The Penguin

Having just finished the first installment of Redtooth , I'm going to try and get installment 7 of The Empty Quarter started. This will be the final installment of TEQ , and after that I'll just have more Redtooth to work on. For those of my faithful readers who don't know (and I know there are thousands of you readers out there), The Empty Quarter began as a four-page comic book assignment for my sequential art class, ARTS 275: Comic Book Illustration. In it I used a group of characters I had already conceived for a story of my own, titled Longshots. Longshots is an expansive story about a crew of four misfits who prowl the galaxy, looking for odd jobs and generally getting into and out of trouble. There is Captain Andrew Logan, a former star-pilot; Second Mate and Engineer Beth Kasty, originally a mercenary fighting other aliens' wars; Communications Officer and Security Officer Ishmael Kuffing, whose past remains a bit of a mystery; and Botswain's Mate Eric Mu

Comic Book Reviews #1 Some long-overdue comic reviews At some point, way back in the misty dawn of time [of this blog], I said this was a comics blog. It hasn't really turned out that way, aside from a few sketchbook pictures here and there. I thought it was high time I put in a couple of comic book reviews, just to spice things up. The following is a series of very short reviews of comics I've read. Most of these come from the library where I work - we have a moderate collection. Because I'm lazy, the reviews will probably be quite short, depending on what I want to say about it. Also, if you've never heard of any of these comics or creators, all's the better - I've become a bit of a connoisseur, I've found, of comics nobody's ever heard of (although this review will include some more commonly-known titles and artists). (By the way, starting from this point, I might be using the word "comickers" a lot - it simply means, "comic book artist

All right, after at least a month of pencils and discussions and friggin' bad weather keeping me out of Lansing, Redtooth is finally in inks! Redtooth (in case you don't know) is a comic project I'm working on with Jay Jacot over at Comics Obscura - Comics Obscura being a group of local artists in the Lansing area who have come together to create an anthology publication of their work, titled - get ready - Comics Obscura. Each issue of the anthology features four or five of our artists, working on issues in rotations, so as to avoid any undue overwork. So far we have three issues out, and the fourth issue is in the works. Unfortunately, the fourth issue has been having some...deadline problems. Suffice to say we at Comics Obscura are a fairly far-flung group, and thus organization is not one of our strong points (I know Jay will back me up on this). We've been working to remedy this situation. As of this moment, we expect the fourth issue to wrap up by mid-February. T