CHECK IT OUT!

This has been pretty exciting; watching my humble marker roughs come to life by the talented and able bodied Marc Letzmann...



And now it's a for real comic book page...



I am fighting the urge to post more. I don't want to spoil anyone from actually buying the book!

CHAOS!

THE CATS OUT OF THE BAG!

This is the cover art for ISSUE #1, minus the CHARLATAN BALL logo, Image banner, etc., plus I don't think this is the cropped version--but you get the idea. It should be noted that almost everyone depicted actually has a name, a story and shows up in the book(s).

Joe wants to do wraparound covers for all the books, which is a brilliant idea. Let me dig thru some of my roughs of this and post them, so you can see all the different directions and steps it took to get here. My only hesitation to doing a composition like this (besides it being fuck-all hard to fit everyone in this space), was that I did almost the EXACT drawing for Rudy Coby's LABMAN, like ten years ago--and I've yet to recover! hahaha Anyone have that to post? I think it was a promo or sourcebook. I can't find mine.

As for a release date, we were all set to do May, but Image Comics said if we waited for JUNE, they'd be able to do a bigger promotional push for it. So June it is. At least we'll have 2 books out by SD Comicon.

Check it out, pix and info are already starting to trickle out, look at this site!

How exciting, there's even a FRENCH BLOG all about Charlatan Ball...though from what I could gather, is just a collection of jpegs extracted from MY blog! "I'm big in France." hahaha

Hilarious.

I'd love to link to more of these sites, which I will, once more comes out and I compile them.

PUTTING MY MONEY WHERE MY MOUTH IS...

...or is it: "sticking my foot in my mouth"?!

I feel like between the colorist, Joe and myself--we're attempting to create a new "language". Not blaze new trails, break a mold or solve pi; mind you, but try to find that happy place with our palette and rendering style(s). We START at Kirby...but knowing how even the PAPER STOCK can change the psychology of what you're looking at, we're attempting to hybrid something that won't be off-putting to new(er) comic book readers.

Taking a shot at a page myself, if only for sample purposes; I discovered another element to complicate matters further: with technology (i.e. computer coloring and Photoshop’s WIDE RANGE OF COLORS), when do you say when. Try it. Take a page, limit your palette and with altruistic intentions, beginning with the utmost respect for old Kirby-era coloring, watch yourself slowly bastardize it, panel by panel. "Oh, he needs to POP more here." "Hmm, let's SCAN this character back so the foreground reads."--all these tricks at our disposal--in our 'arsenal'. Do they even sell DR. MARTIN'S Dyes anymore? Yes, I am a bastard, I succumbed to the siren calls of lens flares and self-colored lines. I am guilty and here is the proof...


By the way--it should be noted that Marc's colors are so much better and refined than what I've done above. I chose this page not for any overall, harmonious composition, but found it's individual panels included the "how-to-sell-expression-thru-color" as their subjects. Hence my qualifier: please don't squint your eyes and take in the whole page at once. I failed in that aspect--and me with meager clicking mouse in hand, hadn't the patience or time to go back and fix panel #2! hahahaha

Someone PLEASE buy me a Centiq!


And then here are some scenes I did with MARKERS many years back. It is world's easier to 'limit' yourself, color-wise, when you are holding only 4 Prismacolors! hahaha










I'm going to wait on posting actual pages until I know the three of us (Marc the colorist, Joe the writer and myself), are happy. I also don't want to take away from any would-be fanfare that might occur with promos that have yet to be seen.