EricZ

X-Men FCBD

X-Men FCBD

X-Men FCBD

X-Men FCBD

These are some Marvel samples I did back in April from Mike Carey’s “Free Comic Book Day X-Men” script, which showcases the fairly new character, Pixie. I’m fairly proud of them overall, but the N’Garai demons need a little work. While working on these pages, I learned a lot about the balance between visually appealing work and perfect storytelling. I find that this is an issue with a lot of sequential artists. There are always going to be situations where you can draw a scene in the most beautiful way that comes to mind at the cost of clear storytelling. On the flip side, there are many artists out there who always find a way to make the storytelling as clear as possible, but the page just has nothing interesting to look at. If I were to assess my work overall, I think I suffer from the latter problem. A good artist can always find a balance between the two.

Generally, I think these pages feel a little naked without any sort of inking or colour, but I think they turned out fairly well.

GW Noir

For the past couple of years, I’ve moved over to a strictly ‘line-art’ style for sequential page renders. My very early sequential work had a distinct noir, heavily shadowed final rendering. (as evident by my pages for “The Killers: Wars End”) But over time, I grew concerned over the necessity to complete a page a day and found that taking away all that time calculating shadows would allow me to be able to make such a deadline. Also, with the emergence of artists like Mike Choi and Sara Pichelli in mainstream comics, I see a growing trend towards more of a collaboration with colourists. This is the future of mainstream comics. I predict that over-rendered images are going to be seen as very dated to this current era of comics. While we’ll always have ‘noir’ styled comics out there, I believe that they’ll be pretty rare.

Nevertheless, it’s been years since I’ve drawn in a ‘noir’ style, so I decided to give it a try the other day. I think I’m a little shaky with it, but I’m happy with the final result. The benefit here is that it doesn’t need to be coloured to fully appreciate it. I find my ‘line art’ sequentials look kind of naked without the colour.

Future Project Cover #2

This is the cover for issue #2 of an upcoming project of mine.

Future Project

This is a teaser image I did for a project that I’m working on with Tim Simmons of “Comic Book Script Archives” and “Spy6Teen” fame. I can’t really talk about much beyond that.

Metropolitan Siege

Here’s a promo image for an upcoming comic, “Metropolitan Siege”, that I can’t really talk about until July. I can, however, say that I did all that art chores (penciling, inking, colouring, lettering) and that I co-wrote it with my brother.