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San Diego 2005: Sketchbook Reviews
by Randy Lander
You'll find my annual sketchbook feature HERE, with scans of all the new sketches I picked up in San Diego. This year, however, that piece has a companion here, as I run down the various sketchbooks that I bought from the Con. It has become something of a tradition for some artists to put together a collection of their sketches and sell them at the Cons, and it seems to be a practice that is increasing. To which I say, "Yippee!" These books are a great insight into all the work that goes into art that we don't often see in the polished finished product, as well as a chance to see artists tackle characters that they don't handle commercially but that they certainly have an interesting take on. It's also a great way to experience new artists, or to see static work from a variety of talent who usually work in animation.
This year, I was picking these things up like they were candy. Some were given to me, but a lot of them I dropped the cash on, and I think the lion's share of my Con budget actually went to picking up sketchbooks when all is said and done (there are a couple of prices with question marks, because I'm only 95% sure of what I spent on them). Some are minicomic format, some are beautifully packaged glossy collections, and one of them is even a swanky hardcover. I'm going to do my best to provide links to all of these artists in my brief overview of their sketchbooks, as well as an excerpt of one piece from each book, so that readers who are interested can try to track these down online or at other conventions. If I don't have any contact info or a website, and you know that info, please drop me a line! Or if you're one of the creators of these sketchbooks and you want to provide an alternative link for folks to buy these sketchbooks online or just a list of conventions they can catch you at this summer to pick one up, drop me a line!
One common theme I discovered in a lot of these sketchbooks? Artists do love drawing the nekkid girls! I also discovered that it's hard to really describe all these sketchbooks with just words, so if you click on the cover scans below, you'll get a picture of one of the sketches from the book so you can get a sense of what the book looks like. Although honestly, most of them are so eclectic that it's hard to sum them up in just one picture.
 The last time Ross Richie handed me a sketchbook, it was the Dave Johnson book from Atomeka, and it was awesome. The Aaron Lopresti Sketchbook is from Boom! Studios, but in every other way, it's a match for the Johnson book. Lopresti brings his considerable talents to bear on jungle girls, pulp adventure, mermaids, westerns, sci-fi girls, famous likenesses and oh yeah, a few more sexy girls. Lopresti's pulp sensibilities are on full display here, and it's clear that he should be doing a book on Shanna, Tarzan, Ka-Zar or something of that nature. Or perhaps a western, as his work on a masked rider type at the back of the book are very striking. Or maybe fantasy, as his work on barbarians and monsters, dinosaurs and dragons and giants is exceptional. Or maybe science-fiction adventure, as his retro Wally Wood style sci-fi pinups here are beautiful. What I'm trying to get at is that Lopresti has a gorgeous style and a lot of range, and this shiny, perfect bound rendition of his art talent is a must-have for fans of great art done in a great format. I actually was told what Lopresti is working on next while at the convention, and it was with a writer I like on a character (or characters) I was interested in, but I've forgotten what it was. Hopefully I'll remember or get an email reminder, but I'm pretty sure that you folks will find out about it on the major news sites.
ACID BOMB & PENGUIN BEEF
by Dave Crosland & Debbie
Price: $7.00 & $10.00
Website: www.hiredmeat.com
 When I found Dave Crosland's booth at the end of Artist's Alley, I splurged and picked up all the minicomics and sketchbooks he had on sale, and I'm so glad I did. Acid Bomb is just general madness, and Penguin Beef is subtitled "Dirty Nuns and What-Have-Yous," which should give you some idea what to expect. Crosland's crazy energetic style (most recently on display in The Puffed trade paperback from IDW) is perfect for sketchbook riffing, and these books are a blast to flip through. Crosland and his mysterious one-name collaborator Debbie cook up some bizarre mixtures of crazy and sexy in Penguin Beef that reads like a cross between Paul Pope and Jim Mahfood (to give a rough overview of the style) and Acid Bomb has this same element of crazy/sexy, with the addition of street, music, guns, bikes and much love for weird fashion. Crosland and Debbie have a style that is just damned hard to pin down, so hopefully the art excerpt will give some idea what to expect, and a visit to Hired Meat.com will let you sample the rest. Crosland and Debbie have Slop: Analecta, a trade paperback of their shorts, doodles and other work, coming out from Image later this summer.
 Justin Ridge is another animator who presented sketchbooks or comics this year, and Butterscotch is a great sketchbook. It's full-color, shiny format with a spine and features mostly (you guessed it!) sexy girls. The cover image gives a great sense of Ridge's expressive artwork and good girl style, but you have to look at the interior to see his amazing color sense and great skill with perspective. In addition to some cool one pagers like hot western girls, a '50s-esque bombshell talking on the phone and a great kung-fu action shot co-created with Ethan Spaulding, Ridge has a terrific two-page splash of three girls in bathing suits looking out at the reader as if he were on the floor looking up at them. Beautiful stuff, very inventive in its use of angles and color, with a great sense of humor to boot. One of my favorites.
 Ragnar is a name I know from seeing his design work on a variety of T-shirts, stickers and some notepads from Dark Horse. His design style is instantly recognizable and attractive, and when I saw that he had an artbook, I snapped it right up. At $20, it's a steal, a big 'ol full color artbook full of pretty girls, faux movie posters, rock and roll flyers and design elements that reads like a mix between the '30s and the '50s. Ragnar intersperses the art with commentary on his process or comments and context at the time, including some very funny anecdotes about his work with punk rock bands and their fans. You can pick this one up off of Amazon, and I'd definitely recommend it, along with Ragnar's two children's books (Got Your Nose and Izzy's Very Important Job).
 Tony Harris's sketchbook is an interesting mix of design journal and commissioned piece record, with equal time given to cover sketches and character design pages and finished character sketches. Much of the work is recognizable as early work on covers for everything from Knights 4 (although I don't think the one pictured here ever actually ran... naughty implications to an editor, maybe?) to Ex Machina to Starman, but there are also plenty of character design sketches showing off characters' heads from different angles. There are also some great full-on pics of Doctor Strange, the Joker, Nightcrawler and Wonder Woman. It's a great showcase of Harris's art, and though a lot of it is early layout work for covers, it's all pretty polished and amazing to look at. Tony Harris, of course, is busy at work on the Eisner-award winning Ex Machina every month along with his studiomates Tom Feister and JD Mettler.
 Duk! Soup was a lucky find, actually occurring after the Con when I met Townsend in the San Diego airport. On his website, Townsend indicates that he wasn't going to go to San Diego, but something must have changed, because he was there, and I met him when he was hanging out with Austin Books owner Brad Bankston and got a copy of his sketchbook. Townsend was a conceptual artist for ADV, and has worked in a variety of other commercial art jobs, and it's clear that he won't be hurting for work at any time in the future. This stuff is gorgeous, folks, and well worth looking out for. Think J. Scott Campbell mixed with Art Adams, Chris Bachalo and Geoff Darrow, and you've got some idea, but only some, as Townsend clearly has developed his own artistic voice at this point. Duk! Soup ranges from pretty naked girls to robots, from weird animals to detailed architectural designs, from science-fiction vehicle designs to the manga/funny animal strip that gives the book its name, and it's all... just... drop dead gorgeous. Townsend is clearly a major talent, and if one of the big publishers doesn't snap him up after seeing his stuff, it's either a huge mistake on their part or (more likely) an inability to compete with the pay rates available in animation and commerical work. Beautiful stuff, and the last sketchbook I saw over the weekend is also one of my favorites.
 Last year, I passed up buying Fragments. I think I saw it late in the Con, I was running low on budget, and I wasn't as sketchbook crazy as I was this year. Thank goodness someone pointed me toward the Flight booth where Casarosa and Del Carmen were staying this year and I got a second chance, because Fragments is a great f*cking sketchbook. It's a flipbook, beautifully designed with bookflap covers and nice matte paper, with Casarosa on one side and Del Carmen on another. It's funny, because these two have a lot of things in common (a background in animation, some similarities of style, a friendship enough to go in on a publishing venture) but each side of this sketchbook shows off the differences in their personalities and their art. Del Carmen has a sort of work journal approach, detailing his love of earth tone color post-it notes for drawing, how he'll catch subjects all the time for a quick sketch, about a class he took with Baron Storey. Del Carmen's work on Fragments is, surprisingly, a narrative of sorts, a journey through Del Carmen's metholody, with a beautiful scenery that ranges from city streets to random bystanders to life models to pretty girls.
 On the other hand, Enrico Casarosa presents a pretty personal insight into his insecurity about living up to the Del Carmen side of the equation (almost certainly half-joking, because Casarosa has got to realize the extent of his talent) and serves up a variety of beautiful girls done in brushpen, water and Photoshop coloring. The results are sexy and fun, a celebration of the female form and a style that seems more "painterly" (for lack of a better word) than Casarosa's work on Adventures of Mia. There's also some amazing stuff influenced by fashion magazine illustration and a few pages of life drawing that are equally impressive. Casarosa's approach is different than Del Carmen's, and more focused in terms of subject matter, but it's just as valid and certainly just as beautiful to look at. This one is a must-have, and you can get it from Enrico's website (and probably Del Carmen's too, but I couldn't find it as easily there).
FRANK CAMMUSO'S ROUGH SKETCHES VOL. 2
by Frank Cammuso
Price: $10.00
Website: www.cammuso.com
 The creator of fairy tale noir Max Hamm, Fairy Tale Detective offers up this collection of dames, wiseguys and city streets that is a visual primer and preview for the Max Hamm series. The dames section includes a lot of cheesecake (but no nudity), the guys section a cross-section of scowling mobsters and monsters, including an intriguing large two-headed guy in a pinstripe suit. The artwork in this book features a lot of extra pencil lines yet to be erased, so it's still rough stage sketches, but the forms and features are very well defined, so it's hardly just rough pencil sketches. It's a terrific look at an interesting talent. Cammuso is working on more Max Hamm, Fairy Tale Detective right now, and has just released the first trade paperback collection of Max Hamm.
 The Love Brothers deliver a sketchbook that looks like a comic, with glossy color covers and black and white interiors, and the spread of subject matter and strength of the work point out the talent that these two guys have. A lot of the work here is development work on their upcoming series, but given that they're covering a variety of genres (children's story, blaxploitation kung-fu, sci-fi fantasy/pulp), there's still a pretty wide range of art here. A lot of the work is made up of two page spreads that give a sense of atmosphere and moment, such as the two-pager of tribesmen charging into battle alongside a modern-day warrior, the shot of a Doc Samson-esque adventurer facing down a tiger or the pages that show an astronaut strapped in and ready for takeoff. There's also plenty of character design work and a few fun pages, including a stunning redesign for a female Falcon (at Marvel) and a cast rendition for Good Times. The Love Brothers have a lot of projects coming from different publishers, including Credence Walker (sci-fi/fantasy pulp), Shadow Rock (children's adventure from Dark Horse, and I saw pages in San Diego and it's gorgeous) and the long-awaited Chocolate Thunder, a blaxploitation riff that will hopefully finally see print later this year. In the meantime, you might check out the graphic novel Fierce, their modern-day action thriller from Dark Horse.
 Dan Brereton is best known in the comics industry as the creator of The Nocturnals, a superhero/horror/noir book published by Oni Press. His painted artwork has also adorned many a White Wolf gaming project and plenty of comic covers, and his style is especially applicable to the two subjects covered in this sketchbook: Monsters and girls. There are a ton of voluptuous naked girls in this sketchbook, as well as some beautiful costumed shots of the revamped Batgirl from Chaykin and Brereton's Batman: Thrillkiller, Zatanna, Harley and Ivy, to name a few. Brereton also has a few illustrations of Natalie Portman as Matilda from The Professional (a dead-on rendition), plus a terrific two-page spread of the Avengers circa 1969, a nice G-Force group shot and a color Conan-esque piece on the back. Brereton has just finished the Italian sword and sandal drama The Last Battle which will eventually see print in the U.S., and with any luck there will be more Nocturnals on the horizon.
RUNNING* (*ON EMPTY)
by Mike Huddleston
Price: $10.00
Website: No info
 Mike Huddleston is an amazing artist, as those who have read Deep Sleeper, The Coffin or Mnemovore well know. Running on Empty is the second sketchbook I've gotten from him, and it's a joy to behold, a terrific mixture of Huddleston's horror sensibilities, life drawings and a handful of character homages as well. It's an eclectic mix of content, but every piece contained here is just beautiful. Huddleston does some beautiful nude girl drawings (including an unusual use of zipatone for nipples that really works), some moody shots of musicians (from Jimi Hendrix to Louie Armstrong) and a few fun fantasy images, like an astronaut with a wizard, a group of well-armed zombie commandoes and a boombox-toting samurai. Huddleston is currently at work on a Man-Bat miniseries with Bruce Jones, and his designs for Man-Bat and a gorgeous shot of Batman in this sketchbook make it a project worth looking forward to, at least from an artistic standpoint.
SIMONE BIANCHI SKETCHBOOK SAN DIEGO 2005 EXCLUSIVE EDITION
by Simone Bianchi
Price: $10.00
Website: www.simonebianchi.com
 When I saw that the artist of Seven Soldiers: Shining Knight was in Artists' Alley, my jaw dropped. I hadn't expected him there, and so I made a point of swinging by the table later to pick up his sketchbook and toy with the notion of picking up his full-color artbook. I didn't get the artbook, which I'm really regretting now, but I did get the sketchbook, and it's just as amazing as you'd expect if you've seen Bianchi's amazing work on Shining Knight. The work here draws from the European tradition, and there are some early shots of techno-blended women reminiscent of a cross between Moebius and H.R. Giger. There's also a gorgeous two-page spread of model sheets for Superman, some pages that are presumably from Bianchi's Ego Sum (published in Europe, someone please please please translate and release this here) and some crazy detailed anatomy and hand studies. Bianchi's sketches are as jaw-dropping as his finished pages. Bianchi is of course finished up with Seven Soldiers: Shining Knight (although only three of the four issues have come out) and working on more Ego Sum. I'm quite sure we'll be seeing more American work from him in the future, and very hopeful that we'll see his European stuff translated as well.
 When I bought this sketchbook, I had no idea who Patrick Morgan was. All I knew of him was that he is friends with Scott Morse, because I was there when he dropped off a copy of his hardcover sketchbook. I've since gotten an email from Patrick giving me a little bit of info, and it turns out that he is an animator for Nickelodeon (as well as having worked for Warner Brothers and Disney), specifically a character/background designer for The X's, a show launching in January, and he has a couple other things in the hopper as well. I also know that his sketchbook is amazing. Leaving aside the design, a nifty hardcover format, Morgan's artwork inside is just a whole lot of fun. Exaggerated figures, a terrific visual sense of humor and a strange assortment of subject matter make for an engaging artbook. Morgan's work resembles caricature in some ways, and in fact some of the work here almost certainly started out as caricatures, and if I had to boil the style down for simplicity, I'd say try to imagine Dave Cooper crossed with Bruce Timm. Morgan dabbles in superheroes, with a hilarious redesign for Firestorm, a very energetic Hulk, a great Wonder Woman piece that would make Sir Mix-a-Lot proud and a terrific stocky looking Wolverine. Most of his work, however, features everyday folks, although more the everyday folks you'd meet in the back rows of a county fair than the guys you'd spot in the city. Morgan's characters have a lot of character, and despite a commonality of exaggerated proportions, a lot of variance in their appearances and body types. Definitely one of my favorites from the Con, and a lucky strike that I might have missed if I hadn't been in the right place at the right time and known to track Morgan down later at the Con.
 Jose Garibaldi was the artist on Oni Press's Maria's Wedding, and he's currently working on his own graphic novel, Teen Heaven, as well as having just finished up a run with Paul Dini on Jingle Belle. It's funny, because Garibaldi often works in a sort of animated style reminiscent of Bruce Timm or Ty Templeton, but the style I've seen him use in sketchbooks is more "street," more like his buddies Jim Mahfood and Dave Crosland with a little flavoring of Peter Bagge and even Coop thrown into the mix. Some Bitch Told Me To Draw is 18 pages of Garibaldi working closer to his native style, covering everything from Batman's unfortunate farting in front of his Justice League friends to random girls, guys and ninjas. It's an honest to God sketchbook, in that Garibaldi includes a lot of rough sketch work and noodling of ideas, but there are some nice finished pieces as well.
Email Randy Lander comments about this column.
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