Luluki Launches!

The first strip for my weekly webcomic strip is out.  It’s at Luluki.thecomicseries.com

Here’s a promo image:

Some Stuffs I’m Workin’ On(Luluki)

These are panels from the webcomic Luluki that I’m about halfway through(halfway through, two weeks behind–half empty, half full).

More Luluki Sketches

Here’s some more finalish sketches for the two main characters for the Luluki comic strip.  You can see how things have sort of evolved from the skethes I put up yesterday.  This is the gist of how they’ll look, so now I’ll actually be starting on the strips themselves this weekend.  I like to do this, so that I don’t end up reinventing the look of the character everytime I sit down(obviously), like I did with Ophelia.  It worked with Ophelia, but this story is much more cohesive.

Luluki Sketches

I thought this would be an interesting thing to show.  This is sort of a preliminary character design for the main two characters for my forthcoming webcomic Luluki(a weekly webcomic strip about a shamanic vetrinarian and her special rabbit friend).  Obviously this is extremely rough, it’s just meant to capture the general ideas(which may change obviously).

Incidentally, if you were wondering, the reason it’s called Luluki is that Louise Brooks is one of my main main muses for the work(as always), along with my dogs which are salukis.  So I combined the two, and if you say it right, it sounds like you’re mispronouncing Saluki in a very fun and cute way.

Which…it IS a cute comic.  But it’s also very weird, and in my head kind of messed up and scary in what I think is an erotic kind of way.  It’s sort of the fetishizing of dismemberment that I think is behind one of my chief phobias(that I’ve written about here).  I think the mission statement of this comic is in some ways to capture the eroticism of the nightmare, while maintaining a childish innocence.  The idea is very Winsor Mcay I think.  Less Little Nemo and more Dreams of Rarebit Fiend.

Anyways.  It’s a three month comic strip(coming out once a week).  It will start coming out in August.  And the idea is to have some previews of my comic books I’m doing to show at the start of the webcomic, and then those books should start coming out after the webcomic finishes.  I’m shamelessly using the webcomic to bridge people into the more serious send me money books.  Plus webcomics are something I’m always going to enjoy.  I want to do a lot of these sort of short bursts of self-contained narrative for the web.  I’d like to eventually figure out how to allow people to put them on their iphones and stuff.  But as I have no iPhone, it’s hard to play around with that.

But yeah here you go.

Album Artwork Like What

Here’s some album Artwork I did for Shane Hall.

Western Bondage Gasface Finito

Finished the script for the first issue of the Western Bondage script.  It only took for freaking ever.  It’s what happens when you lose momentum on something.  But it’s done.  It’s going to be called Django Sexy, or Sexy Django I think.  I grew up on Westerns, weirdly, so it’s kind of the chance to do a lot of that stuff the right way.
Now that that’s tabled for now, the next few things coming up script wise are: 1. a magical realist story about a shamanic vetrinarian.   I’m thinking that one might work really well as a webcomic.  And then 2. I’m wanting to do some kind of love story, with lots of snappy dialouge, and fun Dawson’s Creek level moments.  I’m less sure of the format I’m going to go with on that one, but despite my best efforts, I think it will probably end up being a little weird too.  I’ve been watching way too much Bunuel lately for it not to end up that way.

Artistically, I’m going to be working on album art this month.  So you might see some rough stuff from that.  I might be doing it for two bands, but I know for sure I’m doing it for this one: Shane Hall.  I already kind of know what I’m doing too, and if it comes off how I have it in my brain, it’s going to be beautiful.

Then June I’ll be starting to do artwork for all of these scripts I’ve been accumulating.  I plan to be extremely busy this summer and into fall.  The goal is to have the first issue of two books ready to put out somewhere.  And to also have a finished webcomic project, like Ophelia.

Fashion Pirate: Art “Josephine”

This is some artwork I made today.  The main thing I was messing with was combining a lot of diffrent clothes to make a coherent character design.  In this case a pirate.  Maybe I should do a pirate story?  At any rate, things didn’t quite come out how I wanted, but this does have a pretty Ophelia vibe to the art.  And I think it looks pretty cohesive considering all of the things I did here.

Interview Schmetnerview

Someone(Aris) actually cared enough about my opinions to want to interview me across a range of them.  It’s done as a “fan interview” but I still managed to plug some of my projects in there, which anyone following this blog is pretty aware of, but anywho.  I talk about that stuff too.

Here’s an exerpt:

4. How did you get into comics?

Initially probably those old Superfriends cartoons. I used to watch all of those growing up. I thought Superheroes were intensely fascinating. I liked the idea that you could be a person of great power and ability, but that those abilities could be unseen from most. I think like most kids of that era, we used comics, particularly superhero comics, as a kind of coping mechanism for a variety of alienating feelings. What sealed the deal for me was when my mom finally bought me a comic, it was some really violent Flash comic, where the Flash fights Zoom, and I think kills him. It was very graphic. Well I was visiting my dad at my step-grandmas, and he found the comic, and forbid me from reading it, and threw it away. But he threw it away in the bathroom trash can, so I would constantly be going into the bathroom to pull the comic out of the trash and read it, until finally someone took out the bathroom trash. It was both really gross, and really what being a comic fan is all about. And then spinning out of that, I got very into Calvin and Hobbes, and that’s probably the book most to blame for my knowledge base. I used to look up all of the references Watterson made in those books, in the school encyclopedias, in like kindergarten and first grade. Which that process got me addicted to research, and knowing things.

Rest of Aris Asks Interview

Oh and yes, I am aware that my name is misspelled in the link.

My Steve Trevor Pitch

So I post on Mark Millar’s message board from time to time(see links on the side).  And one of the forums there is this creative forum, where comic creators sort of horde around sharing artwork and such things with each other.  Well one of the things they do for writers on that forum, is this write off contest.  Where someone will pick a theme for that month, and then all the writers on the forum, will go off and slap together something in line with the rules for that contest.  Then you submit your work, people read it, people vote, people give honest critiques–everyone is made better by the experience.

Long story short, this month was for practicing pitches.  And the theme was pitching a revamp of a character who currently doesn’t have a mini-series at one of the main comic places(DC/Marvel).

I chose Steve Trevor.

Which if you’re wondering who he is, well here’s the wiki description which pretty much nails it:

“In the original version of Wonder Woman’s origin story, Steve Trevor was an intelligence officer in the United States Army during World War II whose plane crashed in the isolated homeland of the Amazons. He was nursed back to health by the Amazon princess Diana, who fell in love with him and followed him when he returned to the outside world, where she became Wonder Woman (and also his coworker, Diana Prince.)

Steve Trevor was portrayed as an American military hero who often fought battles both alone and alongside Wonder Woman. At the same time, he was also a traditional superhero’s love interest: repeatedly becoming kidnapped and needing to be rescued by Wonder Woman, as well as pining after the superheroine in the red-and-blue outfit while failing to notice her resemblance to his meek, bespectacled co-worker Diana Prince.

Yet even at Trevor’s closest resemblance to Lois Lane, the genders of his (and his superhero’s) archetype are reversed from the traditional model, and the significance of this cannot be underestimated. Creator William Moulton Marston was very deliberate about such “role reversals”–indeed they were central to his concept. Steve Trevor’s attraction to Wonder Woman, a woman who was infinitely more powerful than he, was and still is a radical concept, and in the feature’s heyday this element was played to the hilt. Marston was selling his liberated female archetype largely (perhaps primarily) to male comic book readers, and it was essential to the concept that the central male character set the example for them–and in the process validate some of the readers’ secret fantasies.”

And here’s my pitch:

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Steve Trevor: Man’s Man

Another bad day at the office for Steve Trevor. We examine him as he comes up the elevator. He is a huge barrel chested hulk of a man. Not the spindly Steve Trevor we are used to. He looks more like a romance novel hunk than the less muscled version of old. He is kind of a Flex Mentallo of masculinity and raw male sexuality. Hairy chested love god, a man’s man. Unfortunately today, his face looks badly battered. He’s trying to cover up some of his bruises with his sunglasses. As the elevator doors open he sees a giant TV screen surrounded by a throng of his laughing co-workers at the Defense Department. The image on the screen is of Steve Trevor being carried out of rubble by Wonder Woman, split screened with Superman saving Lois Lane in a similar manner. His co-workers see him arrive and immediately snap to attention. Trying to stifle their jokes in difference to their friend and superior. He ignores them and goes into a very officially marked door within the Defense Department.

Trevor plops his massive frame on a tiny couch within the office.

“It happened again.”

A voice snakes back from off panel “It happened again, what?”.

“It happened again, SIR.”

“No. I mean, what happened again?”

“It’s all over the news. Surely you must know.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“She saved me again.”

“Wonder Woman?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“It’s embarrassing.” Steve looks down at his hands. Some of his fingers are broken.

“It’s your job, Agent Trevor.”

Steve looks up. And looks right at his boss, the head of the defense department, Etta Candy(you know this because the damn placard on her desk says so damnit!) She’s holding a whip, and dressed in dominatrix gear. “I just don’t understand my job, Ms. Candy. You send me out every week, as a representative of the United States, just to get…beaten, kidnapped, and otherwise h-humiliated—and then you have that woman or someone associated with her come in and save me.”

“Who do you work for Agent Trevor?”

“What? The defense department…”

“No. I work for the defense department, Agent Trevor.”

Etta has walked across the room, and now stands over the seated Trevor. He is looking up at her. She has a stelleto jammed into his thigh, and is leering at him.

“You work for me, Agent Trevor. Now assume the position. You’ve earned your reward for a job well done. You’re our best agent in your department, Agent Trevor.”

“Who else is in my department, Ms. Candy?”

“Just you.”

THWACK!

And so begins the Steve Trevor ongoing. Part catch-22, part Bunuel fetishism, part epic silver age adventure—all Steve Trevor.

Steve Trevor: Man’s Man follows Steve Trevor’s journey as an agent of one for the Department of Conspiracies for the Aggrandizement of Undervalued Metahumans Within the United States. Or C.U.N.T. for short. The core of the Steve Trevor character has always been about gender bending power reversals–about masculinity as a submissive act. Steve Trevor as a character, essentially exists for the sole purpose of being saved or humiliated, all the while still portraying himself as the pinnacle of manhood. His story is in a way the story of many females in comics throughout the superhero medium’s history. And through him we are allowed the opportunity to examine these issues in more base terms—instead of looking at gender politics in superhero comics as a T&A thing, Steve Trevor allows us to see how the power dynamics of superhero comics work. What does it mean to assert dominance in a masculine way. What does it mean in a feminine way? If you punch Lex Luthor in the face, how does that interplay with how masculinity and femininity are viewed in the DCU? That’s the theoretical side of the story.

The practical side is that this will be a trippy Alice and Wonderland bondage trip through the DCU. What Steve Trevor doesn’t realize is that he is the unwitting victim of a conspiracy against him that has been going on his entire life. A conspiracy that reaches up through the government into the celestial and into even the metafictional world. The poor bastard never had a chance from his creation. And over the run of the series, this is what he comes to realize. Over the course of the ongoing series, as he continues to fulfill his role as an agent of one for C.U.N.T. he comes to understand that his mission statement is to fail. And not just fail, but to be humiliated on every single level. He begins to question why. And these questions begin to unravel his grip on reality. People switch genders, species, body sizes, bodies, identities—until Steve Trevor is reduced to a pile of sobbing contradictions on the DCU floorboards. And at that point, it’s up to Wonder Woman(because in some ways she’s the only person who could understand what he’s going through, and she connects all of the levels of the conspiracy(also she has the lasso of truth)) to save him one last time, and reclaim him as a fully formed and realized character within the DCU, with his masculinity no longer hinged upon his place within a patriarchal system. The end result is that Steve Trevor becomes a Man’s Man. The only person who can draw this book is Frank Quitely. The characters as they are portrayed in this book, need to have that kind of clay malleability that only Quitely’s heroes have. Steve needs to be BIG! But his world needs to look loose, and like it can change shape at any moment. As a monthly book this should be a book that is both wildly entertaining, but also very on the edge in terms of it’s dealing with sexual issues and bondage issues. It has a very episodic potential in terms of the continued situations that Trevor can be put in, and the spacey silver agey ways that they can develop. In some ways this is a boys adventure book in the purest sense. The adventures are big, they are colorful, they are kinky as hell. And as these episodes build the overarching conspiracies and criticisms of gender in the superhero world come further and further to the fold, even as the stories deconstruct more and more.

Etta Candy will have a large role in this book, because besides Wonder Woman, she is the most powerful woman in Steve’s life. And her character morphs along with the stories. At times she is almost a parody of the fears people have of feminists. But as with Trevor, the end point for her character is a higher understanding of how her gender plays for her character. As the series starts, most of the initial plot arcs I want to keep down to single issue or double issue lengths. Because I want to play up that notion that each month you can come to this book and see a completely new and out there adventure with lots of action and crazy things going on. The longer term development is very tied to the characters. So the goal is both a book that can be approached on a stand-alone basis, that has all of it’s macro themes contained in one issue—but that develops along subtle macro ways which definitely pay off for people who stick with the book long term. By the time this ongoing is done, I want Steve Trevor to be mentioned in the same breath as Shade the Changing Man. That’s the goal. And I want Etta Candy to take Amanda Waller’s job.

The book will have guest appearances by all of the female superheroes in the DCU. And even some of the villains. With Cheetah being something of a spirit guide for Trevor. The idea being almost a Brave and the Bold type idea, where each month Trevor teams up with(gets saved by) a new female superhero in a new fantastic and bizarre way related to the basic natures of that week’s particular hero(as an example, when he partners up with Huntress to get revenge against a cabal of sadistic nuns, we’d deal with gender and bdsm as it relates to religion vis a vis the Huntress, or to put it more simply Steve Trevor in a nun costume getting slapped around by a midget in a pope suit named Nancy).

At the end of the day, the book is everything that makes DC great. Weird, unapologetic colorful adventures, that delight on one hand, and raise fascinating cultural debates on the other. It will be good times.

Fall 09 Write-Up, For the Fashion Friendly–FFFFFFF

Every fashion season, or the last two anyways, I go through all the shows, collecting the things I like, and then I spew them out onto my blog, like a manic pea repellent five year old.

Point being, I spend an inordinate amount of time doing it.

So it’s worth sharing.

This is the one I did today:

Fall 09

Here’s the one I did last Fall:

Spring 09

It’s interesting to see the evolution of both the shows, and my taste.  But that’s only because I’m super self-indulgent.  Pity me!