The Penguin

Holy crap! How long has it been? Let's see, what happened between now and last posting...? The Human Cannonball #2 has come out; Bone Boy #2 is just about finished; a Bone Boy website is flailing in the breeze; Blind Alley Comics has moved its base of operations to Sparta Grill Coney Island in Webberville; I've moved out of Howell and am now living in Pinckney; and I began my new job as an electric-meter reader for DTE last week, and am already wondering if I made a huge mistake. So yes, things have been going fast and furious for the past...four months. Gee, has it only been that long? It feels like a year. Two years, even. More updates...maybe? More blog posts...sometime? I don't know. This job is kicking my ass. I come home from work and just sleep. I'm sure it'll get better in a bit. Just need to take it slow and relax. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving! Rick Out.

This is a review I wrote for the Livingston Post website. Only the Insane Jane portion of the review will be available on the Post; you can find it here [link].   Bluewater’s Movie Hopefuls Jane Floats; Tom Corbett Sinks The recent explosion of comic book-to-film adaptations has proven a double-edged sword, both for comic franchises and their fans. Some excellent recent movies, such as The Avengers , have shown the storytelling potential of the movement. At the same time, this burgeoning trend has had the opposite effect: more bad movies are made out of comics, and more bad comics are made into movies.             Bluewater Productions comic book label has recently paired with Pleroma Entertainment, an independent film studio, to bring two of its comics to the big screen. The first is a solid entry, an original series called Insane Jane. The second is a less noble endeavor, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, based of...

Hello, Gentle Reader. You're probably a-bed now (if not, stop reading and go to sleep), but your intrepid author is wide awake, thinking blearily about his professional life choices, musing and brooding on the future. I imagine myself as a Byronic figure, glass of Port in hand, looking out over the moors from the moon-filled window of my empty, haunted manor. Brooding is a boring business, and requires a little bit of drama whenever possible. My egg for tonight (get it? "Brooding"? Never mind...) is Blind Alley Comics, and namely, what we're going to do with ourselves. It seems the gloomy utterings of my co-conspirator, Joe Haines, were prescient on several points, my own blathering enthusiasm notwithstanding; it was he who predicted that our sales will be very small, and skewed cynical on the subject of putting our products in stores. I'm beginning to agree with him that there's a lot of wasted effort going on here, if not in the fact that we are putt...

THIS!!! That's the late Jean Girard, aka Moebius, aka His High Surreal Majesty. He died earlier this year. This guy was a great influencer of Hayao Miyazaki, if you can't tell, as well as many other artists, filmmakers, and comic book writers. His work with Alejandro Jodorowsky also "influenced" Luc Besson's The Fifth Element , resulting in a bit of a lawsuit (although I'm not complaining - TFE is one of my favorite movies of all time). Enough talk. Here's more: And more: And MORE: Okay, just one more: That last one is from his wordless comic masterwork, Azarch . Perhaps it's a reaction to my own cartoony style, but I love his very European graphical approach: spare lines, flattened surfaces, luminous colors. The second-from-last image recalls my favorite computer games of all time, Homeworld (1999); you can see the amount of influence Moebius has had on video games and comics throughout his career. I suppose I'm doing...

The Human Cannonball was officially launched June 1st, 2012! I know this post is somewhat late; then again, I've been super busy. The comic is being delivered to all those who pre-ordered as we speak, and I'm going to pick up some new copies tomorrow in Lansing. I'm sort of double-teaming between Ka-Blam and Insty-Prints; Ka-Blam is cheap, but takes forever, while Insty is pretty fast, but expensive. It's the age-old printing dilemma, I guess. I'm getting frustrated right now because the expense is draining the old Blind Alley Comics coffers. I'd move completely to digital comics, but I don't have a website, and anyway I don't feel my tablet skills are quite up to snuff yet. Anyway, hopefully things will settle down from here on out. With all the knowledge I've gained from THC #1, perhaps #2 and the rest of them will be a lot easier to handle. We'll see. Rick Out.

Hello, all. Back from vacation up at Grayling; had a pleasant four days relaxing and recharging. I'm all ready to get back to work. I'm currently working at the Howell Conference and Nature Center; be sure to stop by and check out our Wild Wonders animal park, or sign up for Summer Camp. Other than that, I'm also gearing up for the June 1st release of The Human Cannonball #1, and getting Bone Boy #2 ready for print. For me, as writer and producer, THC #1 has this sort of weird split-time thing going on: I'm already fleshing out episodes #4 and #5, even as #1 is barely off the presses. It isn't even in stores yet. Sometimes I forget it, and I'm like, "Wait a minute...didn't I already print that one?" And then I realize, "Oh yeah, I haven't drawn it yet..." It's hard to get used to. I guess I'll be doing a lot more series in the future, so I'd better be prepared. Anyway, hope to write some more blogs in the near future. ...

Goblins Tarol Hunt and Danielle Stephens Imagine a webcomic based on Dungeons and Dragons . Now imagine it was told from the point of view of the monsters in the game. Now imagine that same webcomic is one of the most engaging, addictive, and downright hilarious comics you've ever read.   Goblins is that webcomic. Drawn and written by Tarol Hunt and colored and edited by Danielle Stephens, Goblins examines the weird, arcane world of Dungeons and Dragons through the eyes of the much-maligned monster races in the game. A band of goblins, their camp destroyed by loot-seeking adventurers, decides to become adventurers themselves. In seeking their home village, they navigate trap-filled dungeons, outwit monster-hating villains, and evade a monomaniacal paladin bent on wiping all monsters from the face of the earth. A parallel plot revolves around the adventurers who destroyed their village, as they come to realize just how human many of the monsters truly are. Goblins is su...