Above, two unrelated comics pages from Ville Ranta’s blog.
Click over to Ville Ranta of Finland’s website to see more of these colorful drawings on his blogi. Ville also co-runs a Finnish-focused comics publishing group, Asema. Ville’s blog makes me think about others that are using blogs to showcase journal-style, personal comics. I am impressed with the ability of these artists to chronicle their lives in comics form and then have the deftness to regularly scan, format and post them as their primary means of publishing personal news, when just typing up some crap would be much quicker. Obion, for example is one such artist that comics-blogs (that we just posted about last week). Meathaus’ own comics barbarian, Becky Cloonan, has something similar going on her blog too. She has been making these Comic Attack strips for a while (one example of Becky’s strip below):
We posted about Rex Hackelberg’s cartoon drawings back in 2006 here, so there are four years of manic, strictly fun drawings in a loony Milt Gross vein to catch up on if that was the last time you happened to check Rex’s blog.
Thierry Martin is a comics artist in France who keeps a nice blog here with everything that is interesting to other comics artists such as work-in-progress shots, behind the scenes photos, sketchbook drawings and videos of him inking panels and so on.
Coming from a similar cartooning lineage as Katie Rice whom we posted about again yesterday, is the work of Stefanie Achtnig, from Germany. I’ve really enjoyed following her blogs for years because of the amount of funny, quality cartooning loads she dumps on them every once in a while. On one post where she scanned work from about four or five years ago, she noted: “As you can see I got the most inspirations from great artists like Katie Rice, Shane Glines, Lynne Naylor, Preston Blair and Cartoons like Ren & Stimpy.” All those influences are still front and center in her cartoons, most of which seem to be direct studies of her sources, but she also adds her own personal obsessions to the mix, often jumping between drawings styles to render realistic line-art dogs and a bunch of characters from some Japanese manga/anime she is a superfan of, called Gantz. You can see her Arsch Blog here where she stashes more finished, rendered pieces which aren’t as fun to me as the sketchbook stuff. The sketches that prompted me to post are mostly uploaded on her Grillhouse Blog. Apparently Stefanie added a new obsession to her repertoire: the film District 9. On her sketch blog you will see page after page of “prawn” studies in increasingly weird mashed-up combos with her other interests that add up to a comic amount of weirdness. I don’t get all the references to the stuff she is adding to the prawns, but maybe you do if you have similar enthusiasms as Stefanie.
GO FOR THE GOLD! 2 and 3 contributor, animation and comics artist Katie Rice has embraced sketchbooks after previously fearing them. This is news because now we get to see more of her sketchbook pages that she scans and posts over on her blog. Additionally she started out her new life drawing a bunch of Conan drawings, which is the appropriate way to begin. Now I want to see some Grace Jones. We’ve posted a bunch about Katie’s work before, such as this last post about artist’s block.
Hello internet! Jason Sacher here, guest blogging (thanks Chris!) with some shameless promotion, vis a vis my day job as an editor at Chronicle Books. Advance copies of Meathaus man (and all-around renaissance man) James Jean’s new book, Rift, arrived at my desk yesterday. It is utterly beautiful–an energetic and fantastic and amazingly intricate showcase for James’ art.
Featuring 15 accordion-style gold-foil-stamped panels and a series of interconnected landscapes (that change depending on how they’re folded) and James’ sketch-work on the reverse side, it’s a really a sight to behold. I just Fed-ex’d a few copies to James yesterday, so I’m sure he’ll post a more detailed preview on his site within a few days–you can order from him or the Chronicle website, and if you’re in San Diego for Comic-Con in July, we’ll be hosting a signing and an exclusive debut. Stay tuned for more details. Here’s a few more images…
Electro Comics is a direct and pleasant electronic comics delivery system. Go to their website, click around on their selection of exciting comics, select one to read, right click the download link to save the linked PDF file to your computer, then read the comic in full-screen viewing mode, simply pressing your right-arrow to advance through the pages formatted to be viewed relatively nicely on your screen. Nothing fancy, no weird complex comics viewers. It’s good, and they curate a fine selection. Above is artwork from two of the creators with work there, Kolbeinn Karlsson’s artwork is on top, then a page of Amanda Vähämäki’s (previously posted about here) beneath that.
Ulli Lust is appropriately named for the sexy-themed comics that she draws about women being possessed with prehistoric mythological goddesses of Spring and running amok through grocery stores and fields. Ulli also creates reportage comics investigating the characters and places around her and personal stories from her past. Ulli has comics for you to read on her website where you’ll also find her illustrations. Although most of the comics are in German, those of you out there with sufficient English reading ability and pre-school level Spanish (like me) will find that you can muddle your way through quite nicely on several of the strips, such as this one titled “Someone Else, Someone Good”, since much of the dialog is in English. This one was published in the comics collection, Spring. In addition to all of this, Ulli has several comics published online by Electro Comics for you to read in downloadable PDF format.
Brad Holland is of course a world-famous, fantastic illustrator. But his blog is relatively new as far as I can tell, and you can eyeball the heck out of that over here. He writes some wonderful things about his career and illustration in general for you to ruminate on, text and art all flattened together onto tall-ass .jpgs. It’s kind of like the tall .jpgs we make here sometimes. But our tall .jpgs can’t beat Brad’s tall .jpgs. Above are a few of his earlier drawings from his blog posts, and some hair sketches, because as Brad knows, hair is generally hilarious. After you’re done with all that, there is of course Brad’s portfolio website which is a thing of beauty. I would have had to make the world’s tallest .jpg just to begin covering this load of work, so just go and see yourself.
Tommi Musturi is probably right now making comics in Finland in the KUTIKUTI studio. He’s finished up a new book pictured above, Walking With Samuel, which is reviewed here on Avoid The Future, my new favorite website that turns me on to comic books that I want, but would be really hard for me to get, and then impossible for me to read. OK, most of the comics they review are in English and are available in the States, but some aren’t. Check them out. Anyway, Tommi has his hand in all of the publications on this page, including his sketchbook collections of which you can click and see neat art selections.
