Sweet Drolatic Dreams

A very peculiar book has recently caught hold of my magpie mind. I discovered it thought the Public Domain Review's Instagram account. It’s a book from Renaissance France, right around the time Montaigne was kinda-sorta inventing blogging (well, okay, inventing the rambling personal essay). The book is called The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel and it’s so wonderfully weird and I love it.

Published in 1565, Drolatic Dreams is just a big parade of goofy-ass monsters that look like they crawled out of Hieronymus Bosch’s ears after a hard night’s drinking with H. P. Lovecraft and Alexander Dumas (there's a swashbuckling, cavalier look to many of them). There’s no text beyond the introduction, just creatures galore. 

It all just goes to show that weird books and zine culture were right there with everything else in the wild early days of publishing. 

You can read more about the book here, and you can flip through the whole thing here.* 

I’ve already copied out a couple of the creatures in my notebooks (sort of a #drawthisinyourstyle). Here's one:

One of the best things about finding this book is that it felt like a missing piece for one of the weird side projects I’ve been slowly (slooowly) fiddling with over the last year. Everything suddenly snapped into focus and the story felt more alive. That’s a good feeling.

But more on that later…

*For some reason I think leafing through the Drolatic Dreams pairs well with this playlist based on the travels of Ibn Battuta.

CONTEST WINNERS ANNOUNCED

Hi everybody. Today, as promised, I have the MIGHTY JACK AND THE GOBLIN KING Jolly Raffle Giveaway Contest winners to announce. As always, thanks to random.org for offering “true randomness” in choosing the winners.

And as always, we’ll announce the winners with a weird, hastily-thrown-together comic:

And there we go! Winners! Get in touch with me via my email address on the sidebar and I’ll send those books on their merry way.

And feel free to keep checking back here! I’m planning to give this blog some long overdue attention in the coming weeks.

The Not-So-Great Pumpkin

Last year, for Inktober, I drew up a little world of Wizards. This year, with so much else going on I made a shorter (and quicker) series of 11 drawings all about a small, sad Halloween spirit called the Not-So-Great Pumpkin.

Here you go:

Talk It Up

Hey friends.

Last week I made mention of an upcoming project that was "unlike anything I've done before." Well that project is launching today -it's a podcast called Galaxy of Super Adventure!

GoSA is an art-of-storytelling podcast that I'm co-hosting with my friends Zack Giallongo and Jerzy Drozd. Some episodes will be more technical (art tools, plotting, working on licensed characters) other episodes will explore more purely fun topics (80's fantasy movies, Role Playing Games).

And with Halloween almost upon us our first episode is all about MONSTERS. Have a listen:

Missed Events and Whispers of a Short Film

I apologize to anyone who missed seeing me this last weekend at either the Princeton Book Festival or the Baltimore Book Festival. I seem to have run myself into the ground a bit.

The past few weeks have been crowded. A road trip to Indiana to visit my family was followed by the Baltimore Comic Con, which was followed by a whirlwind 3 days of shooting a short film (more on that in a bit), which was followed by SPX. I missed the first day of SPX to something like food poisoning, but I pulled myself together for the second day (and what a second day it was. It reminded me just how nice a show is SPX). After SPX we had some awesome guests for a few days and then I had a day of school visits and car trouble.

Then I just couldn't get out of bed.

The little cough I'd been trying to ignore finally blossomed into Something Terrible and I have nothing but gratitude for the dead car battery that kept me from going to New York this weekend. And now, thanks to a nice doctor and a round of antibiotics, I am just starting to feel like me again. I've made promises to rest a lot this week. Because this weekend is the beautiful Baltimore Book Festival. I'll be speaking there at 2pm (info here) and probably doing a reading of Julia's House for Lost Creatures.

But what's this about a short film? I hear you asking. Well...

My friends over at Mirandum Pictures have been putting together a series of scary shorts for Halloween. I helped them with a couple of the shorts and then, somehow ...I'm not quite sure how it happened, but I found myself writing my own short. And then I found myself directing the short.

It's a small thing, only a touch over 3 minutes long, but it was an absolute blast to make. As you'd expect it leans heavily toward fantasy, and I hope it catches the flavor of Halloween. I ought to be able to share it here in early November so stay tuned for that. But for now here's the title treatment and a production still:

Mermaid

No time to work on my version of Aquaman today, but here is a bit of mermaid concept art from a project I'm currently working on that has me designing a whole menagerie of creatures...

And here's a little something drawn by Zita, that I found on the kitchen table. It seems to be a princess flinging away her crown to run off with some smooth-talking rascal. Hmm...

A Zita the Spacegirl Halloween Special

Oh hooray, it's Halloween!

I know I said I’d be posting pictures of Superman today, but those will have to wait. I had forgotten the special Halloween post I’ve been planning! I wanted to highlight the great Zita the Spacegirl costumes (and crafts) I’ve seen this month. Here are the pictures:

First Zita cosplayer at New York Comic Con (more pictures here).

Zita and Mouse visit Casablanca Comics!

Another Halloween Zita!

Here’s a Zita the Spacegirl Halloween pumpkin craft from the Houston Academy:

Finally the picture below is my wife, Anna, in the original Zita costume:

So, Happy Halloween everybody! Here are a couple more seasonal treats for you. It's not bobbing for apples but we do the best we can here on the internets:

Out of It video by Fallulah (featuring monsters by post-it master Don Kenn)
Monsters and Men Little Talks video
In the Night, by Basia Bulat

And October Country, a seasonal poem by our old friend Tom Riley.

Monsters in Miniature

Where did these guys come from? Well, last week I created an illustration for an article in upcoming issue of Mothering Magazine. I decided to do the piece on really nice heavy watercolor paper. It's nice stuff, and really a joy to work with compared with what I used to use as a watercolor surface. The way I cut it left me with a strip that I cut into little squares. Then the squares started whispering to me. Each square was asking for a creature. What's a guy with pile of pens and a brush to do?

After the Jump: another monster, a flawed watercolor, and some media recommendations...