blog: drawings

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

Original art auction: CASUAL GAXIAN

When my friend and yours Carly Monardo said “Hey folks who wants to donate some original art to be auctioned off for charity to benefit the Colbert Nation Gulf of America Fund,” I said “Well shucks I’d love to, except that my work doesn’t involve the creation of any original art!” To her credit, Carly was going to take that as an acceptable answer (and I was gonna make an exclusive print or something instead), but then I said “Dang-blast it, I wanna draw something.” So I did! And the result (that you see above) is up for auction right now as part of Carly’s Webcomics Auction For the Gulf series, which also includes many other pieces by many of my favorite people!

ANYWAY ENOUGH ABOUT THOSE PEOPLE HERE IS MY DRAWING which could very easily become your drawing (wink wink)! Edit: it’s sold! Thanks!

Works-in-progress survey

At any given time, I’m working on a half-dozen different projects: making comics, of course; designing books; hashing out ideas for prints or posters or shirts or what-have-you; and often, creating logos and layouts for stuff that may not see the light of day for months, if ever. Sometimes I get a little antsy and post previews or sneak-peeks on my Twitter, but that’s very limited in its scope, and I’d like to share more, and in different ways.

However, I am also very sensitive to the fact that you come here to read comics (with the occasional other nonsense), and you may not want half-complete junk-in-progress, or long chunks of prose, or stuff wholly unrelated to Wondermark in your feed reader or email inbox. Personally, I’m in favor of littering this site with everything I do, but this site doesn’t just belong to me anymore; it belongs to you too. So I’d like to ask your opinion — where should I put miscellaneous stuff? We’re talking half-finished comics. We’re talking chapters from novels, potentially. We’re talking sketches and designs and journal-type entries and probably stuff related to Tweet Me Harder and other projects. I figure there are three options:

Keep it at Wondermark. I’m a big believer in not fragmenting one’s online presence more than necessary, and Wondermark is potentially a broad enough umbrella to encompass everything I do. Besides, you could just ignore the stuff you don’t want to read.

Move it offsite. I’d probably start a Tumblr and start posting over there. That has an advantage in that I wouldn’t feel self-conscious about posting non-comics-related stuff there, but I’d hate for that to be so separate from Wondermark that nobody bothered to visit.

Move it offsite, but post a weekly digest on Wondermark. I’d put all the nonsense on the other site, but on Wondermark there’d be one post a week (if that) listing the highlights. So you’d still stay abreast of any cool stuff over there, but if you were only subscribed to Wondermark it wouldn’t be tons of posts in your feed reader or email.

Here’s a poll!

Or, if you have other ideas, leave me a comment. Thanks for your feedback!

Sketches from the Road

Thank you for supporting the Kickstarter effort for The Devastator! Amanda, Geoffrey and I are very excited to see this book come together. I should make clear that you can still get in on the pre-order for the book for the next day or so, and I’ll also be sure to mention it once the physical book is available!

On my travels, I like to sketch — either on paper in my notebook, or on my laptop with a drawing tablet. This particular collection is the result of an animated evening in New York a few weeks back, and I thought I’d share!

This weekend I’m in Toronto for TCAF! What a fun show, what a great city, what a tremendous collection of artists under one roof. Plus, it’s free! Just walk in the ol’ door! What do you have to lose.

Another thing I love about TCAF is how varied the panels and programming always are. Just check out the schedule — if you have even a passing interest in comics I’m sure you’ll find something interesting going on. TCAF is one of the rare breed of comics shows put on by people who love comics and comics creators foremost (which cannot be said of all shows, sadly), and boy, it shows!

On Saturday I’ll be on a panel called “Tracers, Photoshoppers, Cut & Pasters: Cheaters or Revolutionaries?” with my good friends Ryan and Emily as well as two other folks I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet. We’ll be talking about making comics without actually, you know, drawing comics in the traditional fashion. I think it will be a gas! OR, it could be miserable, but I think that is fairly unlikely.

On the plane to Toronto I impressed myself mightily by saying to the person beside me (after a few minor conversations about the drink cart and so on proved to be perfectly pleasant), “Can we be friends? I am tired of sitting in these seats staring straight ahead not talking to people. I’m David.” I’m not usually comfortable initiating conversations like that, but I did this time, and it was nice! We talked for an hour or so, and then went back to our reading or whatever. It was perfectly fine.

I might even try it again on the next flight — but only if the preliminary drink-cart tester-conversations go smoothly first.