IN LIVE-INK COLOR

Hey there Creepy cousins.... It is I, your humble horror comix hombre with a special serving of late winter lunacy. I have been buying bucket loads of old horror comics lately at conventions in Boston, and it has influnced me enough to produce this fun little frolic into vampirisim~

The page is a meld of all things wonderful about the genre, The darkened room with creepy figure, the voice of reason crying out to deaf ears, being cast out into the night midst a creepy fog, and the grappling with ones own sanity.... ahhhhh, just gotta love that stuff!

Not to mention of course, that I topped it all off with color! As many of you know I generaly stick to black and white, ( for the most part because it is cheeper to reproduce, and thus, easier to market ) however... this was such a fun and nostalgic page, I just felt it had to have that old school color groove working for it.

Hope you are all looking forward to the soon arival of spring, when all things dead become new again.... even VAMPIRES! ( just foolin )

ALIENS IN BOSTON?

Hello again.... This is a little page to show you geek-sters I am still indeed working on my new comic: SUPER GROOVY MAN on a continuing basis. I was going to cut you guys a break and show you a finished page, but I am drawing on my iron will power and keeping things a little mysterious by only showing you the finished lettering, and the rough pencils.

Okay....I lied~

The truth is this... I fully intended to show the finished page, but my work schedule has kept me too busy to do little more than the lettering :-( On top of that free time is running out, because I am getting ready to go to, ( what is shaping up to be ) the WOODSTOCK of comicbook conventions...SUPERMEGAFEST in Boston!

Dig this hipsters... Adam West, and Burt Ward, ( the original 1960's Batman and Robin ) will be there, Julie Newmar, and Lee Meriwether, ( the two hotties who played Catwoman from that series ) will be there...THE FRICKEN BATMOBILE, will be there, Superstar Fantasy Artist Ken Kelly will be there, Holly form LAND OF THE LOST, Edddie Munster, BOZZO the clown, and a slew of other Big time B-listers...you can check it all out at http://supermegafest.com

If you are able to get there at all it will be well worth the visit, and when all the dust has settled, yours truly will be right back here at ye Ol' blogsite to give you a blow by blow re-cap.

Till then, keep yer pencils sharpened~

GET YOUR GROOVE ON MAN!

Hello all you Cat's and Chicks! Here I is again with my latest humble offering from the pages of SUPER GROOVY MAN. In this page we see the groovy one before he had powers, or skill, or charm, or charisma, or anything closely resembling a personality. He is being confronted by the latest in a series of dates to tell him he is duller than a doorknob. She urges him to read something once in awhile so he has topics to discuss instead of pick-up lines. This urging leads him to Barlows Books where he meets a mystical proprieter, and his destiny is forever altered.

I often will letter a page first, then ink my balloons and caption blocks, then do my characters, then my backgrounds. Not this time however... Nope I am staying true to my promise of keeping a wee little bit of mystery surrounding SGM so I wanted to post this page sans detail, and keep ya hungry for more.

Hope you like this little sneak peek. May the god of all things geeky bless you with boogie beats, and a comicon soon~

NOT EASY BEING GREEN

Trick or treat! I recently went to a comicbook convention in Boston, and I was talking about my work with Jim Steranko, ( yeah..."THE" Jim Steranko ) oKAY.....so I'm a shameless name dropper, so what else is new? ~ Anyway... Mr. Steranko was there to sign autographs, and I was fortunate enough to get to shake his hand, and hear some feedback about my portfolio. I must say the man was extremely kind to me. With a line of fanboys a good 15 feet long waiting to get his signature, he took the time to go through each and every page with me, and offer very helpful and constructive comments.

One thing he said I should do was to emulate some other comicbook artists for practice, and also that I need to "punch-up" my blacks...this is not the first time a top dog in the field has told me this, so I know it's a portion I still need to work on. Also while at the show, I bought a short stack of coverless comics for 50 cents a pop, Among them was an old INCREDIBLE HULK, with art by Marrie Severin who was not, to my knowledge, a regular artist on the Hulk run. Marrie was sort of the "Gal Friday" of comics, and much beloved by nearly every comic creator of the gold, and silver age. She got her start at the offices of EC comics in the 1950's as a secretary, and before long was being asked to do touch-up's, coloring, and corrections. It was interesting to see someone who did not have a buttload of experiance working their way through the monumental task of a 52 pager, and doing an okay job of it. It was actually very educational, and inspiring.

I looked at that comic and thought..." Alright, I'll give it a whirl. " So I chose some scenes I thought had enough action and drama in them. I mixed up the players, and changed a pose or two, re-wrote the dialouge to fit my new arrangement, and ...wha-la, my trick or treat HULK practice page was born. There are things I like about this page, overall it was a very good artistic workout, and though it is no prize winner I sure did learn a heck of alot.

Yaknow what else? When I was talking to Jim, ( Jim Steranko ya moron, haven't you been paying attention...sheeSH! ) He flipped through my pages, then came to a dead stop...flipped back one or two pages, stopped again and studdied the page with his hand cupped over his chin. Then he waved his finger at the page and said " This page I REALLY like... I like this one alot!" Then he went back to his place in succession. Now.... do you think this giddy fanboy thought to pay attention to which page he liked so well? .....Hell no, and it's been driving me cuck-koo ever since!

Enjoy your comics everyone!

A SUPER GROOVY SPLASH

Hey all you groovy goblins out there, Just thought you would want to take a peek at the Splash page for SUPER GROOVY MAN. I was influenced on this page by both the 70's romance comics, and the work of comic master Gene Colon, who did, ( among many other great things) , a really inspiring run on HOWARD THE DUCK. The page isn't quite finished yet, and I still need to punch up the blacks quite a bit, so don't be surprised if this post is re-edited sometime soon.

I just wanted to keep to my new goal of posting bi-weekly ( instead of the bi-monthly posts of late ) and I wanted to put something real fresh up. Hope you guys dig it...

LOOK TO THE SKIES

Greetings inhabitants of planet Earth.....

Bet you geek-a-zoids thought you wouldn't hear from me for at least another month or so huh? Well... you were all wrong! Here I am....and with the latest page from SGM to boot yet! This little number let's us see just how the two pointy headed pythons from Zenar 7 got here in the first place. It is the classic UFO arrival scene inspired by countless sci-fi movies, and also more recently by a comic selected especially for me by a very good friend.

I'm hoping you dig this little scribble. This was just a test of the inking I wanna do. What I did was, I took a copy of the original pencils, and just went over that with an ordinarry ball point pen while I was at work.

Of course, I still have the original pencil that I will take the time to ink properly later, but this gives ya a pretty fair idea of what it will look like in the end. Ooohhh.... I should also mention that since I was using a ball point, and not my good micron pens, I decided not to even attempt the lettering. If any of you are hard of seeing, an cannot make out the word balloons... you have my deepest apologies.....b'sides, I don't want you should all know everything upfront.

Who will be interested in buying my book then???

Hang loose hip, and hairy ones~

WHERE YA BEEN LATELY?

Hey everyone remember me? I'm the goofy "retro" comicbook geek artist who used to post here...like, a really, really long time ago. I used to post quite often, as some of you may recall, but Ummmm well there's this stupid little place I go everyday called "work", and I sort of have to go there to keep the lights turned on in my house, ( really lame how that works ) anyway, and this place called " work" has like...really been eating up all of my time lately. Folks...I am so-o-o-o-o not kidding here, I just got done working ten, ( count 'em ) ten 12hr shifts in a row! Not only that, but half of them were night shift, and half of them were day shift! Yowza!

Anyway...enough excuses, and whinning, what you came here to see was art right? Well... here is a little doo-dad I had started on one slow night at work, and then stuffed in my locker. Every week or two I would pull it out, and dabble with it a little more as time allowed. It took me a month or so, but I finally got it finished. It is an homage' to the work of Gerry Taloc, who for years worked on the DC comics classic UNKNOWN SOLDIER.

I hope you dig this little number, and for those of you wonderin where I am at with SUPER GROOVY MAN these days....Wel-l-l-l-l-l-l, Let's just say the Groovy one is still back there perculating in the dark corners of my addled brain, and yes I did do another page, and yes I will post it soon, but I just wanted to show you this one first. IS THAT OKAY WITH YOU??? Sheesh.... You guys are tough! Jes kiddin :-)

Oh...a few other points worth mentioning. I went to the comicbook show in Nashua NH Sunday and was able to get my portfolio critiqued by a nice gentleman from DIGITAL WEBBING. My retro look isn't exactly what they have in mind for their upcoming projects, but the guy was really nice, and took his time looking over my work, and had very positive comments about it, so it turned out to be a very good experiance for me. He asked if I did all the writing, coloring, penciling, lettering, and inking myself, and I said: " Yeah ", and then he said: "WoW!" and so I thought that was very cool.

Finally...I promised to give a shout out to my co-worker Bert Barrett who gave me some fair amount of crap for not posting my blog lately. I asked why he was giving me crap about it, and he said " Cause I like reading the stuff you put up there." I thought that was very cool too. Thanks Bert for a well deserved kick in the kiester.

Peace out Geeky Ladies, and Gents~

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY~

Hey cat's and chick's! I thought it was time to do a little tiding up here at the old blog site, and this is one of the post's that is being re-visited, ( for those of you who are paying attention ) I originally posted this as a two part deal where I had my raw pencil post, and the finished ink, but...well, there are other examples of that in the archives, and I just wanted to have a nice flow of more finished pages for new visitors to look at. This page is when I decided to take some of my SGM practice pages, and meld them into a back up feature. I originally thought of a length of about 8 pages, but it now looks more like at least 12. The long haired young man in the lower left is a sort of morphing of me, and my son Brandon at age 13. The character could easily be recognized as eiether of us at that age. Well that's it for now ragamuffins,....Don't fall off your bicycles~

ZAPPO!

Holy Cat's ! Super Groovy Man is being blasted by the cone head aliens from Zenar 7 ! Their leader, Klatok, has just unloaded a blast from the dreaded new weapon he calls: THE KARMA RAY. Can SG break through the wall of confusion and meditate his way back to his positive energy flow?

What is all this anyway? So glad you asked... it is just some busy brainstorming on what is sure to be the best Mitchell comic yet SUPER GROOVY MAN. This is just another doodle page really, but I am having so much fun with these I might use it for a mini-four page serial in the back of the book.

Say...where is everybody? It's as empty as a tomb around here....

Is all you all gone to conventions?

SUPER GROOVY SAMPLER

Here is a finished page to give everyone an idea of what SUPER GROOVY MAN will be like when it's finally in the bag. This page isn't going in the book, it's just sort of sumpin I was messing around with at work one day. It does give you a little flavor for the style and themes however.

Give me a shout if your having a groovy summer~