Another proponent for "naked hands"...

More progress... albeit slow and cumbersome.
This current fight scene is in it's finishing stages and all the players are in position for the finale. The next 3 or so pages will be fast and furious, with little or no transition to break up the brutality... so I just wanted to establish character positions one last time before just zooming in on the two main combatants. The young Girl is trapped between her fear of the nearby violence and her revulsion towards the crippled and dying Director, who in turn is now in the right position for the coming denuemont.
These sort of "set-up" panels are the hardest to pull off because they require a great deal of information about the environment as well as the characters involved. The final panel shows the figures in relative positions... and this becomes a bit important later on in order for the story to flow well. We'll just have to see how it all turns out...

Life in general is in a stall right now as I battle my bank over a balance discrepancy and I lack extra funds to simply run around and enjoy myself. I suppose that it helps to motivate me to work on the pages, out of default... but it doesn't exactly put me in the sweetest of moods to know that I haven't any choice in the matter.

Well... it's back to the grind now...
Damn,.. I just wish that I'd refrained from putting friggin' gloves on the Director's hands now. The hands in the panel where he's on his back looking up at the Girl came out very well... and I am no longer as pleased with the rendering now that I had to put those goofy-assed gloves over them for continuity.

Crap.

The Solar Plexus is NOT a Celestial Object... Here... Let me show 'ya!!!

Just a bit of progress from the ongoing saga as it rumbles closer to it's finale...
The pages are coming a bit easier now as the end is in sight. Perhaps it is just the thought of the prodigious task of coloring and formatting that has to get done before the big San Diego Comic Con this year that has galvanized me into action... we shall see.

Around 30 pages are in the can now pencil-wise, with about 26 or so inked already... not too shabby.
I have a long way to go though...

To be honest, as long as the pencils are completely finished and a few pages are color sampled, I'll have plenty to show at the Con... but I'd rather have the whole danmed thing finished and pitched to Heavy Metal before the show hits.
Wish me luck...

"Why, yes... yes it IS a surgical cap!"

Just a quick flashback to the October madness that brought smiles to the faces of the local Brooklyn kids that flocked to our home-made spookhouse on the 31st last year...

Every year, my buddy Robert and I have a big costume blow-out for the local kids in his neighborhood. These are kids from a rough lower income area that don't usually get out to see the big parade in Manhattan... they also can't really safely trick-or-treat on their own... so they (and even their parents) flock in droves to our little open house every Halloween.
We go through POUNDS of candy every year, and each successive season promises even bigger crowds!

Last year, we put on the big "Godzilla vs King Ghidorah" blow-out...



After our big tussle... both costumes had pretty much given up the ghost... we REALLY went at it too!
Goddamned King Ghidorah's three heads had wire-framed paper-mache and chicken wire horns... all 6 of which went right through my Godzilla foam costume and left multiple welts and contusions all over my upper body when Robert gleefully pounded me with them in triplicate during the climax of our battle...
I simply resorted to punching him in the giblets with my claws in retaliation...

Here was my "default" costume... a home-made number I painted and cobbled together from various sources myself...



This was my "candy peddling" get-up... I actually got a little flak from a kid's impatient Mother who told me, "You'd be able to hand out candy faster if you weren't wearing those big scary hands..."
Unbelievable... free candy and show for her kid, and she still couldn't squeeze a simple "Thank you" out of her ungrateful cake-hole!

This year, we opted for the more classical approach... Universal style!
We had a whole mad scientist lab set-up... complete with operating table for the "Monster" to re-animate on.
I had about 4 hours to come up with a flyer for the show... from finished sketch to colored and lettered image.
I did the best I could with the little time I had... and still tried to get that old retro movie poster feel out of a rush job.
Here's hoping I was at least mildly successful...





My buddy Eric did the "Dr. Frankenstein" honors... and he aquitted himself famously... well... except for the moment when he forget his line about the the fiery torch prop and had to be prompted from the semi-articulate Monster himself! ("Eric... it's frikkin' RIGHT BEHIND YOU, man!")


Robert played the hirsute Wolfman and I was the infamous Frankenstein Monster. We had TONS of fake blood to toss around and a pair of fake hearts to tear out of one another's chests at the shows climax... it was a blast.



Messy and barely rehearsed, we did our best. The kids roared for more...
Maybe we'll do even better next year!



See? You hardly miss the perfectly fitted wig we wasted $30 and 4 hours searching for downtown the day before...


It probably looked better on Robert's upstairs coffee table anyway...