Dylan Meconis's Blog, page 5

Family Man update!

Page 228 now online!

Some of this might be starting to look familiar. I suggest you maybe reread the Prologue, if it's been awhile. (Don't let that five year-old art stop you! Agh, my eyes.) Also, man, bunnies just have no kind of luck in this comic, do they? I swear there's no personal vendetta at work.

Portlanders! Please join me and everybody else who is cool at Comics Underground, next Saturday (11/17) at the Jack London bar, where the fantastic Everett Patterson and I will be doing a reading of Outfoxed. I'll be sharing the stage with several irritatingly talented people, including my studiomate Ron Chan and friend Mike Russell! It'll be swell.

In the meantime, I put up a series of 12 Western-themed illustrations I did for a roleplaying game this fall on my Flickr stream – I'm fond of how they turned out. Click on the preview below to visit:

Family Man update!

Page 227 now online!

I realize that this story gives new meaning to the term "slow build," but do trust me when I say that this page is a bit of a milestone! You'll find out soon what the deal is with this particular moon we've been working up to.

I've had a busy week, so no time for new drawings of goddesses! But one of the things I've been gleefully working away at is a staged reading of my recent short story, Outfoxed, to be performed in Portland on November 17 as part of Comics Underground. Put it on your calendars, local types! If you have never seen me in front of a live audience…I…it's like a drug for me. You will want to be there.

Details are on the site, and I will remind you all again next week! (With apologies to my readers who live everywhere else.)

Family Man update!

Page 226 now online!

The Noltes might be under just a tiny bit of stress.

Happy Halloween to all those who celebrate it! (Those of you who don't: give it a whirl, it's the best.)  Allow me to recommend you to one of my favorite personal illustration challenges ever, Danse Macabre 2.0, in which I gave myself an excuse to draw modern people being chased by medieval demise. And to think that my mother used to worry about me.

For other Halloween cartoon delights, look no further than Emily Carroll's typically gorgeous latest short, Margot's Room, whose last part should be posting this Friday.

Family Man update!

Page 225 now online!

We're really getting somewhere now, aren't we? Heavens have mercy. (They won't.)

I'm a little wonky under the hood this week, so I won't try to dredge a big blog post up out of my fuzzy brain. Enjoy the page, and I will see you all next week for more fun with the Nolte family.

Meanwhile, here is Mama Quilla, an Inca goddess – click to read a little more about her and see her full-size.

Family Man update!

Page 224 now online!

Rector Nolte is having a very, very bad day. It will probably not get any better. I never had any particular fondness in the past for drawing aggravated old dudes of post-boxer physique, but he honestly might be my favorite thing to draw. Go figure.

As my aside for this week, I thought I'd point out a nice article that Laura Hudson recently posted on ComicsAlliance. She asked nearly a dozen comics creators and editors – including at least four people I can personally confirm are awesome  - to sound off about how superhero comics could do a better job at depicting female characters. I'm don't follow many capes 'n tights titles these days, but there are lots of good, thoughtful suggestions in there that apply to any storytelling genre. Well worth the read!

Lastly, I've been drawing goddesses from around the world as a warmup exercise. Here are the first two – click to find out who they are and which mythology they come from!

Family Man, Page 223

Page 223 now online!

Tra-la-la, I think we've officially gone from "foreshadowing" to just plain old "shadowing" at this point.

More good news for comic book fans: my studiomate Jonathan Case is taking the world by storm this month! His debut graphic novel Dear Creature hits the shelves on the 11th. You will like it, because it stars a B-movie sea monster who speaks in iambic pentameter and occasionally pauses in his wholesale devouring of careless 1960's beach bunnies to express his longing for true love. Basically it is the best.

You can also catch Green River Killer, where Jonathan provides the suitably unsettling and gritty art to match Jeff Jensen's real-world tale of his father's pursuit of Gary Ridgway. It's lovely and fascinating to see Jonathan operate in such different modes.

Family Man update

Page 222 now online!

Friends, let us all reflect on this week's page and remind ourselves: it is never a good idea to piss off a crowd of lawyers.

Thanks to all of you who checked out my recent short story, Outfoxed, when I posted it last Friday; for those of you who missed it, you can find  all 23 pages online here!

Also, there are two very different books of comics fresh out this week, both of which my readers should love: Kate Beaton's collection of her wonderfully silly strips riffing on literature and history, and Craig Thompson's novel Habibi, which is a love story between two people and two faiths. I know both creators in the real world, and they're absolutely stand-up people who deserve your support as a reader and customer. Go forth and purchase!

Outfoxed

Taking the summer off of updating Family Man, and away from the internet in general, allowed me to do a lot of things. Foremost among them was getting married, which was fantastic. Workwise, I devoted a lot of time to hashing out plot details and writing new material for Family Man. And, in the category of "So Fun It Didn't Feel Like Work" is Outfoxed.

Several years ago I wrote a script for a short comic – a cynical little fairytale about a girl and a fox. It's probably the tidiest idea I've ever come up with for a story, and my original intent was to draw it in 14 pages and submit it to the Flight anthology. But paying work and personal life intervened every time the antho deadline came around. The constant scramble of a freelance career made it hard for me to justify spending time on "personal" projects other than Family Man.

Of course, I realize now this is a terrible attitude; the thing that keeps you alive as an artist is making new stuff, different stuff, and giving yourself the chance to remember why you enjoy what you do in the first place. You have to play. You have to force yourself to play, if necessary.

So I had three months of "break", stretched before me. Realistically, I couldn't spend it all in isolation at the writing room at the library; I'm the sort of person who starts having aggressive conversations with inanimate objects after six hours alone.

So I said what the hell, and decided to devote a month of studio time to finally drawing Outfoxed. To help break through my tendency to second-guess myself I asked a studiomate to be my "teacher", giving me deadlines and offering critiques when I hit milestones. I expanded the comic to 20 pages to lower the panels-per-page count, designed everything in a drawing style that I find fun and easy, took up the missions of learning how to ink with a brush, letter with an Ames guide, tone with a single Pantone spot color, and draw to standard comics dimensions (big and tall). All sorts of big-kid stuff that I never gave myself the breathing room to learn.

And it was a blast.

I hope you enjoy it. it's all online now:

dylanmeconis.com/outfoxed

Back to School

Page 221 now online!

I'm back from my self-imposed, summer-long internet break! And updating Family Man once more. This week's page goes up on Wednesday, so that on Friday I can hit you with a 20-page short story that I drew over the summer.

Bordertown publication day!

It's publication day! Callooh, callay! Go order (or heck, walk into a store and outright purchase) Welcome to Bordertown. You'll have an easy time finding the story Sara Ryan and I did together – it's the one that has pictures!

I was very trepidatious at times about contributing to this project – not expecting to get a lot of love from reviewers (many of whom have their phasers set to "dismiss" when it comes to comics), not having a long relationship with the shared world in question, appearing smack in the middle of a prose book surrounded by genius up-and-comers in the fantasy and YA genres and some well-established creators whom I abjectly worshiped as a teen.

But now that it's out on shelves, I'm allowing myself to feel excited and very pleased to have been so graciously invited to participate.

I should have a guest blogpost on Tor.com soon showing how I drew the story; I'll link to it when it appears.