blog: drawings

LAST FEW DAYS for Artist Editions! PLUS TMH LIVE Saturday

TODAY, FRIDAY, is the last day to receive a free ebook by forwarding us your Machine of Death order confirmation from Amazon or TopatoCo. If you’ve purchased a print edition, you can get a Kindle, ePub, or rich text version for free simply by sending your confirmation to info at machineofdeath dot net! Or, you can buy the ebooks directly for ten dollars, that’s fine too. Or of course just download the PDF for nuthin!

SUNDAY is the last day to order Artist Edition Wondermark books, which are books that feature original sketches perhaps similar or perhaps wildly divergent from the example above. This is the only Holiday Offering — I won’t be doing any more Artist Editions until next spring.

Some folks have asked about COMBINING THESE EFFORTS and commissioning a Machine of Death Artist Edition. This is a bit like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, and so I’m disinclined simply for safety reasons, but rest assured that we have lots of interesting MOD stuff coming down the pike and there will be no shortage of delights in the future.

Now after all those deadlines, here’s one splendid aliveline:

SATURDAY at the New England Webcomics Weekend, I’ll be doing a live performance of Tweet Me Harder with my handsome friend Kris Straub! We’ll be streaming the show online at tweetmeharder.com — just head over there a little before 10:30 AM Pacific / 1:30 PM Eastern to tune into the live program. It is guaranteed to be astonishing.

Now I am off to attend a Final Fantasy-themed wedding. Jealous?

Airplane fish are a GENRE now.

Twice a year, I offer my books in “Artist Edition” — I create a custom unique sketch in every book, for those that desire it. Patrons of the most recent offering are well familiar with my fixation on “flying fish,” by which I mean strange hybrids of fish and aircraft (or fish and armored vechicles, or insects and aircraft, or land mammals and construction equipment). Here are some examples from this spring’s series of Artist Editions:

I will be honest with you: I have harbored furtive dreams of turning this particular subject into an oeuvre, of creating larger and ever-more-complex tableaux of sea creatures/aircraft, engaged in all sorts of aerial hijinks in glorious, full-painted color. (The sketch at the top of this post was an expression of this urge to refine and develop the theme.)

Well, thanks to diligent reader and frequent correspondent Kevin S., I have learned that apparently someone else had the same idea — Roland Tamayo:

I HEREBY DECLARE TAMAYO MY NEMESIS

…although I should point out that my inspiration, and perhaps Tamayo’s as well, was and is the surrealist vehicular work of Stan Mott:

I believe this more comprehensive collection may be Stan’s official site, but with respect, it’s miserable to navigate. However, if you have a little patience you’ll find the charming “History of Tanks” illustration series there, which I’m sure is why 90% of the sketches I’ve done at conventions in the past year have featured tanks in some fashion (usually attached to African wildlife).

Finally, consider this your official warning that the fall Artist Edition series will become available very soon! Before the moon is full! October is going to be a big month, I’m just brimming with exciting news. ALL IN GOOD TIME.

Introducing Malki-In-Progress !

A little while back I asked your opinion about what I should do with my sketches, works-in-progress and various miscellany. I am pleased to introduce Malki-In-Progress !

In flagrant disregard of public opinion, I have set up a Tumblr microblog which I hope to populate with all manner of strange nonsense. I decided to do it this way because I have come to regard the Wondermark site with a certain measure of reverence — it’s like a brightly-lit gallery for work I am beaming with pride to share, while the new site will be a more of a garage workshop where I can tinker with stupid things not fearing that the slightest absurd scribble will trigger ten thousand Feedburner emails to folks who subscribed expecting comics.

The new site has its own RSS, and all the site content will cross-post to Twitter @wondermarkfeed (which also posts the updates from this main site). Expect to see drawings, Wondermark comic in-progress shots and detail views, behind-the-scenes info on other major projects, and maybe — if I have the gumption — pages of a new book as I write them. Nothing will change or decrease here at Wondermark; everything on MiP! will be new, additional content. I’ll occasionally post highlights here so you don’t miss anything I think is particularly cool, but I won’t overload you with duplicate posts. (Or you can just cast an occasional eye over on the right-hand sidebar to see thumbnails of recent posts.) The main idea is just to give me a little playground to mess around in — I’m deliberately not setting a schedule or standardized format for the MiP! posts, and in fact will probably soon abandon the MiP! moniker as it’s starting to strike me as ridiculous.

ANYWAY HERE IT IS ENJOY