More Bob Morane Artwork

I've spoken about my time working on the amazing Bob Morane series before on this blog and today I'd like to share a few more pieces of art and design work for that series.

First here are some design sketches of Bill Ballantines

(Click to enlarge all images)





Sophia



This storyboard panel is a good example of some of the elements that made the series so distinctive.



Bob Morane Music Score CD



Bob Morane Music Score Cover

Bob Morane Music Score Artwork

That's all I have for today, but if you would like to see more Bob Morane work, please let me know.

Mister Crimson Episode 42

Mister Crimson Episode 42
Wherein buttons and people get pushed too far...
Read it here .:

Free Comics Monday: Things and Creatures

Before we get to today's free comics, I want to explain how I picked them. Last week, Gentleman Jerry Hinds has sent me a few more pages of the Creature Wildcard Comic he is working on - So Falls the World (written by Charismatic Chris Sims ). (see below)

Anway, between these awesome new pages and some conversations I've been having with a few other folks about Public Domain characters, it got me to thinking about Public Domain versions of The Creature and The Thing.

I'm talking about the characters that appeared in the 50's in Charlton Comics...here is the Creature:

and here is The Thing from Charlton

Now, at this point, using The Thing in a comic book is pretty much impossible because Marvel's version is trademarked 7 ways to Sunday. However that golden age Creature has some possibilities doesn't it?

Here are the comics wherein you'll find the first (and only?) appearances of both characters:

[ Charlton's The Thing 01 ]

[ Charlton's The Thing 02 ]

Enjoy!

Is Illegal Comic Downloading Passe?

Has illegal comic book downloading grown during the recession?

Recently I got a spam comment on this blog from someone who has made a blog of nothing but links to illegal comic book download sites. :\

At first I was a little surprised to see blogger allowing such a site in their domain, then I realized if the blog was simply linking to other sites, it may not be doing anything wrong.

Heck, I've seen quite a few other blogs that post entire issues of DC or Marvel comics in the name of criticism or fair use.

To be honest, I think posting an entire issue of Blackest Night 3, with nothing more than This comic rocks isn't what the academic commentary portion of fair use was intended for. However, when you are posting a complete issue of a comic that is no longer in print and mostly likely never will be again?...well then I am willing to turn a blind eye.

However, back to the spam comment - checking out the site with its multitude of illegal comic download links made me wonder had illegal comic book downloading grown during this recession.

Here is what I was able to determine by checking out the known haunts of comic book downloaders.

1. The DCP Scanners are still pretty much running, business as usual

2. Comic book downloading from torrent sites may be going down

Remember Z-Cult FM, the infamous comic book torrent site that pretty much popularized comic book downloading? Well, before they were practically shut down by the combined legal might of DC and Marvel, that site had 74,000 registered users. There were several cases where a torrent of comics was so popular, that it had over 15K downloads.

So, one would suspect that once Z-cult was shut down, we would see the illegal downloaders moving to other torrent sites, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Check this out.

Here is a screenshot from a popular torrent aggregate site. The numbers on the far left represent the number of seeds and completed downloads of the latest batch of DCP scans. No more than 1000 downloads registered at a site that aggregates the seeds? Seems pretty low considering Z-cult's DCP torrents often reached much higher (from 7k to 14k at its peak I think.)

Here is screen shot from one of the oldest torrent site on the net.

Again, the SE numbers are seeders and the LE numbers are Leachers.

Finally, here is screenshot from the newest members only comic download site.

The 886 represents the number of DCP torrent downloads.

Okay, so far, this doesn't look so bad. What have we got? About 3000 total downloaders?

3. But...there are a lot more torrent sites now than 2 years ago...

However, these numbers don't tell the whole story. As I started drilling down on the various sites in the Torrent Aggregate site, I was surprised to discover that site does not accurately report the number of seeders and leechers from the sites it aggregates. Many of them had a lot more seeders/leechers than the aggregate site was reporting. I found one of the child sites that as of 10 pm last night had over 1000 current leechers on a DCP torrent from last week!

The most current weeks comic scans had 500 leechers at the time. If one takes the time it takes to download such a torrent and divides the span of days by that number, well, then one would be better at math than me, so feel free to help me out here. :)

But seriously, my best guestimate is that if it takes 1 day (at most) to download a 1 gig DCP torrent, then in one week at 500 - 1000 leechers every day, you end up with 7000 downloads in the first week. And that's just from one torrent site.

So, my final assessment: The downloading hasn't stopped, it's just gotten much harder to track.

I got an email from someone telling me Demonoid was down. I don't know why the powers that be even bother. For every Demonoid, Z-Cult, Supernova they shut down, 100 rise up in their place.

That's just not the answer.

There needs to be a legal system for downloading comics.

I sure hope Longbox is it! :)

Have a great weekend!

- Jim

Pierre Speaks: How Do You Write

Jim asked that question some time ago.

When it comes to writing them Blogs… It often turns into a multi-headed Hydra.

Too often as I write these Blogs, what starts as one Blog becomes two. Then four. Then six. So that most of the times I am writing at least half a dozen Blogs in parallel.

As I write one Blog, I will get an idea that I will explain briefly, but that will need another Blog all of it’s own to try to explain properly. Then as I keep on writing… what I am writing will take me in another direction, and that too will end up requiring it’s own Blog.

So before long… I can end up with 2, 4 or 6 Blogs in progress

For example, I could have half a dozen Blogs about various aspects of an animation production. Or half a dozen Blogs about the transition of going from drawing on paper to drawing with the computer.

So often what starts as the idea for writing ONE Blog, turns into many.

Although when it comes to writing comic book stories… I use a trick/technique used by many artists when they “pretend” to be writers… I “write” by drawing rough sketches of my comic book pages.

Usually rough sketches only as detail as I need them to be, so sometimes it can be little more then a few lines unrecognizable to anyone else but me. But detailed enough so that I know what is on the page.

By keeping them pages/sketches rough, it allows me to do them fairly quickly. So if I decide to, let’s say, discard one page for some reason…. I did not waste too much time putting details on my sketch/drawing.

Once all my roughs are done… if I need to show the story to someone else… like in this case, Jim, I then make my sketches more detailed so that Jim can understand what is going on.

An example of that could be when I came up with the story that became our Flashback Universe issue featuring the Paladin.

It started with me trying to come up with a FBU character with some sort of “domino mask”.

Love that kind of mask for some reason.

So as I was trying to come up with such a character, I had the idea that we could give a WW2 sidekick to Paladin.

And the more I developed the character that became “the Squire”, and later in the story, “the Knight of King City”, the more the story started taking shape.

I was possessed.

The story started taking on a life of its own.

I spent the next 2 or 3 days sketching like a madman and shaping the tale of the Paladin and his “kid sidekick”.

I used various names as little more as place-holders trusting Jim to come up with some cool names for the characters.

Jim had expressed some concerns that our stories always seemed to end on a sad note. And heck I would have been tempted to do the same. But then I added an epilogue that not only made use of a twist that Jim had come up with concerning who Paladin was (if you do not know what I mean…. Go read our Paladin comic), but also that ended on a hopeful note. We were also fortunate to get Chad Bowers to write all of the dialogue. He did an excellent job in keeping the darker tone of the comic compartmentalized.

That ended on some sort of “new beginning” (again… if you did not read it yet…. Go read it now).

And there you had the rough foundation of what became the tale… “I Paladin”.

Until next time.

Mister Crimson Episode 41

Mister Crimson Episode 41
Wherein our hero must face his demons
Read it here .:

Free Comics Monday: Charlie Chan

Went home this weekend to visit my folks who are big mystery fans so I got a chance to catch up on some classic 40's mystery movies, one of them being Charlie Chan at the Circus. This got me curious if there were any Charlie Chan comics, and sure enough there were several. Today's Free Comics are two issues of the Charlton Comics version.

Charlie Chan is a fictional Chinese-American detective created by Earl Derr Biggers in 1923 for a novel published in 1925. Biggers conceived of the character as an alternative to Yellow Peril stereotypes; unlike such villains as Fu Manchu, Chan is portrayed as non-threatening and benevolent.



[ Charlie Chan 07 ]

A Charlie Chan comic strip, drawn by Alfred Andriola, was distributed by the McNaught Syndicate beginning October 24, 1938. Andriola was chosen by Biggers to draw the character. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the strip was dropped at the end of May 1942.

Over decades, several other Charlie Chan comic books have been published: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created Prize Comics' Charlie Chan (1948) which ran for five issues. It was followed by a Charlton Comics title (four issues, 1955). DC Comics published The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, a 1958 tie-in with the TV series; the DC series lasted for six issues. Dell Comics did the title for two issues in 1965. In the 1970s, Gold Key Comics published a short-lived series of Chan comics based directly on the Hanna-Barbera animated series.



[ Charlie Chan 08 ]

- Enjoy!