Here is the completed work, including texts I added, all by hand:
Daniel Loxton beautifully colored the image:
Skeptic launched this as the “cover” of Junior Skeptic, which is an insert in Skeptic Magazine #35! They’re the greatest!
Visit WWW.SKEPTIC.COM
JUNIOR SKEPTIC MAGAZINE Read More »
So ever since I created Dr. DeBunko, I’ve been in touch with the Skeptic Society, who has always been ultra-supportive of my comics work. Junior Skeptic Magazine editor DANIEL LOXTON began to discuss possibilities for collaborating for Skeptic, including some Skeptic Magazine Dr. DeBunko possibilities which never panned out. In May 2008 he mentioned “some little projects coming up we might be able to help each other with.” In June he confided that it would be for a Junior Skeptic illustration, possibly a cover, and that he had the go-ahead to use me as the artist if he wished.
In October, he said we should be ready to begin that project in about a month. In November he said they had to bump the project to complete some books. In April 2009, he finished his huge projects, and we began!
These were my instructions (my “script”):
“… Doris Danger style image of two 1970s teenage *males* confronted at a lakeside by (very roughly) this emerging black-lagoon-style creature … Action is menacing monster, scared teenagers (either standing in Shock! Horror! or fleeing are good). It can be stylistically as over-the-top as you like. (You may wish to hand-draw the Junior Skeptic logo to keep the style unified.”
He sent me some photos and sketches of what the Thetis Lake Monster is believed to look like. He may have sent some links to stories too. I read a couple articles online, and looked up photos of the Thetis Lake. Then I sketched this in pencil:
JUNIOR SKEPTIC MAGAZINE Read More »
diary entry: March 19th, 2007
to cover December 17, 2006 through March 19, 2007
I had begun drawing the pages for DICK HAMMER: THE DAILIES, on November 30 2006, and was able to get eleven pages completed by January 17, 2007 (one page being the “cover image”). One entry was a “double page spread” which I entered as a two-date entry when I posted them online (listed as pages 4-5). I then broke one of the nine pages into two, making it two entries (pages one and two). And finally, I decided one panel should be zoomed into, to make a separate, second entry (panels 12-13). So those eleven pages became fourteen days worth of entries.
I had no web experience, so I told my web helper that I wanted him to set up for me a page where I could just post each new image myself, as I finished them. I didn’t want to have a “click here for next page.” I liked the idea of just scrolling down, down, down, as the story continues.
That said, I still wanted the images lain out so that you could basically look at (and hopefully enjoy, sit back and appreciate) one entry at a time, and then scroll down to the next one when you were done taking in the previous one. The idea with this project was to give each day’s entry a feel that it is its own self-contained little story, with a beginning and end. But that it adds to and builds up the overall story.
It took my web helper a few months to establish that set-up for me, so by the time I had begun posting the images, I was theoretically a couple months ahead of schedule. I planned to post one image every week. I liked that I had made this lead time for myself, because it’s always safer to give yourself a cushion. The other thing though, is that I planned to bite into my cushion a little, and post a number of images all at once, to help get the story started in advance. The first images are just cityscapes, so I thought I should post a lot of these at once, rather than make readers wait an entire week before showing them the next cityscape with absolutely no advancement of story. I “back-posted” the dates, to give readers the feeling some poor suckers might have had to have checked in every week to see basically nothing. It was a gag.
I wrote a long text intro (as I am prone to do with any of my projects), and then posted the first six entries, and voila! The web comic had begun!
I formally announced the release of my web comic by sending out a mailer to the mailing list I’ve slowly been collecting at conventions. This list also includes a lot of stores, and anyone who has been kind enough to take time to review my work. Then I went to a couple message boards to announce the web comic, and I also posted a bulletin at myspace. Lastly, I sent a personal email to Scott McCloud, who I consider the guru of web comics.
After that, all that was left was to check my emails every few hours to see if anyone had written me to say how much they enjoy it. I’m still waiting on that last part, and beginning to check a little less frequently (now three months into posts).
The pacing of the comic is pretty slow, so I’m thinking after the story has actually run for a little while (What I mean here is not that a bunch of posts are up, but that posts are up that actually convey a bit of the story), I’ll need to send some new hype out.
I was afraid some people might look at it, and then go, “Maybe I’ll check back in a month. And one of my friends confided that this is how he felt about it. Hopefully, it will gain interest as the story actually proceeds.
I just finished posting the introduction sequence, and added a new text sequence featuring the No-Good, Dirty, Stinking Back-Stabbing Rats. I had this idea from reading reprints of old 1950’s comics. As Al Feldstein told me (and I later read further confirmation from a Stan Lee introduction to a hardcover collection of Kirby’s giant monster comics), comics used to get a significant delivery discount from the post office, so long as they contained two pages of solid text. For this reason, all the old comics had these stupid-ass text-only “features,” that no one ever read. And the publishers knew no one read them, so they didn’t care who wrote them, and probably didn’t even bother to proof-read them.
So I was looking at these text features, and actually reading some of them, and thinking, I’ve got to put a text feature in some of my comics. And I sat on it for a while, and tried to come up with a feature that would be fun as a “text only.”
A few years ago, I had bought some old radio programs of “The Shadow” on Cd, and I enjoyed them enough to buy a number of other radio programs. Recently, I had hopped into my car, and the local college radio station was playing a radio show, and I listened for a minute and realized it was a Dashiell Hammett “Sam Spade” adventure, and it got me all excited, to the point I wished I didn’t have to get out of my car.
And then the next time I happened upon an old text piece in a comic, it hit me. I should do a film noir radio show as a text piece, to give a little break between chapters, in my Dick Hammer web comic. The whole point of radio shows is that you’re hearing all this stuff. You hear footprints, and a knock on a door, and a door open, and you can’t see any of it. So I thought, What if I do a a radio show, which is dependent on sound, but you can’t actually hear any of it, you have to read it instead? Portraying sound just through text. Will readers be able to “hear” the show? Find out . . . only in Dick Hammer: The Dailies!
I started thinking of Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” and Michael Madsen’s torture and “ear” scene.” I wanted to try and invoke violent, disturbing imagery like that, just as an experiment. To see if I could make “listeners” (readers) squirm, without “seeing” or “hearing” anything.
The final element to the Dick Hammer web comic was deciding I wanted to title every chapter with a real pulp fiction title. I realized I didn’t care if the title had anything to do with the chapter, or even with the story. I just wanted some melodramatic titles.
I was reading James Bond novels and realizing Ian Fleming titled all his chapters, and I was thinking, I never title any chapters. I never even think to title chapters. That might be fun.
Also I had just finished reading an anthology of Cornell Woolrich short stories, and all the titles were so vibrant and corny and fun. So one day, I sat down in my living room with a pen and piece of paper, and jotting any stupid-ass phrase that came to mind, jotted down I’m guessing sixty or so ideas that I’ll be able to pick from, each time a new chapter comes up.
Even with all my advance work to keep on my “once a week” deadline, I’ve managed to get behind schedule. I didn’t even realize I was behind, but last week, as I posted the latest contribution, I realized my previous contribution was ten days earlier. That’s no good. And what’s especially no good is that I’m down to my last entry that I have finished in advance, and it needs to be posted this week. That means this week, I will have officially dried out my two month lead-time, and will have to make sure to publish one post a week. Wish me luck, fans.
151. POSTING DICK HAMMER: THE DAILIES as a web comic online Read More »
When I picked sidewalk square number 25, it was before 8am, and it seemed like a very pleasant spot. By 11am, the sun was getting pretty hot.
“Alyssa Mann” is the person who sponsored my drawing. Sponsors paid to have their names worked into the artwork. Most of the sponsors were businesses, but my sponsor was just a kind person who believed in supporting children’s art programs.
While I worked on SPLUHH, I overheard people who walked by, who would say, “Wow!” or laugh. The other sidewalk artists didn’t make Kirby-style giant monsters.
Now that you’ve seen the “ACTION SHOTS,” here’s a break-down of how I did the piece. I brought with me a print-out of my SPLUHH monster for reference:
MY FIRST HOUR: I don’t remember ever doing a sidewalk chalk art piece before. When I checked in, I was given a nice box of really intense-colored pastels. I was also given a sheet of sidewalk chalking “tips.” These tips included using water, spray bottles, or brushes to spread the chalk and bind it to the sidewalk better, and to get a more solid color. I hadn’t been prepared for any of this.
I grabbed my purple pastel and sketched out the SPLUHH lettering to make sure it would fit. Then I grabbed my yellow, and fleshed in a SPLUHH shape. Procrastinating, I colored in the SPLUHH letters, grinding the pigment into the concrete with my finger tip. It made the color look better and more intense, but I could tell my fingertips wouldn’t last long this way. AND, next thing I knew, my purple chalk was gone, used up completely by the lettering. Then I realized I hadn’t yet put my sponsor’s name in, so I hastily squeezed it into the composition. My chalks were going fast, and I realized I wasn’t going to have enough.
Luckily, I have two small boys, so at 9:30 am I made the twenty-minute trek back home, raided their closet, and came back with a couple extra packs of chalk. I also returned with a bottle of water, a small bucket for the water, and some brushes.
I had trouble with the square format. It changed things compositionally. I found I wouldn’t be including a lot of things I’d planned to include, due to space constrictions.
I tried playing with the water and brushes, but ended up not liking the results anyhow. So I just ground the chalk into spaces as deep as I could.
I began just filling areas with color. I filled SPLUHH with yellow. I colored blue areas behind SPLUHH. I colored green areas underneath SPLUHH for grass, and tan areas for hills. I used the cheap pastels from home to fill all these areas. I saved the nice, bright pastels for later, hoarded them like precious things, hoping their diamond-value would help the piece shine, when applied at the end. If I applied them now, they would just get covered over with the cheap, lacklustre filler.
I knew I wouldn’t be drawing any fleeing, running figures in the foreground, but I decided to draw a few palm trees. I had trouble making a mouth shape I was happy with. Notice in the photo above, my “SPLUHH” reference image, and the tips of my shoes, as I took the picture.
I had a conversation with a passersby, who said the piece looked done. He associated “done” with all the areas being covered with chalk. All the areas being filled. I explained I had to highlight and accentuate areas now.
When I make comics, I only use black. Now, here, I only had one black chalk, so I knew this would be a very differen’t looking piece. It would look like a chalk piece. Color-wise, I was reminded of Wayne Thiebaud’s art.
Wayne Thiebaud. Cake Window (Seven Cakes). 1976
I was fortunate to take some classes from him in college. He talked about mixing colors around edges. Edges of objects, edges of shadows. Mix colors that don’t belong in those edges. Oranges and yellows and blues. It gives the objects a luminescence, and inner glow, and energy. So I mixed some pinks and oranges around SPLUHH. Then I butted those colors up against purplish bluish skies, so that the complimentary colors would give SPLUHH an extra pop. If I didn’t like something, I just ground a new color of chalk over the top, and that took care of it. But the overall piece was still very “chalky”. I finally grabbed my darker, nicer pastels, and began highlighting areas of SPLUHH, of the cliffs, of the trees.I reddened the eyes and lips. I put some grass stalks. I felt done at around noon, then visited with other artists, looked around, dickered with the piece for another couple hours without making any real changes, packed up, and called it a day at 2:30pm.
“CHALK IT UP” SIDWALK CHALK EVENT! Read More »
September 4, 2010
Sacramento’s “Chalk it up” festival is a non-profit organization created to support art education programs. Their website is www.chalkitup.org
This is their twentieth year. Labor Day Weekend (September 4-6), two hundred artists came out and drew on five-by-five-foot sidewalk squares. There was live music, food, vendors, and children’s activities.
I was invited to participate this year. I decided to draw my Jack Kirby-style “Spluhh monster.” A lot of artists take the three-day weekend to create their masterpieces. Registration was at 7am. I hoped to get there by 8am, and finish in time for a late lunch that first day. I suspected I would work faster than a lot of artists.
Here is the square I chose for myself. Number 25.
My wife popped over with my boys at around 9am, after I’d had a chance to write “SPLUHH” and roughly sketch out SPLUHH’S shape. It was an interesting exercise trying to fit the work into a square rather than rectagonal composition.
I shamelessly brought a pile of shwag to sell to passersby. I think I was the only one.
Since they were there, I let the boys help with the piece, and add some lines to the work. Boris did it first. He grabbed a piece of chalk and started “chalking.” I tried to capture the act on film, but by the time I had the camera up, he was on to other things and didn’t care to participate again. Oscar worked at the piece for a little while, though.
TUNE IN NEXT MONDAY, fans! Chris will walk us through a “BEFORE AND AFTER” process, start to finish, of creating his FULL-COLOR five-foot-square “SPLUHH” monster! See you then! – Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief!
“CHALK IT UP” SIDWALK CHALK EVENT! Read More »
