The Hickee Trade Paperback is OUT!

Years in the making and now ready and waiting! The Hickee Trade Paperback is packed with a ton of early out of print, hard to find, comic work by myself, Scott C., Nathan Stapley, Razmig Mavlian, Joe White, Vam, Paul Brown, and Dave Bogan. Clear a space on your bookshelf for this wonderful edition published by TopatoCo. It's even got an exciting foreword by Dan Piraro of Bizarro fame! Don't wait until they're all sold out! Order yours today!

The Principal Skeleton trilogy

Continuing on the theme of "Skulltober" I thought it might be a good time to review and relive the three Principal Skeleton cartoons out there. Soak up the trilogy in all it's skeletal glory!

Skulltober.

Well, the fall has arrived and that means Halloween isn't too far off. I've come to accept that one of my all time favourite things to draw is skulls. This could very well be a left over remnant of my teenage years spent  redrawing  "Eddie" from Iron Maiden album covers, but whatever the source the desire has never left. So I'm kicking off October by attempting to draw as much skull related art as my schedule allows. First up is "the Purple skull of gladness", soon to be followed by more I hope.
I watched "Dead Alive" for the first time the other night and I cannot fathom how I'd managed to miss this movie before! A lot of excellent similarities to "Evil Dead 2", which is hard to come by, in my opinion.

Just a quick post for now. I'll plan to update more as the month progresses!

It's almost ParaNorman time! and shows, shows, shows!

Okay, so I'm about to do a little gushing about the day job first... Ready? Here goes...  PARANORMAN !!! It's almost August 17th!!!! I'm bouncing off the walls in anticipation of the release! For those who weren't already aware, I spent 3 years working on storyboards for the film and there is honestly no project that I'm more proud of than this one. I've been fortunate to work alongside so many talented people in the making of this. And to top it all off it's been extremely satisfying to see Chris Butler (he wrote and co-directed ParaNorman) get a ton well deserved acknowledgement for his efforts. Butler is truly one of the good ones! I offer the interview below as proof of my statement!

See it! See it and love it! See it and not love it! Just get out there on August 17th and get in touch with your current feelings on zombies and stop motion!

Whew... alright. I now return you to your usual Grickle blog post:

 Things have been busy these days and I've found it a little trickier than usual to infuse Grickle with the newness it demands. My apologies. I was lucky enough to participate in "the Book show"in Paris, France and "the Beatles Tribute" show at Gallery Nucleus, down in LA last month though.

Also I got to try my hand at an Adventure Time piece for the "Oootopia: An Artgebraic Tribute to Adventure Time" show (a different Gallery Nucleus show.)

 
Beyond that I'm working on a couple more pieces for a mysterious side project I hope to announce in the near future. Oh man, can you feel the anticipation in the air? I can. :)

Selling some babies.

I've decided it's time for some of my original artwork to leave the nest. So, right now at the Grickle store I've put up the five original illustrations for "The Children of the Night & their Dad" for sale. Have a look and please treat them gently if you decide to purchase. :)

Wizards and stuff

A rambling, off the cuff, seat of my pants update on anything and everything I've been up to recently.

Earlier this week I posted the first of four Wizard images I created for the wildly successful Idle Thumbs kickstarter campaign. I will eventually post the rest of them there, so keep an eye out. I also mailed off my piece, Late night at the Library, for the Book Show in Paris, France.  Definitely influenced by my recent discovery of M.R. James. Speaking of the man, has anyone watched this (below)?


So good and spooky and wonderfully acted by Michael Hordern. I've never been so entertained by just watching someone eat!

Let's see, what other stuff is going on? My grandpa just turned a cool 91 years of age this week so if you find yourself in Deep River, Ontario, wish him a happy birthday! I managed to contribute an Adventure Time cover last month and I'm busily working away at Laika every day and putting together pieces for a few more upcoming art shows that I'll post about soon enough.

Oh, and did anyone notice that the LA Kings won the Stanley Cup? I'm not a Kings fan but I have to say it felt nice to see them win it after being around for 45 years. I do hope that Marcel Dionne gets a chance to hang out with the Cup in the midst of all the celebrating.

That's all I've got for now! Talk to you soon.

Hulked up.

I recently added some Hulk doodles to my Flickr gallery and I must say I was pleasantly surprised at the general reaction to them. I won't pretend I'm unaware that anything "Avengers" related gets disproportionate internet attention right now, but I was still caught off guard by the number of folks wanting to look at Hulk drawings. Thanks everyone! The Hulk is crazy fun to draw but no matter how mad I tried to make him in the doodles I kept wishing I could infuse just a little more rage into that green ass body. I may have to just keep trying.

Grickle with voices

A few weeks ago I was approached, via email, by an English language instructor at a university in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, asking permission to use "The smartest dog in the world" in a learning exercise. The students were to practice using English by providing an audible thought process to the main characters of the story. The results were both hilarious and fascinating to me!

Here's a playlist with all the variations on Youtube for your viewing and listening pleasure.

Grickle with voices

This blog.

Jeez, I haven't been doing a great job, as of late, keeping this blog relevant. Between the Twitter and Facebook accounts, by the time I get around to here all the info seems overly redundant to bother posting.

I'm going to make an effort, right here and now, to give this blog a more blog-like feel. It'll still have posts of stuff I'm doing and selling and whatever, but the updates will hopefully be more off the cuff and less just repeating what was in Twitter and Facebook.

So ...uhhh.. hmm. Okay, off the cuff. Here goes... well first off I've been doing a few Game of Thrones doodles and hoping to do more as ideas and time allow. I'm reading the third book, Storm of Swords, and enjoying every bit of it. Probably the most addictive reading I've experienced since the Harry Potter series or catching up on all the Sherlock Holmes stories I'd missed.

I've got a couple of illustration pieces I need to get cracking on for two different art shows this summer, one in LA at Qpop and another at Galerie Daniel Maghen in Paris, France. Excited to contribute to both shows. I'll be posting more on those as I actually complete the art.

I've been doing a steady stream of work for SpongeBob Squarepants Comics as well. If you ever get a chance you should pick up an issue. I always find this fellow's video reviews very pleasant. I think Chris Duffy has done an outstanding job, as usual, of collecting a ton of talent to work on the books.

Alright, well that should suffice for my first stab at giving a more substantial and relevant post on this much neglected blog. Stay tuned for more!

Hourly Comics Day (Feb.1, 2012)

I participated in the Hourly Comics Day event that happened on Twitter yesterday. Check out the results on my Flickr gallery.

The Book of Grickle a finalist for the 2012 Oregon Book Awards!

I'm extremely flattered that the Book of Grickle is a finalist in the 2012 Oregon Book Awards!You'll find me alongside some other excellent books in the The Pacific Northwest College of Art Graphic Literature Award category.