Gordon "Gordo" Cooper

This is drawing of Gordon "Gordo" Cooper, last of the original Mercury 7 astronauts to go into space. He is also the last American to go into outer space solo, as the Gemini program sent guys up in teams. During his orbit, the computer went on the fritz and he had to hit the booster rockets manually to make it back to earth. Bad timing or the wrong angle would make him bounce off the earth's atmosphere and shoot out into space. He used his time in orbit to make the calculations himself, writing formula's in the condensation on the window (which the Mercury 7's pilot's wisely insisted NASA's engineers put in).

I inked this with Micron Pigma markers. I king of like the results.

Wolfbait Poster with Color

Trick

I spent almost all of my “free” time in July working on a short story for Midnight Horizon. The script is by Alex De-Gruchy. It’s a Halloween themed “Tales from the Darkside” type story. I’ve lettered a couple comics for Alex in the past, but this is the first time I’ve illustrated anything for him.
I wasn’t able to really get to work on it until after July 4th and the deadline was August 1st. That means 3 weeks to pencil, ink and letter six pages and a cover, in addition to the 40-60 hours I spend a week working normally. And Wolfbait had a show, including a brand new 7-minute epic, (called either “The Dragon” or “Lusty” depending on who you ask) which we had to rehearse. Also July was a busy month for family stuff, including two birthdays, two funerals, and a visit from my brother in Chicago.

I worked in fits and starts, before and after work and all day on my days off. I knew I needed to warm up, so I started with what I considered to be the easiest and least dramatic pages. I wanted the first and last pages to look their best and figured that they would probably benefit from doing the middle pages first.
I began with page 3. I didn’t have the time to do detailed character sketches, so I worked out the kids and their costumes right on the page. I penciled roughly since I was inking it myself.








After I finished the pencils for pages 1-5, I sent scans to Alex, mostly to assure him that I actually was working on this thing. I struggled with the layout for page six, so I left it to deal with after the inking.


I started inking in the same order as I penciled. I used my usual inking set-up, 102 nib, #2 brush and Speedball Super Black ink. Most people mix it with the Higgins ink to get it a little thinner and clog less. I have to say that I love the Super Black on its’ own. It doesn’t fade when you erase the pencils and gives you such a striking, rich black. I make sure to rinse the nib/brush every once in a while to combat clogs. I also used a C-6 for some of the straight edges.









I did the lettering in Adobe Illustrator after I scanned in the pencils. I used Comicraft’s Wild and Crazy font for the dialogue because it’s one of the best looking and versatile fonts I have. Alex’s scripts are very specific about which words are in italics, bold, or bold italics, and this font has all of those. It also has alternate characters available when you hold the shift key. So, in a word like “Halloween”, I can use different “l”s and “e”s for variation. It makes it look less mechanical and closer to hand lettering. For the captions I used Comicraft’s Comic Crazy Roman font. I used a slight Roughen effect on the caption boxes.



Next, I penciled page six. The deadline was fast approaching, so I kind of rushed through it. I inked it the same day. However there were a few things I wasn’t happy with, specifically the head in panel two and all of panel 3. So I redrew them on a separate board and Photoshopped them in. Panel 4 and 5 called for a static background with characters moving around. I thought I would take a lesson from Dave Gibbons and draw the background only once and just slide it in behind the characters, like in animation.
I drew panel 5 with the background and just copied and pasted in behind Gary and Hal in panel 4. I bought a nice beleveled triangle right before I inked this, which made inking the straight edges a breeze. I also used a brand new 102 nib, which made the lines extra sharp.
The only problem was that the background from panel 5 didn’t extend far enough for panel 4. It stops at the window. So I copied it, flipped it horizontally and stitched it together.



Here is the cover. I wanted a simple image that could represent the story without having to spend precious time rendering it. It took about three hours to decide on the image and I inked it while watching an episode of STAR TREK, the original series. WABL shows it every night at 10:00. It was a great episode too, “Balance of Terror”, featuring the first appearance of the Romulans.

Anxiety

This one is pretty ancient. Two years ago I did a series of parody comic covers meant to look like EC or romance comics from the Silver Age. A friend wanted to by a print of this one, but she requested color. So I scanned it in and colored it in Photoshop. I also replaced the hand lettering with digital in Adobe Illustrator.
I always thought this one was pretty funny. Maybe funnier if you live in Michigan.

Wolfbait Lives

This is a promo illustration I drew for a Wolfbait 7 inch. The A-side is “Lords of the Universe” so I went with a space theme. I think musically, we’re headed down a path that can only be described as “Sci-Fi metal” (or SyFy™-metal, if you prefer). It wasn’t hard to capture Brian’s naturally sculpted physique, but I did exaggerate the arm and hand. I was going for a John Buscema trying to draw like Jack Kirby kind of thing.
Drawn mostly with the Hunt 102 pen-nib. Hair and beards were done with the Windsor & Newton #2 series 7 brush. The stars were done with ProWhite and a #00 brush. I might go back and redo them with Photoshop. We’ll see.