Christmas can be heard. Here in the Northern Hemisphere the days grow shorter and water falls from the sky in a variety of formats.

This is the newsletter. I’m guy drinking coffee and drawing stuff. You’re one of the Beautiful People. (Duh. It’s there in the opening sentence.)

Lovecraft Kids

The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection by Oscar Rios, published by Golden Goblin Press featured four scenarios. The Halloween scenario is actually the first in the book as well as being the first one Oscar wrote. An earlier version of it was published as part of Halloween Horror, a collection of Halloween themed scenarios, back in 2005. That collection is out of print and I couldn’t find a link to it while I was writing this. If I’d been smart I’d have featured these illustrations in last week’s newsletter.

Halloween In Dunwich –
A group of six cousins, from across Lovecraft Country, gather at the Dunwich farm of their great grandfather Silas for a family celebration. There will be a day filled with Halloween themed activities and games, followed by a night of feasting and ghost stories. However, as the midnight hour approaches, the children discover that a certain old family ghost story is quite true, as a vengeful spirit from their family’s distant past rises from the grave.  It falls upon our adolescent investigators to save their family and thwart the aims of their sinister foe.     

Talking to Myself

Scene:
The Studio. (Also: The Library.)

The Cartoonist is sitting at his desk. He’s staring at his computer monitor. A fat orange cat sleeps on the actual computer at the right of the monitor. The Salesman enters.

Salesman – “Are you thinking? Or have you fallen asleep with your eyes open?”

Cartoonist – “I’m thinking.”

The Salesman waits for the Cartoonist to elaborate. The cat on the computer yawns.

Cartoonist – “Punk rock. Zines. Getting the work done and getting it out.”

Salesman – “Did that make sense in your head? Because it’s not making sense out here.”

Cartoonist – “I’m thinking about how to approach Red Storm Elegy. How to do the art. How to craft the story.”

Salesman – “Maybe just leave it alone? Maybe start an Instagram and draw fan art of popular characters that people recognize instead of trying to salvage a decades old project that the writer abandoned? It would be easier for me to sell people on something they recognized.”

Cartoonist – “I’ve got the new story in my head. Mostly. I’ve rearranged the pages and I’ve written dialogue for about a third of it. I’ve done new art.”

The Salesman sighs. He scratches pets the cat a couple of times. The cat shifts its position slightly.

Salesman – “Red Storm Elegy is lousy title.”

Cartoonist – “It’s the working title. I had to come up with a new title for the project so I could start thinking it as a new thing instead of an old thing that I was trying to expand.”

Salesman – “It is an old thing that you’re trying to expand. Are you sure you’re not stuck in a case of Sunk Cost Fallacy? Maybe you think that because you spent a bunch of time drawing a bunch of pages you need to use those pages in something otherwise the time that you spent drawing those pages was a waste?”

Cartoonist – “No.”

Salesman – “No? No to what?”

Cartoonist – “No to being caught in a Sunk Cost Fallacy. Probably. I don’t ever consider a project done until it’s done. Some things just get set aside because other things take priority. I’m working on Red Storm Elegy now because now is the time to work on it.”

Salesman – “Talking to you gives me a headache.”

Cartoonist – “So do something else. Isn’t it Friday morning? Don’t you have a newsletter to write?”

Salesman – “I just finished it.”

Skook Words (and Pictures) #43

Posted on by

Hmmm. There’s something familiar about today.

Could it be … Friday?

These Days …

I’ve been on vacation since last Friday. It’s been a good week to be on vacation here in the Pacific Northwest – we’re getting lots of rain. Since my plans were to finish the physical art for the next Mighty Nizz story and sort my old comics, staying indoors was not a problem.

Unfortunately I have the attention span of … one of my cats. If that.

I sorted the magazines that have been sitting unboxed on shelves. Now all the various series are stacked together rather than mixed in. I open the long boxes of comics that had been sitting, sealed up, since my brother shipped them from California twenty years ago. (I’ve been saying I had eighteen long boxes for so long I’d never bothered to actually count the boxes. There are only twelve boxes. I have no idea where the “eighteen boxes” number came from.) I got as far as doing a quick skim through each box before putting the lids back on and setting them aside again. I saw comics I’d forgotten that I had. I saw comics that have never been collected and probably never will be. I’m not nostalgic. Not for comics as they were when I was collecting them. I don’t buy monthly comics anymore. I buy graphic novels and series collections. I like books with spines. Those old comic magazines (one comic writer calls them pamphlets, another calls them flimsies) don’t sit on bookshelves. They’re not durable. But the art and story should be preserved. I have four days until I have to go back to delivering mail. I could actually sort the boxes in that time, if I’m willing to be quick and ruthless.

Yeah. Maybe.

As for working on Mighty Nizz art …

See “Red Storm Elegy” later in this newsletter.

Innsmouth Independence Day

Today I’m showing off my illustrations for the July 4th occurring adventure in The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection, written by Oscar Rios, published by Golden Goblin Press.
At a good old fashion New England Seafood Boil, on a beach in Innsmouth, the cousins gather to celebrate the 4th of July.  However, young Alice has a plan and needs her cousins’ help. She asks them to help her break into her great grandmother’s abandoned mansion to look for the family’s genealogy records.  She wants proof that her ancestors worked as privateers for the Continental Navy, so she can apply for membership in the prestigious Daughters of the American Revolution.  However, for some reason her family has forbidden her from exploring the family’s history. The cousins soon stumble onto dark secrets and are faced with difficult choices in the shadows of the decaying seaside town.

Red Storm Elegy

About ten years ago I was commissioned to illustrate a graphic novel. A friend of mine had decided that he finally wanted to make a go at a career writing comics. The best way to show a comics publisher that you know how to write a comic is get an artist to illustrate one of your scripts. So he commissioned a few artists to illustrate a few of his scripts. For me he’d come up with a fun gimmick idea – a “sci-fi samurai western” in which all the dialogue was in emojis.

I drew about a hundred pages of the story. The hundred is approximate. The writer wrote and I illustrated a number of revisions, including a couple of different endings. He had someone color the first 28 pages. We tossed the emoji gimmick. Eventually he decided that the story wasn’t anything he knew how to finish. He gave me the rights to use the art to create a story of my own, if I could think of one.

I put the physical art in a drawer. I kept scans of the art on my hard drive. Occasionally I’d open the files, look at the art and try to think of a story that I could tell with the art as it was, without having to draw anything new. I always came up blank.The plot of the story was more something the writer had come up with than something I would have thought of on my own.

Last week, after I’d been practicing with my Wacom tablet in Clip Studio Paint, I opened the files again. I thought, “Maybe I can do something with these. I’ll probably have to do some editing and maybe draw a new page or two but …” While I delivered mail, my brain tossed around ideas, thought of ways to reorder the art, considered new motivations and relationships between the characters. By Saturday I had a vague idea how I might use the existing art to tell a story that worked for my sensibilities.

First I wrote out a basic outline of the plot, using as much of the existing art as I could. Then I renamed all the files and put them in a new folder. Having a new name made it easily to consider the art as something new and malleable. Then I reordered the art to match the basic plot I had worked out. I created blank pages to fill in the places in the plot where I figured I’d need new art. I ended up with this –

Counting the blank place holder pages told me that, if I kept to the outline I’d written, I’d probably have to draw 31 new pages. I say “probably” because some of the existing pages would need a little redrawing and I could see how some of the pages could be rearranged.

Thirty and one pages. Plus God only knows how much correction and redrawing and editing and …

And so I looked at the Google Sheets document I’d created when I was trying to figure out where to place my original art based on my new plot. And I started writing dialogue. I didn’t worry about whether the dialogue matched the outline as long as it drove the story forward.

I’m thirty pages in and I’ve shaved four pages off my outline. Which means I’ve got some drawn pages that will need to be rearranged and some art that might not get used at all. And I’m okay with that. I’m not going to do that editing or draw any new pages until I finish the script and do at least one rewrite.

My working title is Red Storm Elegy.

This is Dove, my protagonist.


She’s not someone you want to piss off. A few someones have done that. They’re going to be very sorry.
I’ll be posting updates on my progress as I go.

Along with any progress on anything else that catches my attention.

I hope your week has gone well. I hope that your world has some happy places in it.

I hope the next seven days give you what you need.

See you next Friday!