Fred the Clown: Infatuation Deliberation

This one is probably best filed under "blah idea, pretty art." It looks fine, but the script doesn't quite get there. Probably why it never got collected.

Ich bin was ich bin

Here's a drawing I did for the Comiciade Festival in Aachen, Germany in April.

Character Sketches

Character Sketches

Capaldiiiii

Okay, I think I've finally cracked it.

Fred the Clown: The Quest for the Bearded Lady

There are two versions of this one - I reformatted it for some anthology or other, can't remember which one now - so I'm posting them both. Not sure why this one never made it into a print comic; I like it just fine.

Fred the Clown: Feeble Fables

Here's one of my tortuous rhyming strips that for whatever reason never made it to the collections. William McGonagall it ain't, but it's not far off...

Fred the Clown: Custard on his Peas

Not sure quite what I was doing here. I like it, but it was a bit of a dead end format-wise.

More Character Sketches

I turned in another draft of the script for this thing today. Oh, the suspense...

More Bullwinkleness

Here's a cover rough for #3 which wasn't used. Incidentally, there's an interview with me and Mark Evanier about this series at Comic Book Resources...

Rocky and Bullwinkle: Another Unused Cover Concept

This one was also under consideration for #2.

Rocky and Bullwinkle: Unused Cover Concept

This rough was submitted for consideration for #2 of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but one of the other ones got the eventual nod.

Fred the Clown: Lonesome Cowboy Fred

This one's on the list of strips I'd like to redraw at some point for use in a portrait-format book. I still like it, and I think the only reason it didn't make it into the print comic was because of the need to redraw it and the time I had available. Other "Cowboy Fred" strips would eventually follow.

Fred the Clown: Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit

This one's pretty simple but I still like it.

Fred the Clown: Kodak Moments

This is an early, not-quite-successful attempt to tell a big story in a few panels by allowing the reader to infer a lot of the stuff in between shots. I return to this idea a few times over the years. (The best example is "The Interesting Thursday," which we'll get to eventually).

Some Other Characters

These are for the same thing as the other thing.

Work In Progress

Some character sketches for a thing.

More Moose, More Squirrel

This is from the same, pre-model sheet batch of roughs as the previous post. The nearest thing to a guideline I had was "just show the Moose and the Squirrel looking cool." Well, okay.

Moose and Squirrel

So I'm doing these Rocky and Bullwinkle comics for IDW with Mark Evanier, whose scripts have been a delight thus far, and as a part of that I've been pitching ideas for covers. So I thought I'd run a few of the rejects here. Here's the first...

This one was before I'd been sent any model sheets or anything, so of course all the characters are a bit off... although if you look at Rocky and Bullwinkle's sundry comic iterations over the years, there's really a lot of variation in the different artists' interpretations (which is all to the good, in my opinion; a little bit of a cartoonist's personality injected into a licensed property never made anything look worse).  

Fred the Clown: Action, Diction

The main thing I remember about this one is that I had decided to draw my originals smaller in order not to lose all the detail I usually drew back then – I did like my crosshatching back in the '90s. (Still do, really.) So this was an experiment to see what something drawn very small (A5, or about half-letter size) looked like on screen. Came out all right, visually at least.

Fred the Clown: Random Acts of Violence

This is the first strip I did when I decided to do a weekly "Web Fred" back in 1999. I was colouring like a kid with the wrong crayons in a bit of free software that came with my first scanner, and the idea wasn't up to much – I still hadn't quite figured out who Fred was, I think. Best to get this one out of the way.

So Here's the Plan...

Couple of things...

First, apologies for neglecting the blog over the past couple of weeks; I've been extremely busy, which is a nice problem to have after last year's abysmal performance... and, to be honest, 2013's daily posts had left me feeling a little bit burned out. However! I'm going to try to get back in the saddle as of now, so I'll be posting a couple of items a day while I play catch-up. I like the idea of having a post per day, especially as I'll be off the comic shelves for some quite long stretches of time this year while I work on something fairly big and substantial (shh!). It's always a good idea when you're in that situation to remind people on a regular basis that you're still alive.

Second, it's been brought to my attention that the Fred the Clown link above is no longer working. I've looked into it, and the very simple reason seems to be that my "lifetime account" on WebComics Nation is no more – as indeed, it appears, is WebComics Nation itself. Happily, the Fred the Clown book is still available, so a lot of those strips are still out there for anyone who wants to read them (albeit in black and white); however, there were many, many strips that never made it into the book, either because the drawing was a bit shonky, the idea was topical and didn't warrant being stuck between covers for posterity, or because I just didn't like them quite as much for whatever reason.

So here's the plan. I'll start posting the odd Fred the Clown strip from Ye Archives here, on the ol' blogeroo – the ones that aren't in the collection (a.k.a. "the shit ones"). I actually redrew and updated some of them for various anthologies over the past several years, so there are some previously-unposted (and substantially improved!) versions in the mix as well – something new-ish for anyone who's read them all before. I'll be tagging them, too, and I'll amend the link at the top of the page so it takes you to the tagged posts. The current plan is to post them Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and inflict other rubbish on you during the rest of the week. I may change my mind because I'm capricious and fickle that way.

Onward!

Activities!

The Li'l Dynamites comics are coming out thick and fast at the moment. My own effort, Li'l Ernie, hit the stands last week, and this week we got Li'l Vampi, the kid-friendly spin on Vampirella by (deep breath!) Brandon Jerwa, Art Baltazar, Agnes Garbowska, Eric Trautmann, Molly Mahan, Joshua Cozine, Orion Jerwa, Ken Haeser, Chris Caniano, Katie Hidalgo, Jason Ullmeyer, Josh Johnson, Josh Green, Hannah Gorfinkel, Joseph Rybandt, Keith Davidsen, Rich Young, Juan Collado, Nick Barrucci and Andrew Elder – and also with a couple of activity pages by Yours Truly.

In fact, I did activity pages for all the Li'l Dynamites books. You can see the one I did for Li'l Sonja below... and you can find the whole lot over at Bleeding Cool if you're so inclined.

Barney Google Will Never Die

I found myself with an unexpected day free today while I wait for some stuff to be approved, so I (a) did some writing and (b) knocked up a reconstruction of this 1920 Barney Google advertisement. I sourced the original image from NewspaperArchive.com (they host thousands of scans of newspaper microfiche files, including many, many old strips – I used to have an account before they jacked their subscription fees up to an unmanageable level, and I gorged myself on Barney Google for a few years there) and, as a technical exercise, reconstructed the image in brush and ink. Here are the results.

Badenov for ya

More Sketches...

Thank you to everyone who's bought sketches so far! I appreciate it a lot. I've uploaded several more today, so there are still plenty to choose from. And to clarify for those who have asked, I do sign everything before sending it out – the only reason I don't sign them in advance is because sometimes people like to have me write a special dedication.

Here's that link again! And thanks for looking!

Sketch Sale!

I've just finished uploading about 50 sketches to the old web store for people to peruse, or perchance to purchase. Prices range from £10 to £30 (about US $16-50), depending on size, subject matter, amount of detail and perverse whimsy. Most of them have been posted on this blog at some time or another. The link in the header above will take you to the store, but to go straight to the sketches, just click right here.

Think of it as the Hotel Fred's January Sale! Browse around! Tell your friends! If you haven't got any friends, go out and make some! Then tell them! All sketches will be mailed flat in cardboard envelopes.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Fez, Friend and Foe

A Spirited Finale

This is the last commission for a while, as I need to get my head down and do some work for publication. A nice one to end on, though.

Happy New Year!

Here's a commission-in-progress with a suitably festive atmosphere. Hope everyone had a grand old Hogmanay.