Tag Archives: process gif

Skook Words (and Pictures) #42

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It is a day like any other day. It has 24 hours like other days. The sun rises. The sun sets.

You spend some time awake. You spend some time asleep.

This newsletter is posted to Skookworks.com and arrives in your email mail box. If you think you have time, you read it. If you feel your time is short, you look at the pictures. Either choice is fine.

If you just delete this email without looking at it you are cursed for eternity. You’ll never know why your coffee is always weak and your car’s gas mileage is pitiful. Your dreams will be haunted by a six foot teddy bear that refuses to be hugged, it just wants a cigarette.

Aren’t you glad you’ve avoided the curse?

These Days …

More accurately, this coming week. The week just gone was pretty much like other weeks but with less medical drama for both people and pets. Kemo the cat got out of his cone-of-shame and we’ve let him out of isolation. It’s the week ahead that I’m thinking about.

Starting today and running until November 6th I’m on vacation. I have two goals –

1. Sort my comics collection. Back in 2003, when we moved my mother up to live with Sarah and me, my brother and I cleared out her house in California. Living nearer, he did most of the work. I went down for quick visit and sorted the stuff I’d left. A big part of that was the comics collection I’d acquired from about 1971 to 1994. I did a quick separation of them into Stuff-I-Don’t-Really-Care-About and Stuff-I-Think-I-Want-To-Read-Again. I gave the first batch to a friend and, a few months later, my brother shipped up the boxes that contained the second batch.

Those boxes have been unopened since their arrival. I have an idea what comics are in them but I don’t know specifically. So this is going to be a bit of an adventure. I have 18 long boxes and multiple stacks of magazine sized publications. My goal is to end up with three or less long boxes of magazines and two or less boxes of magazines. The rest will … magically find some other place to be.

Yeah. I haven’t thought much past sorting the things.

2. Finish the physical art of the second Mighty Nizz story. I have five pages done and thirteen pages in various stages of completion. Once it’s all complete I can format, color and letter it in Clip Studio Paint. This might be the last comic I do physical art for. I like doing physical art. I like ink and paper and brushes and pens. But working digitally is quicker. Not because I draw faster. My actual drawing time is probably the same. It’s more because I can just pick up my tablet and go. I don’t have to set up paper and ink, watch out for the cats, and clean my tools afterward. I can work for five minutes, do something else, work for ten, do something else, work for an hour, rinse, repeat.

Sarah and I will do a few things together. We’ve got a day trip planned for Bremerton. We’ll get out of the house and drive around. There’s the Billi 99 Kickstarter to prep for. And we’ll nap. Napping is a goal these days.

The Lovecraft Kids – Easter in Arkham

The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection (former The Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection) featured four adventures, each set and themed for different holiday – Easter, Independence Day (July 4th), Halloween and Christmas. In the book the adventures run Halloween, Christmas, Easter and Independence Day. I’m going to showcase my illustrations for Easter first because … I don’t actually remember if I thought I had a good reason.

What happens? Well …
In the city of Arkham, the cousins gather for an Easter egg hunt on the quad of Miskatonic University. The cousins fall into a mystery when recently departed pets begin returning to their owners, but changed, tainted, and unstable. As tensions mount over reports of a strange new disease affecting the pets of Arkham, drastic measures are proposed to protect public health. The cousins must work fast to get to stop these unholy resurrections as the barriers between life and death blur. Unless successful, every pet in the city is destroyed, and an even larger tragedy will befall witch-haunted Arkham. Arkham’s only hope are our six intrepid cousins. Can they get to the bottom of things before it’s too late?

CSP Practice or Making Mistakes Faster

I’ve spent part of most mornings in the last week practicing drawing in Clip Studio Paint with my Wacom tablet. A big part of the fun is the ability to make quick changes and corrections. It turns out that, when given that ability, I use it a lot.

I didn’t use it much for this first piece. I based it off the photo below. This is a tree stump next to one of the houses on my USPS route. I took its picture because I thought it looked creepy. I like creepy.

Once I’d posted the photo on my Facebook page my imagination started coming up with ideas for drawings based on image. The illustration below is the idea that I thought would be most fun to draw.
Next I did this cheery little fruit bat. A friend of mine had seen my illustration of a Surrilana vulture bat and said she wanted me to draw a bat that she could have as a tattoo. Her favorite bats are fruit bats/flying foxes so …

Then … obviously (I hope!) the drawing below isn’t one of mine.
A few months ago one of my nephews had asked if I would do a better version of that drawing. Someone he knew had paid for that and felt ripped off. Since my nephew couldn’t pay me he didn’t expect me to make it a high priority. It would have been okay if I didn’t do a drawing at all. Last week I decided it would a fun bit of practice and I did the design below.
And then I started really making mistakes.

I’m doing character designs and world building for The Surrilana Depths. I wanted to do an illustration of Morgo (name to be changed) fighting one of Zorimi’s (also to changed) scaled men minions. I sketched out the basics using one of the “brush” brushes in CSP.

I’d rather not bore you with all the steps I went through. That’s what process GIFs are for.

And here’s a finished version that’s not part of a GIF.

Practice, practice, practice.

Updating the Mighty Nizz

And speaking of mistakes and learning – we went out for dinner with new friends on Sunday. Part of the conversation included the comics she and I had done together. The one that’s available online is Mighty Nizz so Sarah tried showing it to our companions on her phone.

That was hard to do. The first page of the comic loads fine, if a bit small. But it’s actually the last page that loads first because I posted it one page a week and, like a blog, the last page loaded is the one that shows when the site opens. You can use the navigation buttons under that page to go to the actual first page but by then you’re having to work at reading the story. The first rule of the internet – don’t make your viewer work to use your site. This rule especially applies to internet accessed by phone.

I don’t use my phone to surf the net much. I use it to text, read emails, check Facebook and Youtube, and, occasionally, make phone calls. When I read webcomics I do it on my desktop computer’s monitor. I keep forgetting that, for an awful lot of people, their phone is their main (or only) computer. So I’ve reformed the first Mighty Nizz comic as a scroll that can be easily read in a single blog post.

The current version is temporary. It can be read easily but it’s not as clean an experience as I’d like. That will get fixed before I start posting the new story. And, yes, there will be a new story.

And that’s it for this week.

Thank you for reading all the way to end.

May you blessed with good sleep, strong coffee and a flying car!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #37

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No, you’re not hallucinating. It’s Friday again.

Seven days have staggered by. It only feels like yesterday.

Mother Shub-Niggarath

Cthulhu gets all the spotlights. August Derleth named H.P. Lovecraft’s story cycle “The Cthulhu Mythos” so that helped to put a stamp on things. Cthulhu itself also makes an appearance in one of the stories. That’s more than most of the rest of the Great Old Ones. Nyarlathotep has more in-story visitations but he’s just a guy who could be an indescribable eldritch horror if he wanted but, in the stories, he isn’t. No one is making plushies out of his bad self.

Of the Great Old Ones that aren’t Cthulhu my favorite is Shub-Niggarath. Who wouldn’t love The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young? No one the other GOO have such a distinct soubriquet.

I don’t remember if Lovecraft ever wrote a description of her. Most versions I’ve seen depict her as a sort of swirling cloud with teeth. Not very goatlike.

Being a GOO, I wouldn’t expect her to actually be a goat but, when I set out to do her portrait I thought I should give her some resemblance to the randy critters.
This design is available on schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Ease On Down

My friend Rae Dinsmore passed away on July 3rd of this year. I was able to visit her in Fairbanks, Alaska for a few days at the end of March. I’d initially planned to help her and her family reorganize her mother’s home so that the mother and Rae could better manage it. Between the time I made reservations to fly up there and the time I actually arrived, Rae and her mother had moved into a retirement community and their former home had been sold. So I spent a few days helping Rae sort as many of her boxes of (very well packed) stuff as we could. Many of the boxes hadn’t been opened since her move up to Alaska from Texas a couple of years previous.

I did the black and white illustration above for the back cover of a reprint of the first issue of Steve Ahlquist’s Oz Squad back in 1992. These were my versions of the artist Andrew Murphy’s version’s of Ahlquist’s versions of the original Fabulous Foursome. Among Rae’s possessions we found a thirty year old photocopy of the original art. It was neatly rolled and the only obvious indication of its age was my signature. Rae and I had been a couple when I did the art. She’d kept the photocopy and decorated the walls of some of her apartments with it in the years since. She gave me the copy and I brought it home with me.

I had the idea of coloring it and sending her the new version as a poster. Things got in the way. Work. Other health crises. She went into hospice and passed away.

I’d done a little work on coloring it right after I got home. I started a written tribute to her right after she passed. It exists in bits and pieces on my hard drive. I haven’t been able to make any more progress. My grief gets in the way. But I’m better with images than words. A little at a time I worked on coloring this image. I finally finished it on Monday.

Rae brought color and life into the world. Those colors remain.

May the next seven days pass, for you, in glorious bliss.

Autumn is arriving. Ghost and goblins will soon be abroad.

Cheers!

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Skook Words (and Pictures) #35

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Hello, hello! Good to see you! You’re looking well. As always. You really must tell me your secret sometime. I’ve asked before. You keep avoiding the question.

Am I being rude?

Are you keeping busy? Is the world your oyster? Do you even like oysters? If so, do you prefer them raw or smoked?

These Days …

It’s been a lively week. As of last Saturday, all the Seattle carriers are starting work a half an hour later due to Seattle Postmaster mandate. I don’t like it but I’m been trying to use the extra time in the morning to my advantage and get some art done. So far, so good. The cats, that is, our real, physical cats, tend to leave me alone more in the morning than in the evening so, really, doing artwork first thing makes sense. Resisting the temptation of social media and youtube videos is a little difficult but I’m getting better at it.

On Sunday we had visitors drop by from out of town. They’re a couple I’ve known for more than thirty years. They were here for an Alaska cruise that departed on Monday. I offered to cook dinner. They offered to take us out. We settled on picking up dinner from a local Indian place and eating at our apartment. This was the best choice. In general I prefer hanging out with friends at home rather than at a restaurant. There are fewer time and noise constraints and you don’t have to worry about the subjects your conversation wanders into. We got loud. We reminisced about our misspent youths, complained about work and the current political situation. We used foul language and touched on subjects that tend to make other folks lose their appetites. It was lovely.

Monday was Labor Day. Chores were done. Plans were made. Sarah and I rested as much as possible.

Tuesday and Wednesday were long workdays. Tuesday because the day after a holiday always has a backup of mail and parcels to get out and Wednesday because we’re shorthanded. The weather is cooling down and it was only two days so I don’t have a lot of complaints. Sarah spent those days getting the house reorganized to give the new housemate more room and to catch up on chores that we’d slacked off on since she got back from Mississippi.

Thursday morning Sarah and I had a zoom meeting with the publisher who will be kickstarting the Billi 99 Special Edition. We’re moving the kickstarter from a planned October back to November so that he and his team can better prepare. They’ve run some very successful campaigns recently and that success is leading to more success and the resulting demands for time and attention. No complaints there.

Thursday afternoon we went on a date. We joke that most of our dates are going shopping or doctor visits. Yesterday we went to the movies for the first time since the Pandemic. Matinees midweek are perfect for avoiding crowds. There were maybe ten people in the theatre. We saw The Equalizer 3. If you liked the first two, you’ll probably like this one. We did.

And then we went to Costco. We had to make it a proper date, after all.

Councils of Cats

Golden Goblin Press pays for printing their books by running kickstarters. They focus on roleplaying game manuals. One of their reward levels is a chance for backers to get themselves or a loved one included as a character in the game. For Tails of Valor backers got a chance to include their beloved cats as characters and I did the cats’ portraits. Many cats, many portraits. Meow. Purrrrrrr.


Process GIF

Cats love boxes. This is an established fact. Boxes are gates to unknown realms and the cats are guarding those gates. It’s for our own good. The things on the other sides of those gates would drive us mad. So the next time your cat scrunches itself into that box you were planning to break down and toss away, say thank you. Madness has been pushed back for another day.

These intrepid guardians can be found on schtuff in my Redbubble store. Of course.

Thank you again for reading. I hope your week gives you all the fun and/or relaxation you need.

If you’ve never eaten an oyster, give it a try. Or have some pizza. Pizza is good for breakfast. Oysters … maybe not.

See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #34

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Greetings and Salutations!

It’s good to see you! You’re looking well. Someday you must share the secrets of your success!

These Days …

Our new housemate is all moved in. He’s brought a cat with him. So far it spends most of its time in his room but it has begun venturing into the greater universe of the apartment. Its expeditions have been short. Our cats are getting used to the idea that there is another four legged being in their world. They are mostly respecting the threshold to our housemate’s room as border not to be crossed. No wars have broken out.

The weather is getting cooler. A little rain has fallen. We’ve managed to be a little bit social. On Wednesday we visited with friends who were in town from Taiwan. We’ve know them for years, having met them before their move to the Republic of China. We hadn’t seen them in about three and a half years so there was a lot of catching up to do.

The day job continues to be the day job. I’m continuing to carry a little extra. Lately I’ve been volunteering to deliver the express mail for the 98106 zip code. (We serve four zip codes in our station. Besides 98106 we carry for 98126, 98136 and 98146.) This has me travel more than if I’m delivering part of a specific route. Express mail usually arrives after I’m already out delivering my own route so I have to go back to the station to pick it up. I like the variety of the task. The number of expresses and the amount of driving required is different every day. One day I had only two parcels but they were miles apart. Another time I had five parcels to going to addresses in a four block area. Some days none of the packages require customer signatures before delivery. Some days all of them do.

Cathulhu

Last week I turned in what I thought was my last illustration for the updated edition of Cathulhu and was almost immediately commissioned for three more. Yay!

Tails of Valor from Golden Goblin Press was my first Cathulhu job. I illustrated that book back in 2019. I shared my illustrations for two scenarios last week (one set in ancient Rome) and the week before (one set in ancient Egypt). This week I’m sharing my illustrations for the final scenario.

The Undesirables (set in Dark Ages France) by Oscar Rios
The cats of Paris struggle to survive in a city driven mad with fear. The streets are filled with the dead, the dying, and the terrified as a deadly and mysterious plague runs rampant. The church places the blame on Satan, black magic, witches, and their familiars… namely cats. As a purge of such undesirables begins, will the cats put a stop to the actual witches spreading this vile pestilence, or seek to escape the city and reach the countryside?

I have two more posts worth of illustrations from the Tails of Valor project queued up, one next week and one the week after.

The Process GIF

Bzzzzzz. Bzzzz. Bzzzzzz. Means “Glad to see you!”

This design can be found on all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Thank you for reading. May the next seven days treat you kindly. May you have continued success in the endeavors that matter to you most. May you get the rest you need and may you, on occasion, be surprised by joy.

See you next Friday!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #32

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TGIF!

I leave it up to you to choose which god to thank. The day is named for Freya here in America but she’s on a long vacation and probably wouldn’t notice if you sent your gratitude to someone else.

These Days …

It’s hot. It’s been hot. It will continue to be hot even if we feed the hearts of all 2540 of the world’s billionaires (listed by Forbes) into the mouth of Moloch.

It has been cooler here in the Pacific Northwest than in other parts of the world but, being human, I’ve got complaints. Postal trucks don’t have air conditioning. They have fans that blow the air around. A good chunk of my route requires me to drive. I’m glad of that on rainy days. This last week – no. I’m enjoying the walking parts of my route more right now. There’s usually a slight breeze.

I’d be more okay with the heat but it seems to have baked off a noticeable amount of my drive and imagination. I’m getting a little art done in the mornings before work and in the evenings after. I manage that with a combination of habit and Sarah gently reminding me that I feel better when I get something, anything, creative done.

Cathulhu

My current commission is an update of Cathulhu from Sixtystone Press. Since that’s work in progress I won’t show that here. However, back in 2019, I illustrated Tails of Valor, a follow up to Cathulhu, for Golden Goblin Press. The book featured three adventures set during different periods of (human) history.

This week’s illustrations are from:

Shadow Harvest by Stuart Boon
As harvest approaches, strange things are happening in the Temple of Bast outside of the city of Bubastis. Two of the oldest and wisest cats have disappeared, and a kitten has been found murdered on temple grounds. Can a group of heroic and cunning cats of the temple discover what has befallen their kin, and uncover the dark secrets and blasphemous horrors that threaten all of Egypt?

Process GIF

This weeks process GIF is a return to one of my favorite subjects – The Horror of Party Beach. Specifically, this is another variation of the bloodsucking atomic zombie fishmen featured in that movie. I love bloodsucking atomic zombie fishmen.

If you desire to put this face on your chest (or your wall or a tote bag), it’s available on schtuff at my Redbubble store.

Ko-Fi Schtuff

I didn’t mean this newsletter to be so sales oriented but …

If you’re interested in owning some original art, my Ko-Fi store is open. Discounts are available to supporters and six month subscribers get to choose from some of what’s available.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

And that’s it for this week. Drink a lot of water. Relax in the shade. Hunt billionaires like the fate of the planet depends on it.

See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #31

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Don’t look now. It’s that day again. The day this newsletter arrives in your email mailbox.

Hopefully.

For those of you who haven’t checked the website, three weeks ago I broke the subscription function for my newsletters. The subscription form had been inviting people to join the 530 folks who were subscribed to Skookworks. I went looking for where that number was coming from, got distracted and, in the process of adding some new functions, I shut off the subscription one.

And then I didn’t have any dedicated time for a couple of weeks to figure out what I’d broken.

On Sunday I made some adjustments to the function of Skookworks and the “subscription” function is back on the main page. Ideally that means subscriptions get sent out again. I still don’t know where the subscription form was getting the idea that 530 people were subscribed. It’s currently listing a number that actually matches all y’alls email addresses.

So … HI!

These Days …

Sarah gets back in town tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to that. I enjoy my own company but we got married because we enjoy each others company and I’ve been missing hers. We’ve been talking and texting on a daily basis. That’s fun. Being physically in the same place will be more fun.

We’re still looking for a new housemate. We’ve had one person come by and look at the place and have another scheduled to come by on Monday. We’ve only had one scammer contact us and that got no further than one email exchange. Never trust someone who wants to sent you money to rent a place sight unseen.

We have a Craigslist ad up that I need to repost. The thing disappeared off the front page of the site after a day. I’ve been checking other listings to be sure that we’re not asking more than average. I see very few listings for our area of Seattle. Does that mean this neighborhood is unpopular? Or do people living here just not want to leave so there aren’t spaces available?

I’m working on some color illustrations for an RPG manual. I’ll show them off when the book gets published. You’ll have to trust me that they are pretty good.

When I’m working on art I like to have either music or a Youtube video playing in the background. Despite Youtube being a video sharing platform a lot of what’s featured is just someone talking into a microphone. Those videos don’t require me to look at them to get their points. I listen some politics, some media reviews, some examinations of social phenomena, some people giving their opinions of other peoples opinions. There are a lot of videos focusing on that last one.

There are a few Youtube channels that require me to actually watch the videos to get the full effect. One of those, that I think should get more attention, is the Panel Jumper. I did a portrait of Cole Hornaday and Ben Laurance back in 2020. The channel features video essays on the history of comics. A couple of my favorites are:

The One about Swamp Monsters

The One about Octobriana

Their current project is a documentary on Peter Antoniou – Apostle of the Impossible. They’ll be filming here in Seattle on August 22nd and September 18th. I may have to stay up past my bedtime to attend one of those.

Designing for …

Redbubble is a terrible place to try to sell ones own designs. It is designed as a site to sell people things. Any things. If you’re trying to get folks to buy just your things Redbubble will insist on showing people other things by other people.

But Redbubble is a great site for practicing making designs. They give you a variety of products on which to position your design. You can see how an image looks on t-shirts, mugs, bathmats, shower curtains and clocks. You discover that almost no designs work on miniskirts.

I do sell the occasional something through my store at Redbubble. Supposedly one could rake in the bucks if one chases trends, owns a category or has a big social media presence.

Me? I have fun making art. Having the store gives me a place to put that art. I hustle enough at the Post Office. Here is a process GIF of one of my recent designs.

You can find it on schtuff here.

I hope your week has been eminently tolerable. I know we’re being told that the world is going to hell and that we should be mad at somebody. I’m not going to argue. I’m just going to do my best to make my corner of the world better today than it was yesterday. I’ll still be angry but I’ll try to be rational about it. (Yes, I know that’s an oxymoron.)

See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #30

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Today is the first day of my three day weekend. I have all sorts of plans for what I’d like to accomplish. Art! Writing! Fix the frikking subscription function so this newsletter can invade people’s email inboxes again.

My most immediate task is finding a new housemate.

On Tuesday, August 1st, our previous housemate informed me that he’d found another place with coworkers, nearer to his work. He paid his rent for the month, minus the security deposit, and in a couple of hours, had moved his stuff out.

On the one hand, this was annoying. Aside from now having to find a new housemate, when he’d moved in he’d asked for assurances that we’d be here for the long term and that, if we decided to move, he’d get a lot of advance notice. So his sudden evacuation was a big surprise. He’d made no mention that he was even considering such a thing and he’d been good in the past about informing us of his schedule.

On another hand, he never really lived here. Our place was basically an extended stay hotel room (without maid service). He lives in California. He owns a house, has a wife and cats and is in Seattle for work. He’d stay here Monday through Thursday and head home on Friday mornings. It’s not an arrangement I’d enjoy. He had a commute of at least a half hour, each way, to get from our place to his work. I understand wanting to reduce commute time. We live five minutes from my postal station. A short commute is a big plus for me.

I’ve already contacted some folks who have advertised that they are looking for rooms. One person should be coming by this morning to take a look. I have some tidying to do. Mostly that’s vacuuming up cat hair. With Sarah out of town I haven’t really been occupying most of the house. I use the kitchen (and clean up after myself), I spend time at my computer or my drawing table, and I sleep. The cats – they go everywhere and leave fur behind. Also the occasional hairball. That I clean up immediately.

If the person coming by today isn’t interested I’ll be putting together a Craigslist ad. That’s how we’ve found people in the past. We’ve got the ability to be choosy about who we rent to. I just had other things I wanted to do. Bitch whine complain.

So this is another short newsletter.

Here is the last of the process GIFs of those character sketches.

Here is my reminder that the shop at my Ko-Fi page is open.

I hope you’ve had a good week. If you’re living in one of the hot zones, I hope you’re managing to stay cool. And I hope cooler temperatures are headed your way.

See you in seven!

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Skook Words (and Pictures) #29

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Here we are again. Friday on planet Earth, Northwestern North American edition. I have not yet fixed the email function of this newsletter so if you’re reading this today it means you’ve taken the time to come to this website. You are, therefore, a saint and the most blessed of all beings. I’d suggest that you now go buy a lottery ticket but being blessed and being lucky are neither equal nor equivalent.

Part of the reason I haven’t fixed that email function is that, in the time I’ve had available, I’ve been working on art – a commission for an update of an RPG manual and a couple of tribute portraits of friends who have passed on. Plus a lot of random sketches just to get ideas out of my head.

Plus I’ve been putting art in my shop at my Ko-Fi site. Physical art. For sale. The first batch consists of original character illustrations from my Daughter of Spiders project back in 2013. I’ll be adding art from other projects as time permits.

I’m keeping this newsletter short today so I can make more progress on those art projects. I hope that your week has gone well and you’re looking forward to a relaxing weekend.

See you in seven!

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Skook Words (and Pictures) #28

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Friday stumbles over the horizon, dazed and wobbly. Is today the right day? Is it really Friday? Or has Thursday lingered over, an unwelcome, obstinate guest? Perhaps Saturday has arrived early and will spin Friday around and away for another week?

Nah. That’s Friday alright. Friend to some. Enemy to others. Simply another day of the week in cultures that don’t give the days names.

The Next Five

Last week, over on Facebook, Jason Levine nominated me to post 10 comic book characters that have influenced my interest in comics. One character a day for 10 days. No explanation, no review, just the character.

So I did. I just posted covers on Facebook but here I’m giving a little context to my choices. I wrote about the first five in last Friday’s newsletter. The next five are below:

6. The Spirit


I read the Spirit in black and white reprints published first by Warren Magazines, then Kitchen Sink Press. The stories were original published in color in weekly installments of Sunday newspapers. It’s a brilliant series with a lot of creative storytelling, layouts and design. (And racism. Sigh.) There have been a few attempts to revive the character but none of the new versions have lasted.

7. Modesty Blaise


I spent a lot of time in the library as a kid. I made it a habit to go there regularly and read The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. The comics page. I’m sure I read other parts of the paper upon occasion but it was always the comics that I came to read. If I missed a day the library kept copies of the previous week’s issues easily available. The Chronicle ran the daily Modesty Blaise comic strip. The library also had copies of some of the Modesty Blaise novels. I forget which I discovered first.

8. Den


I read the first 15 pages of Den in the trade paperback Ariel in the same little bookstore that I used to visit to get my comics as a kid. The art blew me away. At the time I couldn’t afford the book. Discovering the extended series later in Heavy Metal magazine further warped me and made me a fan of Richard Corben for life.

9. Zot


Zot! was a fun series. A mix of silly and serious. Not much to say beyond that.

10. Shang Chi


I’m not sure which was the first issue of Master of Kung Fu that I purchased. It’s not this one. I picked this one because it features Paul Gulacy’s art. That’s what attracted me to the series to begin with. Doug Moench’s writing kept me engaged until the series was canceled with issue #125.

The Process

Here’s this week’s process GIF –

Subscriptions Delayed

I’d written last week’s newsletter and scheduled it for publication at the usual time. And then I went poking around in WordPress (this site runs on WordPress) to see if I could find the 530 subscribers that my subscription form claimed I had. In the process I did something that removed the emailing function from my posts. I haven’t had time to dig in a figure out exactly what I did. Apologies to anyone who had to come here to read rather than get this newsletter in their email. I will get it fixed.

And, no, I wasn’t able to find the list of 530 subscribers. Maybe my website is hallucinating.

I hope your week goes well. May you experience joy. May you get rest.

See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #27

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Good Morning to all my 530 subscribers!

Really? I have 530 subscribers?

That’s what my subscription form says. I haven’t been able to figure out where that number comes from but, hey, glad to have you reading. Even if you’re a bot. Bots need love too.

Since you’re reading this it means you’ve survived another week! Congratulations! Pat yourself on the back. Scratch someone else’s back and maybe they will scratch yours. I hear, however, that it’s good manners these days to ask first.

Gatekeeping

I started a rant here about the enthusiasm for AI in … far too much. I’ve deleted it in favor of just saying – current human culture isn’t prepared to put it many good uses. The fact that it is was and continues to be generated by plagiarizing the creative work of real humans is, to me, a clear indication of this. I was inspired to rant by going to haveibeentrained.com. This website claims to search the databases that are being used to train art theft AIs. I put my name in the search engine and up popped a number of my images. I put in the names of some of my characters and up popped more of my images.

If you register with the site it gives you the opportunity to both upload images and register websites that you don’t want scraped for AI training. I’ve got way too many images online – just at Skookworks.com – to spend time uploading all of them, so I’ve registered all my websites and marked them as NO AI TRAINING zones. I don’t know if that will make any difference.

I got an email from someone at the site to confirm that my information was real and accurate. I responded to the email and got a response to my response. That was promising.

I don’t know of any site that does the same for the Large Language Model AIs.

The First Five

Over on Facebook my friend, Jason Levine, nominated me to post 10 comic book characters that have influenced my interest in comics. One character a day for 10 days. No explanation, no review, just the character. Each day, I am to nominate someone to do the same.
Rather than nominate anyone I asked for volunteers. If someone wanted to play, they just needed to say so in a reply. One person each day.
And, while I’m not going to give any explanations there, I’ll be doing so here in this newsletter. The first five are in today’s edition; the next five on the 21st.
The hardest part about this challenge is that, at this point in my life, it’s not specific characters that interest me. I pick up comics and graphic novels based on who is writing and/or drawing them. And even when I was a kid there are a number of characters whose comic I read only because of the artist drawing that comic. I mean, I don’t care about Dracula, in general, but I loved Tomb of Dracula by Wolfman and Colan. Most of the characters on this list fit that criteria. They were only done by one creator (or creative team) and I’m not interested in reading versions done by other folks. I did start collecting a lot of series because I liked one creator’s version and then kept collecting it when that creator moved on because I’d grown to like the character.

1. Spider-Man

This is the first comic I ever owned. It’s not a standard Spider-Man story. It’s a riff on King Kong with Gog, an alien, standing in for the big gorilla and the Savage Land, standing in for the lost world of Skull Island. Also, Gwen Stacy plays the Ann Darrow role and gets carried off by Gog. I had a small allowance that, for a few years, covered the purchase of one comic a month. At the time, Spider-Man only appeared in one regular comic so that worked out for me.

Amazing Spider-Man 103

2. Swamp Thing

Time passed. My allowance got bigger. I added The Incredible Hulk to my regularly set of regularly purchased comics. I loved monsters and the Hulk was a monster that fought other monsters. There was a book store in town that had a rack of comics. I’d go in regularly and skim the comics. I kept getting hooked by Swamp Thing. He was a monster that was weirder than the Hulk who fought weirder monsters than the Hulk did. But my allowance, while bigger, was still pretty small. It took a lot for me to decide to add another series to my must-buy list. I finally took the plunge with Swamp Thing #24. The series was cancelled with this issue.

3. Tintin

I discovered Tintin when my family stayed with one of my Mom’s old friends. She had at least two Tintin albums sitting on a coffee table. One of them was definitely The Shooting Star. Americans often thought of comics as being just “superhero stories” – despite plenty of examples of comics that featured none. Tintin really showed me that “comics” was a medium for telling all kinds of stories. I don’t remember if, when I read Tintin the first time, I knew that it was not an American comic. I probably did. Mom’s friend had a lot of books about African and Asian mythology. She probably told me that this Tintin was a translation. I don’t remember. I do remember wanting more. The stories were longer than American monthlies and the format was larger.

4. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

I’m not sure how old I was when we discovered Perelandra. Perelandra was a comic book store. It sold new comics and back issues. My mother told Brian, the owner, to let me and my brother buy anything we wanted. She didn’t believe in censoring our reading. She’d gotten us adult library cards when we were, maybe, nine and ten. If we didn’t already, Glenn and I soon had paper routes, earning incomes that far surpassed our previous allowances. More money meant more comics and Perelandra gave us plenty to choose from. One of those choices was The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers – sex, drugs, crime, more drugs, hippies, more drugs.  Freak Brothers didn’t make me want to do drugs but it didn’t dissuade me either. There’s a lot Freak Brothers DNA in Misspent Youths.

5. Cerebus the Aardvark

I don’t remember which issue of Cerebus was my first. I know it was before the author, Dave Sim, decided to turn the series into a single, 300 issue, graphic novel. I’d read other self published comics (Elfquest is a prime example) but Cerebus (through Sim’s gung ho editorializing) was the series that inspired me to want to forget about working with regular publishers and publish comics myself.

The Process GIF

That’s it for this week. I hope the summer is treating you well and, if you’re in the parts of the world getting record heat, you’re managing to stay cool.

See you in seven!