Looks like I made the legs a little too long on this Challengers Of The Unknown knock-off for Alan Moore’s reinvention of the Awesome universe. Pen and ink, 1998.

Another giant of European comics I was lucky enough to meet when I visited Lucca in 1980 was Hugo Pratt, author of CORTO MALTESE. Here’s my watercolor and pencil portrait of Hugo for HEAVY METAL.

Marker in sketchbook, 1996.

More pencils from ARMY@LOVE: THE ART OF WAR. Gary Erskine has been turning in the inks and they are dy-no-mite! Don’t forget to get your order in for issue #1 this month!

In 1980 I traveled to Lucca, Italy to attend the city’s annual Comics Festival; reporting back to HEAVY METAL in an article titled “The Tip of The Iceberg at Lucca 14″. I illustrated the piece with some color sketches of things I saw, hot political issues I heard about and people I met. Here’s Jean Giraud, who’s Moebius work was then revolutionizing American readers’ perception of what comics could be. Jean was about 42 at the time of this watercolor and pencil portrait.

Before I launched ROARIN’ RICK’S RARE BIT FIENDS as a regular monthly book, there were three 24 HOUR COMIC collections of my dream art. I did these early comics in a small sketchbook; giving myself fifteen minutes a day to record my dreams in panel form, then printed short runs of them on a copier to give away as Christmas gifts to my friends and fellow travelers. Here’s the cover to the first 24 HOUR RARE BIT FIENDS, based on a dream, of course. Pen and ink with zipatone. 1991.

One of the fun things about doing this visual blog is fishing around in the back of the flat files and pulling out stuff I’ve completely forgotten about. This illustration is from one of my first commercial jobs after graduating Kubert School in 1978. All I have is the tear sheets and I don’t remember the title of the book it was done for. Some sort of intergalactic handbook of some kind if memory serves. Pen and ink on Craftint paper, 1978.

DC has just released the finished cover to the second issue of the upcoming ARMY@LOVE miniseries, THE ART OF WAR. As I’m sure you recognize, that’s Hopper’s NIGHTHAWKS I’m parodying, with the help of incredible inks by Gary Erskine and spot on color from Brian Miller.

We’re hoping you can all jump on board the mini-series by ordering the first issue, with the MONA LISA cover, which is solicited in the current PREVIEWS.

A small shopping plaza in Wilmington, Vermont. Marker in sketchbook, 1998.

Proglo Edizioni has just released an Italian edition of Alan Moore’s updated essay, “Writing For Comics”. As a design element they’ve embedded a wash drawing of Alan, taken from the famous photo on the back of WATCHMEN, behind the text on every page. And since I wrote the introduction there’s this illustration behind my text which might be me. And might not.

Let me explain: comics creator and journalist, Stefano Priarone, is the guy who contacted me about writing the introduction. And he has long been told by people who know us both that, except for the twenty year difference in age, we could be twins! And since I don’t recognize the source photo that Massimiliano Padelli used to create his wash illustration, I’m wondering if Stefano just gave him a photo of himself to work from?