Mr. WHITE & The palette advances

KICKSTARTER UPDATE #48

Walter White and Jesse Pinkman are in the desert. Mr. White has lost his pants and he’s explaining how he used his science magic powers to kill drug dealers in a Winnabago. I’m rewatching Breaking Bad.

When it came out ten years ago Walt was an old man to me. I am now nearly his age. Jesse was a young man. The actor who plays him is now about my age working on the show Westworld. Breaking Bad has all kinds of story techniques I love and try to use. It’s dramatic and compositionally beautiful. MONUMENT doesn’t quite turn up the pulp volume up like my first book FULL COLOR did, but I try to make the chapters dense with pathos. (Man, now Jesse and Walter have a brown guy locked to a post in the basement. The racial politics in Breaking Bad are pretty rough. Mr. White indeed.) I’m reading Alan Sepinwall’s great analysis of the series as I go.

I finished 4 more pages and the color story is nearly done on MONUMENT 02. My son and I watched Peter Pan earlier which featured a lot of Mary Blair color palettes. I put some of her concept art below here. She’s quite amazing and responsible for early Disney films looking acidic, dangerous while still child-like. I still don’t like the colors on my work for this issue. I love MONUMENT 01’s palettes. I still have the “rendering” phase so hopefully I can save it with some reflection and tweaks.

The world is either going crazy or growing up. I rewatched Peter Pan with my son and the racism and gender issues are pretty prevalent. I suspect Breaking Bad would work if Walter was Latinx. Peter Pan would need to become something else entirely. There’s a lot to learn from both. I fear there’s problematic work baked into MONUMENT. I do my best but I fear in ten years it’ll be comically out of date. Actually mostly I’m afraid in ten years no one will care at all. Regardless I’m going to keep moving forward.

Falling into a pit of fire like The Mountain and The Hound in Game of Thrones

I am trying to just move my pen these days. This is a sketchbook thing I did to warm up a little. Wait. How are you? I like that new dystopian mask and that we can talk here like regular humans, ten feet apart. What a hellscape. Wait. This is our imagination. Nice to run into you at this fine coffee shop full of beautiful people, orcs and wizards. Normally they hang at haunted taverns but here we all are together at a hipster vegan coffee shop. That orc over there? Used to date my friend Tina. Weird dude. Hey you look good. I like this new glitter sparkle princess thing you have going on. It matches your beard nicely. The crown is siiiiiick.

Me? I’m aight. I had a solid week at work and colored some pages of MONUMENT. I am so goddamn close to done. I’m at the stage of the work where I hate it and me and want us both to die falling into a pit of fire like The Mountain and Hound in Game of Thrones. I do little side drawings like the above and I feel guilty. I wrestle a lot with “permission”. Do I have permission to draw for fun? Not because of the Kickstarter and being hopelessly behind schedule (well, a little) but am I good enough? Am I allowed? I always say the greatest asset an artist can have is bravado. I’ll take irrational compulsion, I suppose. Still waiting on bravado.

A decent week for me. I managed to lose only like 35-42% of my time to despair. I was useful at my job. Dadded shit up like a boss and hacked out 4 colored pages of MONUMENT #2. I’m not really able to consume narrative art these days. I’m waiting for some comics to arrive from my local comic book shop. I’ve tried re-reading some but it I haven’t been able to really lose myself. I can’t sit through any tv shows other than Tiger King (which I have no idea what THAT says about me as a person). I’m literally putting shows to watch in my calendar this week like they’re actual fucking things. “Watch Bojack Horseman” Gonna check that fucker off the ole To Do List! What a weird time.

Thanks for your support. It means so much to me. Hope you’re okay in all this mess.

Issue 2 of MONUMENT is due out this summer. You can buy Issue 1 of MONUMENT on Comixology.

Pedals and Petals

Kickstater Update #46

I was out for a bike ride with my son and saw a woman I know. She’s living nearby after a bit of trouble with some substances. It is the worst possible time to find any kind of sobriety, but there she is. One day at time. I wave and keep my distance as we do these days. It was hard not to run up and celebrate her time. Sobriety after abuse is a stunning act of courage. Yet, I pedaled away into the springtime blossoming Berkeley streets.

My son and I try to ride our bikes once a day. It’s that time of year in California where it’s impossible to think of living anywhere else. Flowers blooming and the temperature perfect. My son has got the world’s best attitude and I’m grateful. I’m grateful for a lot of things these days. Basic things. My dull ass day job is solid. I am not always so at peace with my career “accomplishments” but seeing my friends with cool art jobs suddenly thrown into a tailspin thanks to economic uncertainty makes my sell-out job feel quite nice at the moment. My son’s school is closed. I home school him part of the day. He had his first video conference class meet up the other day. His teacher, not the most tech savvy person, kept losing his signal. The kids would go into a Fisher Price Lord of Flies round of “What do we do now? The teacher disappeared” until he returned. They laughed but there’s drop of fear. Finally there was some consistency of signal and the meet up continued to conclusion. The teacher used to instruct kindergarten and is new to fifth grade. His style skews a little too young for kids on the cusp of middle school. However, the kids roll with it. My son still finds the puppets funny. At fifth grade some kids are little teenagers and some are big kids. My son is a big kid. The meeting ended with the group singing a song with a purple puppet. Really, though it was my son alone at his desk singing sincerely at a monitor and it was hard for me not cry.

This time has been brutal for me and my life is amazing. I have dough, a roof and kid that has a great attitude about everything. It’s hard not worry about my friends who are delivering packages and my artist friends without a safety net. It’s hard…you know why. The fear is constant. That said, even with this fucked up dystopian nightmare we are in, my son keeps rolling. I tried to ask him how he was feeling. Like REALLY feeling, creating space for him to be honest. He said “Top three things I like about homeschooling: 1. Seeing my grandma every day on video chat. 2. Learning about the Revolutionary War from my Aunt. 3. Biking every day with you.” I don’t know how people survive this without a Noah in their life. We get out. We bike and keep trying.

We are right in the middle of a global fucking pandemic and here I am making emo comics. I dunno, man. Is this the right call?

I make art because I am compelled to. Well, lately I’m compelled to eat carbs and hide, but on a spiritual level art is my compulsion. I remember living in New York after September 11th and Letterman came back on the air because “the mayor said it was time to go back to work.” He read shit jokes from hand held cue cards. His job was to tell jokes and so there he was. Even if he didn’t know how to be funny at that time because the world was a nightmare and bodies had just rained into the streets of New York. Nothing was funny. But it was time and Letterman went to work. His work was art.

I am back to work. I had stopped because the world is pretty awful but I’m back at it. I’m coloring Monument #2 and you can see my progress above. I’m blocking in the color story, then will make one more pass to clean up the colors. Then I letter the book. Then I’m done. I’m fairly close to finished and have the next project precolating. I have real doubts about this particular story and the merit of my work. However, this is my job.

(Kickstarter Update #45)

The floor of my son’s karate school is wide bright golden hardwood. Shiny. The classes get crisper as he gets older. Noah’s step dad is off the floor awaiting his class, stretching. He and Noah started taking classes at the same time. They both wear a white unform (a gi) and the both wear blue belts. I wear black sweater and jeans. I’m sipping coffee with my mother who is visiting. It’s Seido Karate. Most martial arts are derivatives of Wushu Kung Fu and Seido is no exception. It’s very family friendly. We had him in a ju jitsu school originally and I preferred it. It’s a harder, more practical fighting style. One of the older members scrubs the door handle.

Everyone is concerned about the coronavirus here in the Bay Area. There is no hand sanitizer to be bought in the Bay. I don’t think we’ll all die in some zombie-style apocalypse but I do think there will be a serious quarantine as well as economic downturn. Right now it feels a little like before a blizzard back east. Man, I’m glad I have this day job. Some of my artist friends are already out of work. It just feels like these years will be hard.

I’m watching pro wrestling and coloring comic pages. The potentially immortal Gran Metalik just hit John Morrison with a hurricurana. Bonkers. I’ve got 18 pages colored. Chip chip chip. I need to get a regular schedule. I’m mostly winging it and I do better when I designate particular days for making comics.

Anyhoo. We are hanging in out here. More comics are coming. Thanks for tuning in. Refunds, as always, are still available.

(Kickstarter Update #44)

Everyone is a little uneasy these days. I’m grateful to have comics as a place where I have some control over things. Things are a grind but I am excited to nearly be done with this issue of MONUMENT. Above is a color I have “flatted” once the whole book has that level of color, I render it (add some shading basically). The flatting tells the color story. I’m about half way through the colors and hope to be DUN DUN by end of April. I’ll be checking in weekly until then.

It’s been a weird day in America. I’m not going to get into it for all the obvious reasons. I had a whole other post planned but it doesn’t feel right. There’s just so much going on and I don’t have a comedic riff for y’all. I mostly just wanted to check in. I even started writing MONUMENT #3 while I’m commuting. Hold fast, gang.

A touchdown in a Super Bowl no one knows exists (Kickstarter update #43)

Falling from the top of the ladder, all 200 hundred pounds of me hit the floor with the grace of a wet bag of vanilla pudding. Honestly, it was the most athletic thing I’ve ever done.

I had been repainting my bedroom for my then wife. We had bought this great brownstone in the post-apocalyptic hell hole that is Trenton, New Jersey. The previous owners were rather over the top and had painted elaborate murals in a few rooms. A “Birth of Venus” naked lady in the bathroom and ancient greek faces “blowing” the ceiling fan in our brown bedroom. Dark, freeze burn brown. The whole room was a brownie you’d never want to eat. So as a gift to my patient wife and mother to my child, i came home early to paint and build all new furniture. She could rest with her family and the baby while I remade our bedroom. Our marriage was not in great shape and I was hoping this huge effort would be an symbolic lighting of he Olympic Flame. The entire adventure was a fiasco. The brown was nearly unkillable and took 5 coats to cover which is 4 more than I planned on. When removing the fan, it occurred to me after that I should turn the power off before dicking with the wiring. It took 5 straight 12 hour days and I delirium was setting in when I fell from the very top of the ladder with a full bucket of paint.

Time slowed. I knew if the can landed my 100 year old floors would be ruined.I don’t know how I slipped but once free from the ladder, I fully extended like a hall of fame receiver to make sure the full can did not tip and boy did I take the hit. There was thunderous slam in empty house. I stood up and pumped my fist like Michael Jordan after a game-winner. Guys, it was truly amazing. And no one saw it.

This is what it’s like to finish a drawing a Kickstarter comic. Sure, there’s still more to do. (Coloring, lettering and post-production. We’re probably a couple of months from you receiving your books.) However, the hard part, the scoring touchdowns in the Super Bowl that is this endeavor, is finishing pages and I fucking did it. These were the hardest 28 pages of comics I’ve ever made and I’m really proud of myself. Maybe this is the beginning of new era of artistic achievement. Maybe it’s nothing but soon to be discarded weird objects my friends and family don’t read. I do not care. I make this work because it matters to me. Because I have to. I am absolutely good enough to earn a living doing this but the game is the game. Any successful creative telling you it’s just hard work and not some luck is bullshitting either you, themselves or both. I feel really good at the moment. It’s been a difficult few years but I fought for this spot. For the comics, my son and my sanity. It’s really not much at all but I am so so grateful. This year has sharpened me. (In some ways. This year has also made me tender in a way I hadn’t thought possible. I gave up a lot of things that weren’t serving me. Tough…but tender.) I’m glad I did this Kickstarter and that you supported it. I’m not sure I would have made it through things without it. I didn’t scream when I finished that last turkey drawing. I didn’t scream like I did when I saved my floor from paint ruin. That superlative play did not save my marriage and someone else owns that house now. This? These pages I made? I finished them and it took days for it to sink in what happened. I fucking did it. It felt impossible last year like I sold y’all a bill of goods and I’d never deliver. But I dug in. Comics didn’t give up on me even when I gave up on myself. This chapter I put together is fucking mine forever.

Very soon it will be yours as well. Thank you, fam.

Data is a real panty-dropper (Kickstarter UPDATE #42)

I’ll take a double decker taco and two bean burritos. Please, don’t tell my friends. Thanks. What'? Yeah. Mild sauce. Like a handful…HEY! What’s up, buddy? You rock Taco Bell, too? Yeah, I eat it like once or twice a year. I love this stuff. It’s not mexican and it’s not food but it is delicious. When my marriage/life was falling apart I’d hit the Bell and sadly pound doubledeckers in the parking lot. Ah. Good times. But you! What’s up with you? I’m loving this new hair cut. You’re right about the hightop fade. It’s coming back. That cream reduce the swelling? Job good? Doggo? Aw, that’s great. You’re doing great. Me? I’m doing really fucking good, actually. This Taco Bell run is celebratory. I’ll get to that in a second though…

Firstly, I’m reading some great comics lately. Hickman and his squad are doing fun things with the X-Men line. I loved Marauders. All of the talent is contributing crazy ideas to an already idea-dense story. As most of you know from my IG stories I’m rereading John Romita Jr. comics. I picked up Tom Spurgeon’s book on the Romitas. They both have such strong figurative fundamentals that are more and more rare these days.

MONUMENT #2 is going great. I looooove inking. It takes me 12+ hours to pencil a page and 2-3 hours to ink it. Guys, there’s a real shot all the hard stuff will be done by Dec 1. Then just colors and refined lettering and design. Crazy. I included this sexy sexy chart (data viz, baby!) I use to track my progress:

My buddy just told me that he thought I was talking about Data from Star Trek the Next Generation. Which is kind of perfect. I fell off on my TNG viewing when things ended with the woman I was seeing. Data the character is in fact a panty dropper. Folks find him sexxxxxxy. Not just Tasha Yar. I gotta pick the show back up. Thanks for the reminder fam.

Lastly, the news I’m celebrating at this Taco Bell at two in the morning here with you is that I got a new job I start Dec 2nd. I like the company, the money is good and I get legit benefits. Life can be rough and I clearly have expressed that here. Lately it’s pretty fucking sweet. Y’all have absolutely crowd-sourced positive vibes for me during some dark times. I appreciate it. If you haven’t yet get at me on Twitter, @markhavenbritt and Instagram @ca_ghost. Refunds, as always, are still available.

Reflecting on peak Wildstorm Comics

The Marvel Cinematic Universe would not have succeeded without Wildstorm’s output of the 1990’s. Superheroes are at a saturation point I never thought possible. Artist Bryan Hitch and writer Mark Millar’s superhero opus “The Ultimates” was the blueprint. That comic would not exist without Hitch and writer Warren Ellis’s The Authority published by Jim Lee’s Wildstorm publishing studio. Hitch, in particular, does not get his due. Visualizing how all to make Kirby’s cosmic madness work in the real physical world for contemporary audiences was no simple feat. Folks were trying to crack that code for years.

Towards the tail end of it’s relationship with Image and then early in it’s run with DC, Lee and Wildstorm commissioned forward thinking comics that the entire genre benefits from to this day. It was R&D for superheroes. There was risk, failure and great pulp comics.

In my mind, there are 5 key Wildstorm comics:

1. Authority/StormWatch

2. Planetary

3. WildCats

4. Sleeper

5. America’s Best Comics

There are a number of fantastic fleetingly brilliant ones, I’ll get into later (Tomm Coker’s Gen 13/Maxx one shot and Eric Canete’s Cybernary 2.0 come to mind). I’ve been thinking about my bookshelf these days. I sold my collection a few years ago. It was out of order and beat to hell. I’m trying to be more mindful about my space and curating my bookshelf is fun. My Wildstorm section is pretty random (see photo above) so I’m going to build it back out. Tom Spurgeon wrote thoughtfully about Wildstorm here. (Man, I miss that guy already.)

Who were your favs?