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Leif Jones

Last Updated:
Jul 11, 2008

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Gender: Male
Status: Married
Age: 37
Sign: Taurus

City: PORTLAND
State: Oregon
Country: US

Signup Date: 08/02/06

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Monday, June 23, 2008

COMIC BOOK TATTOO in stores in one month!

The release of Tori Amos' COMIC BOOK TATTOO is one month away, as it will debut at San Diego's Comic-Con International and be available at a bookstore near you on July 23rd.

It'll be big, it'll be in hard and softcover, and it'll be published by Image Comics.

Check back soon for more news about events that will coincide with it's release.


In the meantime here's another page from my story Little Amsterdam:

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Thursday, May 08, 2008

Tori Amos’ COMIC BOOK TATTOO

 

I wrote, drew, lettered and colored a story for the Tori Amos tribute book COMIC BOOK TATTOO, and it's one of my favorite things I've ever done.  

 

 

What is COMIC BOOK TATTOO?

 

It's a 12 x 12 inch (record sized) 480 page full color coffee table art book, to be printed in three formats: Softcover, Hardcover, and a special Hardcover limited to 1,000 copies, signed by Tori and featuring some fun extras to be announced.

 

COMIC BOOK TATTOO will feature over 50 stories by more than eighty comic book creators spanning every style and genre in the medium, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman.  Each story will be inspired by one of Tori's songs. 

 

The song I chose was LITTLE AMSTERDAM from her album BOYS FOR PELE.  Here's a sample page:

 

 

 

The limited edition hardcover can be pre-ordered through Amazon.com by clicking here (the page also features a complete creator list).  The regular Soft and Hardcover editions will be in book, music, and comic stores everywhere this July (with a huge print run, so you shouldn't have a hard time finding a copy), and will debut at Comic-con International in San Diego this summer. 

 

I'll be showing some more sample art soon, so subscribe to my blog to stay informed.

 

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Wednesday, December 26, 2007

The SE7EN hardcover collection is in stores

Purchase it here or at a book store near you.

 

Currently reading :
Se7en
By Gregory
Release date: 15 January, 2008

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Sunday, October 14, 2007

Wonder Woman benefit art

 

October 28th is Wonder Woman Day, which also happens to be the day that Portland's Excalibur Comics is hosting a benefit auction of Wonder Woman art to support two domestic violence shelters and a crisis hotline.

Special guest signings at the store will include Wonder Woman comic book writer Gail Simone and artist Phil Jimenez.

Artists who have created Wonder Woman portraits for the auction include Adam Hughes, Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Alex Ross, John Byrne, Craig Rousseau, Guy Davis, Phil Hester, Steve Rude, Michael T. Gilbert, and myself.

Here's my piece:
 
 
You can bid on my art, or the work of dozens of other artists, for a good cause by visiting this webpage. Or if your in the Portland Oregon area on the 28th, stop by Excalibur Comics at 2444 SE Hawthorne Blvd from 2pm to 6pm and see the artwork in person, meet some of the artists (including me) and maybe walk away with a door prize and a piece of original Wonder Woman art.
 
 

Currently reading :
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
By David Abram
Release date: 25 February, 1997

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Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Back-To-School Zombies

 

I'm not a hundred percent sure I understand the idea behind this one, but I like the results. Last week Tak Toyoshima, the Art Director for Boston's Weekly Dig, asked me to do, well...what you see below. He was nice enough to provide, as usual, an excellent sketch to get the ball rolling. This is, I believe, my fourth cover for The Dig, but the first one to be printed on their new slick cover stock.

 

My artwork:

 

 

 

 

Tak's sketch:

 

 

 

 

 

The finished cover, with some nice tweaking by Tak:

 

 

 

 

The issue hits the news racks today in the Boston area, and will be around until next Tuesday or so.  

 

 

 

Currently reading :
Scarlet Traces: The Great Game
By Ian Edginton
Release date: 30 May, 2007

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Saturday, August 18, 2007

Chicago comic-con and some reviews of what I’m reading



Here's a photo of me with David Mack and David Seidman signing copies of SE7EN: ENVY at the Zenescope Booth during the Wizard World Chicago convention last weekend. Thanks to everyone who visited us and supported the issue's premier.




One of the most common questions I was asked at the Chicago convention was what comic books do I read regularly. A couple years ago, I probably would have answered that I rarely buy ongoing monthly comics, but instead tend to collect the work of cartoonists (writer/artists) who only put out an issue of their comic every year or so. But after a decade of finding little interest in ongoing monthly comics, I've become hooked on a few that keep me involved over multiple issues with no end in sight.

I equate a good ongoing, regularly published, comic series with some of the best - and most addictive - TV shows I watch. Television is also something I've recently returned to after more than a decade of ignoring it. But for me I've found, in the last couple years, that most movies rarely deserve to run longer than an hour, and few can hold together a decent third act, while TV shows, like serialized comic stories, are pretty much all second act. They need to end eventually or they'll wind up sucking, but there are some that can stretch that second act pretty far without losing my attention.

However, I don't watch TV shows an episode at a time, but in big season-long chunks on DVD. Similarly I rarely read individual comic issues anymore, but very much enjoy the collections. Here are a few that I've been enjoying:


   Y, THE LAST MAN by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
(DC/Vertigo – So far I've read 48 issues collected into eight volumes)

For me Brian Vaughan is the comic writer of the moment. He writes comics that read like good serialized television, which is the way I think ongoing comics series should read. It's no wonder this guy is now story editor on the TV show Lost. That's why he's writing two of my favorite series of the last few years. In fact I'd have included Vaughan's Runaways on this list as well, except I have a soft spot for Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz's original New Mutants and can't stand to see that series upstaged. Won't admit that is has been upstaged, I mean. There seems to be so many ways that a story about the last man on earth could go, but the path Y has taken is far beyond anything I would have imagined. It's a brutally hilarious dark comedy that touches on most everything about human nature. A stunning achievement in writing, brought to life by the simple, understated artwork of Pia Guerra, who I'm so totally jealous of right now.


   B.P.R.D. by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Guy Davis
(Dark Horse – So far I've read approximately 26 issues collected in six volumes)

I'm a Hellboy fan mostly because I love (LOVE!) Mike Mignola's art. He can draw space raccoons or mutant thumbs, it doesn't matter, I'll buy it. But when Hellboy is being drawn by some other artist, I rarely have any interest in the character. Similarly I had a hard time getting into the early B.P.R.D. collections because Mike wasn't drawing them. But once Guy Davis took over the art chores with the third volume Plague of Frogs, I was hooked. And the subsequent three volumes, The Dead, The Black Flame, and The Universal Machine just keep getting better as they add to the ongoing storyline. It's kind of weird because the first Hellboy collection Seed of Destruction was essentially a team book, and then bit-by-bit it became a solo series. So it's nice to see it come full circle (even without the red guy) and do so successfully. I can honestly say I enjoy B.P.R.D. as much or more than I ever did the Mignola drawn Hellboy comics, and that's saying a hell of a lot.


   EX MACHINA by Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris
(DC/Wildstorm – So far I've read 27 issues collected in five volumes)

Hmmm, politics. Not my favorite subject in or out of comics. Politics in America remind me of commercial sports: you pick your team, stick with them no matter how much they suck, and ultimately, when the flag waving and the insults die down, it's all the same stupid ballgame. Well, that's just boring. Ex Machina, however is not. I think I first picked up this book because Tony Harris was drawing it, but after a few issues I was hooked by the unparalleled ability of Brian Vaughn to write such sharp witty dialogue that cuts through the political bullshit and shows what it might actually be like to juggle the multiple responsibilities asked of a young New York City mayor.


   ALL STAR SUPERMAN  by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
(DC – So far I've read six issues collected in one volume)

Grant Morrison has more or less been my consistently favorite comic book writer for about twenty years, beginning with his early run on Animal Man and The Doom Patrol in the late 1980's. Sure, there are other writers, such as Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, who've received more accolades and more press, but neither of them alone or combined can match the staggering wealth of good stories that Morrison has written, which span all genres and he may have invented a couple along the way. I first became aware of Frank Quitely's amazing storytelling talents in JLA: Earth 2 (also written by Morrison), and was stunned by some of the fantastic visual choices he made in We3 (also written by Morrison). But even combining their talents again, I never thought these two would get me to read and enjoy a Superman series (what am I, ten years old?). Well, I was wrong. This series takes all the absurdity of the Superman universe and makes it so incredibly, awesomely, fantastically fun that it's impossible to put down.


   THE WALKING DEAD by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard
(Image – So far I've read 24 issues collected in four volumes)

Zombies again? Yeah, this has been done over and over and over and over, but somehow this time it seems different. I think this is the movie-versus-television thing. The Walking Dead works because once it starts it keeps going and going and going. There is no end. And that's what makes it scary. There's no neatly wrapped third act. You know the still-living characters aren't going to win. The question is, how long can they hold out? I'm willing to find out.


   DAREDEVIL by Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark
(Marvel – So far I've read 93 issues collected in fifteen volumes)

I've never cared much for the character Matt Murdock or his alter ego Daredevil. Maybe it's because the guy is just bad luck incarnate and it makes me want to keep my distance. In any case, his only good fortune seems to be attracting excellent writers and artists to tell his story. Yeah, I really liked the Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli run on Daredevil back in the '80s, but I've got to say that with Kevin Smith and Joe Quesada's revamp of the series in 1998 (and continuing in the hands of David Mack, Brian Bendis, and Alex Maleev) I've become a true fan of Daredevil's ongoing drama. It's rare to see a superhero book from a major company where the character (and his situation) is constantly evolving, and by-golly this book definitely is. Which leads to the current team of Brubaker and Lark. At close to a hundred issues, this book is pushing it's luck with me, and so with the new creative team I wasn't expecting the quality of the colossal Bendis/Maleev run, but so far, after two collections, they've kept their heads above water. Looking forward to a third.


   ASTONISHING X-MEN by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday
(Marvel - So far I've read 18 issues collected into three volumes) 

Okay, so I was a huge X-Men fan in my teen years.  I had every issue of every series that had even a slight connection to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters (Power Pack, anyone?).  It was the geek soap opera supreme.  But nearly 20 years later I find it hard to understand just what I loved so much about those old issues aside from the overall addictive nature of their overwhelming complexity.  When the X-Men movies came out (I liked the second one a lot), many of my friends, who knew I used to be an X-freak, asked me what comics they should pick up that would continue the stories told in the films.  I didn't have an answer.  X-Men has no set beginning.  None that most would want to read anyway.  What makes it so appealing to the Marvel Zombie insider is also what has alienated it from the rest of the world.  That is until Astonishing came along.  I can happily hand the first collection to anyone and in all confidence say, if you liked the movies, here's something you'll enjoy.  No overly-complex back-story to wade through.  Just cool characters like Wolverine, saying cool lines like "I'm not doing anything that doesn't have the word beer in it" drawn in a clean realistic style that doesn't alienate the casual reader, and allows old-timers like me to re-live the glory days without having to actually, you know, read all those issues. 



And I do read books without pictures on occasion.  Right now I'm reading a modern non-fiction account of what it would really be like to visit Antarctica:


Currently reading :
Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica
By Nicholas Johnson
Release date: April, 2005

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Monday, August 06, 2007

SE7EN: ENVY to debut at Chicago comic convention




It's official.

SE7EN: ENVY will be released in time for the Wizard World Chicago comic convention next weekend, where I will be signing copies at the Zenescope booth (124) along with writer David Mack and cover artist/designer David Seidman. 

SIGNING SCHEDULE:

Saturday, August 11th

1pm – 2pm
David Mack, Writer SE7EN, Kabuki, Daredevil
Leif Jones, Artist for SE7EN, Robotika, Aliens
David Seidman, Artist for SE7EN

4pm – 5pm
Leif Jones, Artist for SE7EN, Robotika, Aliens
David Seidman, Artist for SE7EN


Sunday, August 12th

Noon – 1pm
Leif Jones, Artist for SE7EN, Robotika, Aliens
David Seidman, Artist for SE7EN



Hoping to meet many of my MySpace friends for the first time, so stop by.



Currently watching :
Entourage - Season Three, Part 1
Release date: 03 April, 2007

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Monday, July 23, 2007

2007 illustration round-up (the first half)


While doing the art for SE7EN: ENVY took up a good chunk of early 2007, I did squeeze in a few illustration assignments. Below you'll find some samples:




Three of the character templates I did for Monte Cooke's World of Darkness game.






A few of my latest illustrations for the card game Vampire: the Eternal Struggle.








And a small sampling of designs I did for an upcoming fantasy board game. I did over a hundred illustrations for this, so there will be much more to share in the future.



I'm off to the San Diego Comic-con this week and should have some fun stories, pictures to share, and hopefully a surprise or two when I return.

Unfortunately SEVEN: ENVY has been delayed, so I won't be promoting it at San Diego as I'd expected to. Check back soon to find out when the release date for the book will be.  When I know, you will too.




Currently reading :
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)
By J. K. Rowling
Release date: 21 July, 2007

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Wednesday, May 23, 2007

SE7EN: Anatomy of a Panel (episode two)



Page twenty of SEVEN: ENVY was essentially six panels of a static image, with a couple changing foreground elements. So I put a lot of time into making that one image look nice.


For the apartment intercom, I started off with what is a rather boring line drawing; a framework, really, for the detail and texture that I would fill it with.

I created a bunch of cut out slips of paper, with names in various handwritten and typed styles, to give some personality to the other tenants of the building. Tenants we'd never see, but who would hopefully feel real through the limited amount of information I was able to convey in this panel.

I added layers of splatter texture to make the whole thing look old, grimy, and used. Then lots of color, shadows, and highlights to bring it to life:
 
 
 
Here's a close up look at the final background:

 

Next I drew the gloved hand of John Doe pressing the intercom button for the Mill's apartment. I added various layers of texture to the glove, including one scanned from an old leather-bound book, and threw in a subtle layer of red, as if blood had been quickly, but carelessly, scrubbed from it (the PRIDE victim?).


I dropped the finished gloved hand over the background and added some shadow:

 

Then I drew in ink a close up profile of John Doe's face speaking into the intercom, scanned it, added an old paper texture for the skin, and colored it:





Three drawings combined to make six panels, with some added dialogue and sound effects.

Here's the final page:





Currently reading :
I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel
By Tom Wolfe
Release date: 11 August, 2005

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Friday, April 20, 2007

SE7EN: Anatomy of a Panel (episode one)

Cartoonist Jesse Hamm recently wrote a brilliant LiveJournal post regarding why comic book writers shouldn't, if at all possible, tell the artists what to draw.  The main rebuttal to which seems to be that many comic book illustrators are incapable of telling a story visually.  This to me raises the question "who is hiring these people and why?"

 

Thankfully, I was rarely given any specific panel descriptions by David Mack in his script for SE7EN: ENVY.  Most often there was just a simple sequence of actions performed by the character John Doe, and I had to visually match it however best I could to Mack's superb narration.

 

After reading the script through a couple times and taking some notes, I laid out the pages as small pencil sketches, marking the possible placement of text in red pen.  After sending the page layouts to Mack, we worked on the details over the phone, making sure we were in agreement about how the story would be told, and the mood it should convey.

 

The following is a step-by-step of how I created the dominant panel of page four:

 

 

Using my original thumbnail sketch as a guide, I drew the basic drawing in ink (using Sakura's Pigma MICRON pens on cheap printer paper) and scanned it to Adobe Photoshop at 600dpi.

 

 

 

I then added a flat layer of bright color and a mid-gray layer of shading to the line art.

 

 

 

During the making of SE7EN: ENVY, I created a few dozen hand made paper & ink "textures" using brushes, sponges, sandpaper, woodblocks, and whatever else was on hand.  In order to the give the book the dark and gritty feel of the movie, I then combined the textures with the artwork as low opacity Photoshop layers.

 

 

 

I decided to make the background red (I don't plan ahead with color or even give it much thought while I'm doing it), then combined it with the line art , adding in the texture, gray shading and colors.

 

 

So far, everything had been flat shades of color, grays, and black.  But this is where the real details start to take shape:

I painted some heavy shading for John Doe's body using the Photoshop brush tool, then added a second round of texture - including some "blush" color to the skin.  Note that only The Box on the shelf doesn't have texture of some kind.

 

Now here was the difficult part for me:  Adding the blood in all its forms.  Blood diluted in water, blood smeared across surfaces, blood trickles, blood splatter, blood soaking through gauze, and raw bloody meat.  At this point I'd never done anything quite like this before.  But all the comic book stories I've illustrated have been experiments.  That's what makes them fun.

 

Although I added some scanned splatter I'd created in ink, for the most part I painted the blood in thin watercolor-like layers using the brush tool again.

 

And here's the result:

 

 

 

 

 

Lettering:

Once I'd decided to letter SE7EN: ENVY as well as illustrate it, I came up with the look of the captions by tearing dozens of post-it notes into various shapes and scanning them, where I then added some splatter texture and a subtle "aged" color in addition to the text itself. 

 

 

Here's the finished page:

 

Thanks for having a look, and check back soon for another episode of SE7EN: Anatomy of a Panel.

 

 

Currently reading :
JPod: A Novel
By Douglas Coupland
Release date: 16 May, 2006

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Friday, April 06, 2007

My Emerald City Comicon experience


(mixed with some of my previously unreleased artwork from SEVEN: ENVY, in case you don't feel like reading) 

 

I woke up at 5am last Saturday morning and drove to Seattle's Emerald City Comicon. It took about four hours, with me driving like a grandma and stopping a couple places on the way.

Finding overnight parking downtown was a bitch, but once I did, I took a leisurely stroll to the convention, which was in the Qwest Field Sports Stadium Event Center, which is right next to SafeCo Field. This is the kind of mass marketing clusterfuck I usually try to avoid, with two hundred foot banners of athletes I don't recognize, but as it turned out the venue was nice and relaxed.

I found my pro-badge laying on a table and didn't even have to talk to anyone on my way in.

As usual the excitement of attending a convention turned into instant dread once I was actually there. This is probably because I don't go to enough conventions anymore and once I'm inside the con I don't recognize anyone I know. Everyone I see is having a great time socializing, and I question why I'm even there. I feel like I've just crashed a party that some friend of a friend invited me to and I'm craning my neck above the happy heads looking for that one person in the crowd I recognize.

That one person of course was David Mack, who I'm currently collaborating with on a SE7EN comic book. David attends most conventions and is surrounded by tons on fans (deservedly so) and seems comfortable and relaxed in the venue. But then so do I, on the outside.

I'm not intimidated by individuals, no matter how talented, beautiful, successful, or famous they are. I played darts with Michael Caine when I was a little kid, in the pub he owned and bartended when not working on movies. I met Arnold Schwarzenegger at age thirteen (when he was an action movie god to many boys my age) while filming the climax to Commando on the beach near Hearst's Castle (I lived nearby). And there has been many since, including some of my childhood heroes (comic book creators, mostly) who I've had the opportunity to collaborated with on occasion. When it all comes down to it, they are just people.

But crowds of people do intimidate me, because I usually feel like the odd person out, caught in a riptide, even in a place where I very much shouldn't feel that way. Like a comic book convention.

Once acclimated to the con, which took an hour or so of me browsing (or pretending to browse) the vendors, saying hi to Mack, meeting writer Ron Marz (who did the intro to the Robotika hardcover I worked on), chatting with Michael Golden (the superhero artist of my teen years), and talking to Rick Remender about how we'd both recently moved to Portland from California so we could buy a house we could afford.

Circling back to Mack's booth I stumbled into writer Derek Fetters who I'd arranged to meet at the con, and we went out to lunch nearby.

I must say, the highlight of the convention for me, of which there were many, was meeting the immensely charming (and talented) Joshua Dysart, who wrote the most awesome review of my work a couple months back. We'd never met, but one of Dysart's publishers had set up a table for him and I introduced myself. We talked animatedly at his table for nearly an hour and then walked around the convention floor until closing, then had dinner across the street with a large group of conventioneers, followed by a taxi ride to the Fantagraphics after-party at their new retail store and gallery. Although that turned out to be mostly people standing around drinking cheap beer from cans and browsing books I'd already read, I did meet some interesting people and have a few fun conversations.

After the party Joshua and I bar-hopped around Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood along with House of Parlance editor Sean Cranbury and Tabloia creator Chris Wisnia until we finally got a taxi back to our respective hotels at 3am. Probably the longest almost-continuous conversation I've had in years with someone I'd just met.

What had it been, twelve hours?

My "hotel" was actually The Green Tortoise Hostel right across from Pike Place Market. I'd stayed there years ago (and it's San Francisco sister-hostel) and rode the Tortoise's Adventure Bus line a few times. Lots of fun. I'm opposed to paying a hundred and fifty bucks for a hotel room I'll only see for thirty seconds before my face hits the pillow, so renting a bed in a hostel works just fine when I'm traveling alone.

Miraculously I got nearly six hours of sleep. Late Sunday morning I pulled my car out of overnight parking and drove to the convention center, coffee in hand, feeling rather good.

No convention dread on the second day. And no hangover.

I bought a stack of Joshua Dysart penned Swamp Thing comics (I had really only read his Conan stuff). I also bought an issue of Tabloia from Chris, while chatting with his wife Elizabeth and their baby (who I think was wailing a Led Zeppelin song at one point). And I was given several issues of Kabuki by Mister Mack, for which I offered a single issue of Robotika in trade.

Okay, to backtrack a little: the previous night, while having dinner upstairs with Joshua Dysart, retailer/publisher Mike Wellman and others at the nearby Pyramid Ale House, I found a message on my cell from Mack telling me that he was downstairs having dinner with his own group. I went down, beer in hand, and said hello to actress/model Mandy Amano, writers Brian Bendis and Ed "I just killed Captain America" Brubaker, and spent quite a bit of time talking to current Daredevil inker Stefano Gaudiano.

So, yes I did have the opportunity to spend a little time with Mack Saturday evening, and on Sunday I spend more time with Mack, hanging out at his table, perusing his artwork, and talking to Marvel editor Jen Grunwald and writer/artist Mike Oeming, who invited me to join them for lunch, which was a relaxing way to wrap up the weekend.

I decided soon after to hit the road.

I made it back to Portland in three hours, convinced I must start attending more conventions, as I had a really excellent time. And I should probably do more comics too. That way I wouldn't be crashing the party.

I'd be the party.


 

Currently reading :
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
By Bill Buford
Release date: 30 May, 2006

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Friday, February 02, 2007

Two panels from SE7EN: ENVY

 

Here are a couple of panels I recently finished (I'm not showing many full pages at this point to avoid spoilers).   I chose these two, from different pages in the story because they share a similar shape and both feature silhouettes, but are otherwise so different I thought I'd post them to contrast and compare.

 

 

The panel on the left is unique to the book, as it's the only panel not set in "reality" (it's a memory), and its also the only panel that crosses over with a scene directly from the movie (Doe hitting Mills in the head in the alley).  So I decided to draw it in a more abstract way to make it stand out from the gritty textured look of the rest of the issue.  The result reminds me a bit of the work of Saul Bass, the artist who designed many a Hitchcock movie poster.

 

The panel on the right represents a turning point in the story for John Doe, where he decides to sacrifice himself to do God's work.  The staircase is him figuratively descending into Hell, as a result of his own sin (envy).  But Hell is a light at the end of the tunnel for him, because it's showing the path to complete his mission. 

 

David Mack actually wrote this panel as Doe walking down an alley, but I was inspired by the last scene in the movie ANGEL HEART in which Mickey Rourke's character descends into Hell on a freight elevator inside (what I think) is the building featured on the cover of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti.   At least it looks like the same building to me, and the themes kind of match up.  Elevators don't really work for this sort of thing in comics, because without "speed lines" or some other ploy, it's difficult to tell if they're ascending or descending.  So I chose the staircase.

 

 

 

 

Currently reading :
The Walking Dead Vol. 2: Miles Behind Us
By Robert Kirkman
Release date: 24 November, 2004

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Thursday, February 01, 2007

I'm a drug

 

"Mr. Jones is a goddamned art monster. His work makes me high. I can't get enough of it. I just want to shove him up my ass so the art can filter straight into my bloodstream (I'm afraid of needles, so injecting him is out)."

-- from the blog of Swamp Thing and Conan writer Joshua Dysart in reaction to my Conan sample pages, which he described as "A little Bob Fingerman. A little Richard Corben. A whole lotta Leif!"

Here's what he was talking about:

 

 

Currently reading :
Lex Luthor: Man of Steel
By Brian Azzarello
Release date: 01 January, 2006

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Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Jersey Devil illustration

Here's an illustration I did for White Wolf's World of Darkness Urban Legends book. This is the first book illustration I've done for White Wolf since I broke the wrist of my drawing hand, back in the fall of 2003. After having created literally more than a thousand illustrations for White Wolf's game books over several years, beginning in 1994, it felt strange to return to the format after so much time had past.

The art description was fairly detailed:

Chapter 2: The Jersey Devil
This is a forest scene in New Jersey; the trees are mostly evergreen. In the middle of a clearing, a girl of about 12, sits on a fallen log reading a 30-year-old edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. A stuffed backpack leans on the log next to her. (It contains all the stuff she packed when she ran away from home.) Looming to Linny's right (our left) we see a frightening, winged shadow in the woods. It is Jehrameel Leeds, the Jersey Devil. To Linny's left (our right) is another, smaller shadow: a man with a rifle. The shadows are abstract — we aren't looking at silhouettes in the trees, exactly, or shadows cast from characters outside the frame; the shadows represent the forces at work in the story.

 

 

Currently watching :
C.S.I. Crime Scene Investigation - The Complete Second Season
Release date: 02 September, 2003

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Thursday, January 18, 2007

SE7EN interview (with lotsa links)

 

Alex Ness of PopThought.com interviewed me for his Thoughts From the Land of Frost column. We mostly discussed the SE7EN comic book I'm currently working on, how it compares to the movie, and what its like to collaborate with writer David Mack.

You can read the interview by clicking here.


And because I never post without adding a picture, here's another little peek at SE7EN: ENVY in progress:

 

 

Currently reading :
The Fountain
By Darren Aronofsky
Release date: 04 October, 2006

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