DLAHP II

This is the scanned cover for my comic, Drug Lion and Handsome Panda. It's a two panel gag comic about a foppish panda who lives with a stoner lion. Handsome panda has exquisite taste, but (for reasons never explained) he lives with a talking lion who is usually zonked on psychoactive drugs. It's a great premise which allows me to make fun of and reference a lot of funny and different things. There are twelve strips in this comic, one of which was drawn by Lee Wiesblatt. I'm getting it printed as soon as I can...

INDRICOTHERE III

This is the final draft of the logo for the band Indricothere. Process process! I've blown it up to about 300% to make it crisper and clean up all of the overlaps and spikes. I'm starting on the back cover, which in a lot of ways can be more fun than the back cover. You can draw crazy things because it's on the back of the album. The reverse side should look much more like a manuscript than the front of the album; there will be blackletter roman numerals for the tracklisting, and the logo will be redrawn (again...) in a more floral style, like the borders of some manuscript illuminations. The reverse cover should be a bit more cosmic, but will tie the two sides together by repeating the logo, the black and white scheme and the op art visual effects.

TIME

This is the fourth drawing in my series of manuscript pages. The drawing is about the passage of time and our imminent deaths; what we do between birth and death. The bottom section is an interpretation of (one of) Bosch's St. Anthony paintings. St. Anthony was tempted (supposedly) by demons and women. St. Anthony, here, is tempted by musicians, fame and riches, books, women and, in general, civilization.

The drawing references Tolkien in a few places, on the left next to the phases of the moon are the names of the month which he devised for use by the inhabitants of The Shire, in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, although there are many instances in the latter work of Hobbits using the names of our months. As well, there is a Gandalf quote on the right hand side, above a quote from the Iliad about the ephemeral nature of being alive. There were a few more quotes of this nature, one especially good one from Beowulf, but I've reserved that for the page which is explicitly about death and dying. These pages are meant to be easier to “get” than my earlier drawings, and as such, they have fewer band references and fewer themes per page.

The middle, six panel section borrows format and concept from Roman de la Rose, this one drawn by the scribe Girart de biaulieu. This was the most popular text in medieval times, a secular prose poem about courtly love and female sexuality. It has survived to this day in hundreds of hand made copies.

INDRICOTHERE II

This is the current draft of my logo for the band Indricothere. The bubble letters are gone, instead the whole thing has gotten much more pointy and messier, it looks more like a black metal logo now than before. The symmetry has been preserved and the plant/tendril filigree is essentially the same.

This version has been okayed, so I'm going to start on the reverse of the album cover, and then the front.

INDRICOTHERE I

I've begun working on an album cover for the one-man technical death metal project Indricothere. The Indricothere itself was the largest land mammal of all time, a kind of giraffe sized rhinoceros. The Indricothere in question is one of the many, many projects of multi instrumentalist Colin Marston, who releases fantastic, intricate music at a prolific rate.

In this vein, I've been asked to draw up a new logo, which is always a hoot. The first step is to count the letters, and look to see if the middle two letters (if the band title has an even number of letters) are somewhat similar. The middle two letters of Indricothere are “o” and “c”. This is good. There are countless approaches to creating a band logo, I prefer them to be messy, hyper detailed, illegible and symmetrical.

Colin asked me to do something like that for the logo. The first draft shows a big influence from Roger Dean's work on the Yes album covers, and also the Dystopia logo, drawn by Dino Sommese (in an interview for Profane Existence, Dystopia has said that they made new fans when people came to their shows expecting to see rap music, due to their logo). This direction wasn't exactly perfect, so I started on a much gorier, drippier, sloppier kind of logo, which isn't quite done yet. But it looks great!



The last one here is my work in progress on the logo...

DLAHP

I visited Tolkien's grave recently, and worked it into this comic.

I started drawing a comic called “Drug Lion and Handsome Panda”. It's a two panel gag comic with a very simple premise: a drug addled lion lives with a foppish panda. Hilarity ensues. The minimalism of the plot and requirements needed to set up a punch line in two panels have actually proved very inspiring, and it's forced me to get very creative to come up with something good, and worth reading again later. I've also made jokes which allow me to draw things which I really like; Tolkien, outer space, other comic characters, medieval details.

I should have this for sale at TCAF. Until I begin getting it printed, I shouldn't say much more at this point...



This is not an April Fool's Day post!