Merry Belated Christmas GBPOB Style!

So it's been months since I've updated this art blog but I hope this post makes up for it some.

It's a holiday stocking stuffer for all the Great Big Pissed Off Bear fans. I originally planned to debut this strip on Christmas eve but things got hectic....Think of this as the after dinner mint to the Christmas feast....or I suppose it could be the antacid.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!!...even you heathens out there.

2010 FALLCON THIS WEEKEND!!

That's right kiddies...it's that time of year again! Time to come on out to the Minnesota State Fair grounds for the comic-book centered extravaganza!

http://midwestcomicbook.com/

Becky and I will be there selling our wares and doing sketches and meeting fans along with many other talented folks from the worlds of comics and geek entertainment.

Also, if you go, you will have the opportunity to bid on this collaborative piece I did with fellow artist, Anthony Hary for the art auction. He did the Superman side while I tackled the Bat-family.

And Finally....If for nothing else...You need to go to get my latest issue of Great Big Pissed Off Bear. Just $3.00!

Seriously, this is one of the better comic shows of the year. Mostly because of the awesome folks of the MCBA who run it. So come on out and show us and the MCBA guys and gals some love this weekend!

BTW....The drawing at the head of this post is a Nightmare Monster I did for last weeks warm-up creative exercise at the beginning of the art class I teach at the ART ACADEMY on Tuesday nights. It scares me.

I'm not dead....honest.

I know I've been lax in updating this art-blog thing since Wizardworld Chicago but, honestly, I have been busy with various things...mostly un-art-related but things that needed getting done around the house and such. I will try to get back into the updating routine very soon. I actually might have a few new pieces too.

Fallcon is just 2 weeks away so in case you're unaware that I actually had a new book at that show...Great Big Pissed Off Bear #3 will be available to purchase at the Minnesota Fallcon on October 16th. So come get it.

Here's a pic of me holding the new book.

Wizardworld Chicago August 19-22, 2010

Come See Planet Doom Studios (Bequi and Me) at the Wizardworld Chicago Comicon.

Table 3513 in Artist's Alley.

Resurrecting the Past. Pt. 3

More Unearthed goodness from the stack of Art-i-facts.

Apparently, I had some deep seeded anger issues bubbling under the surface in high school as depicted in the above picture of my character THE VOID spattered with blood. There was most likely a girl and rejection involved as was usually the reasons for me being all mopey and broody. Gads...I was kinda goth back then. I certainly wore the black trenchcoat every day.

Throughout school up through college, I would doodle random nonsense all over my notes and homework. Here's a few lovely examples.

Note: the M&M weilding tha axe. There were quite a few violent depictions of those guys in my notes. Usually, they were ranting some wild nonsense.

Not quite sure what is going on here....Rah Rah Poopie? Hmmmm. I do know the "Curse you Dogman" was a quote from Ranma 1/2....so at least that makes some sense to me.

This one had me rolling. The X-men and Apocalypse having a dialogue about olives seems really funny to me. Maybe only me but oh well.

Like my school notes, I would also draw all over church bulletins. Not eactly what I should've been doing in the House of God but I swear, I was listening the whole time. Honest. Below is just one example of my character THE VOID and Pat Gleason's character LINT, endorsing Lazy Mountain Bible Church. Oh...and some randon dude too.

Chicago Comicon August 19-22

Come by and see me and buy stuff from us...Like maybe Great Big Pissed Off Bear #3. Yea!

http://www.wizardworld.com/mattwendt.html

Resurrecting the Past. Pt. 2

I met one of my best friends, Andy, back in 1986. We went to the same church and eventually were in the same class in 5th grade. What brought us together was a mutual love for GI JOE toys. Fast forward almost 25 years later and we're still obsessed with The Real American Heros. Yup...we're still brought together by plastic soldiers all these years later.

At some point in the early years of our friendship, we decided that we wanted to, not only play with and enjoy GI JOE toys, but we wanted to create and design them as well. So we spent hours drawing up new, cool vehicles and figures in hopes that Hasbro would see the potential and hire us for their design department. We even went so far as to list a suggested retail price for some of the designs should Hasbro decide to produce them. It was fun to dream back then. What was kind of eerie was that alot of our ideas were about resurrecting old characters and vehicles with repaints and putting them on a special team called the Lightning League ( a name stolen from Wheeled Warriors) and then years later Hasbro actually did just that with the likes of Tiger Force, Python Patrol, Night Force, and Slaughter's Marauders. Could they have been spying on us and stealing our ideas? I'd like to think so.

Below are a few examples of our super-awesome ideas.

I had drawings taped all over my walls and even my door when I was a kid. My obsession with GI JOE was even displayed on that door in the below drawing of DUKE.

This final drawing was done, most likely, during one of my classes, I'd guess in the 8th or 9th grade. It was during that time that I really got into collecting the comic books and was die-hard for the back issues. My first GI JOE figure ever was FLASH, the original Laser Trooper, so I proudly depicted him leading the charge in this one.

And now you know....And Knowing is half the battle.

Resurrecting the past. pt. 1

While on vacation back home up here in Alaska, I've had time to rummage through my mom's garage and sift through all the stuff I left behind when I moved out of state 12 years ago. I gotta say...I've found some real gems and can't believe I was stupid enough to leave these artifacts behind. The stuff spans my personal art history from grade school through college. IT has been a real treat reliving all the memories and I find myself laughing out loud at the littlest doodles. Needless to say I will be sending a box of these goodies home.

Here's just a few samples of what I've unearthed.

Here's one of the first renditions of my long-standing character, Mohawk Man. This was drawn in 1986 when I was a mere 4th grader. Apparently my original intent was to have a gang of Mohawk men complete with Mr. T look-alikes. I'm still not sure what Loober is....but it is awesom....minus the e.

This was one from 7th grade. Not sure why or what is going on. Some dude just punching another for some reason. I'm going to assume it's a good one...but, HEY, how about that punch?!

This was a Void cover that got scrapped for something cooler...or not. I have the one I went with back home in MN so I'll have to update later on whether it was better than this or not.

Well whadda ya know....I found an old James Crow and Rex drawing from 1989. I'm really liking Rex's look in this one.

And Speaking of James Crow....

Here's a scrapped cover for one of my James Crow 0017 issues. I think my problem with this one was the varying scale sizes of all the background characters. It just doesn't make sense here. Not sure what this issue number this was supposed to be but I'm sure the one I went with was better than this. Maybe not much but enough.

I got lots of great stuff still to sift through, so I'll try to post again very soon with more ancient treasures.

Counting down to Wizardworld Chicago...But AK vacation first!

As I type this Bequi is upstairs lettering the all new GREAT BIG PISSED OFF BEAR #3. She has been up all night and is still singing energetically away to the K-pop music she spent half the night downloading....the other half (since 2am) has been dedicated to lettering. So if all goes well this book should be done today. Then we can go up to Alaska and actually enjoy our vacation rather than worry about getting our book ready for Wizardworld Chicago 2010 August 19-22. At any rate....If you're in the Chicago area for the convention, look for Planet Doom Studios in Artist's and come pick up GREAT BIG PISSED OFF BEAR #3...and #'s 1 and 2 if you don't have 'em...and any of our other awesome books you may not have yet.

In the Con spirit, I'm posting some various sketches done at the Wizardworld Chicago Comicon show in years past as well as one or two from the local Fallcon. I apologize...some of these are kinda blurry. I was using the old digital camera and it was hard to adjust to the weird show lighting as well as get an accurate focus reading on the crappy little screen. But maybe that's a good thing....it can hide all kinds of mistakes.

At shows Becky and I often get asked to collaborate on sketches and 2008 was a big year of that. So the above is an X-files rendition of our Peep and Peep Lite characters. "The Peep is out there Skully."

Zangetsu. This one, I'm kind of proud of in the sheer fact that the only reference material I had was a teeny-tiny image of the character in the background of a panel in one of Becky's mangas. A bit of advice to folks looking to have commissioned sketches done at conventions. If you have a specific character in mind, PLEASE bring reference material. We artists don't have internet plugged directly into our heads nor to we have an infinite library of reference material on things and characters you're passionate about. If WE have to go search out our own reference material for YOUR sketch....We may decide to charge more.

Okay.....*sigh* now after all that I come to The Baroness. Now this one, the customer didn't bring reference for BUT...I am a huge GI JOE fan so I kinda knew what this character looked like anyway. Rare exception...Still bring reference!

Lastly , heres a sketch of 2 of my Baby Ninjas in a fighting stance. I really dig how this one turned out. It's probably the combo of the Sword guy and Bow and Arrow guy that make it for me. I still have a hard time believing I've been drawing the BABY NINJAS for 21 years! I WAS 13 when I first drew these little guys!!

Again...If you find yourself at the Wizardworld Chicago Comicon on August 19-22, look us up at Planet Doom Studios in artist's alley. Buy some books....buy some sketches....just stop by and say "HI"..Whatever....Just come by and see us.

Wait...What? and Some Random Art.

Wait....Did I read that right?

Romans 9:13 (King James Version)

As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.

So does that mean Esau was a Trekkie or something? *scratches head*

Actually...It's part of an upcoming protest for the San Diego Comicon.

"members of the Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, which is led by Fred Phelps, plan to picket Comic-Con in San Diego."

At any rate....the use of that verse is still somewhat baffling.

To all my friends and colleagues in the comic-world that are headed out to Comicon this weekend....I'm Jealous....OH....and have a great time, stay safe, and God bless! Wish Becky and I could be there with you all.

Okay, here's some random art I had floating around that I felt like sharing.

This was a sketch I did for my friend Dave Gruba of Grubbmaster Pieces. It was for his All Star-Wars Sketchbook.

This one was for another friend Joey Hetzel , the artist behind the webcomics Tonja Steele and Coleman Elementary. It's of her characters Darren and Liza as GI JOE characters. She had asked me to make them look like Joes as a tie-in for a story line she was working on....and since I'm a GI JOE fanatic, she came to the right place!

And finally we have a photo of Becky, Grimlock and myself as we we playing around, and posing with Nerf guns and taking photos back in March. If Yuffie was in the picture it would have been a family photo. We did have alot of fun and took some great, silly photos that day.

I'm currently plugging away hard at finishing Great Big Pissed Off Bear #3 so I can have it ready in time for Chicago Comicon. I plan to update again soon with some teasers and junk so stay tuned.

SLACKER!!!

I Know....I know....I've been slacking on my updates lately. I've been super busy trying to finish the strips for my upcoming issue of Great Big Pissed Off Bear #3. I'm hoping to finish toning, and letter ballooning it in the next 2 weeks so I can send it off to be printed. Oh yeah...and I need to color the cover too. Now that Becky is done with her freelance work, maybe she can lend a hand. At any rate, I wanna get this book done and printed for Wizardworld Chicago, August 19-22. So I better get crackin!

All I really have as far as sketches that DON'T pertain to GBPOB #3 is a couple from the creative exercises from the 2 classes of our current summer session so deal with it!

First up is from the first class of the session. it's always a free draw (no instructions written on the board) so ended up drawing massive pig. With extra time I decided to make it a COBRA weapon of mass destruction called the WARPIG. I even drew in the decals that all the GI JOE/Cobra vehicles came with.

For the second class we had the kids draw a random shape and then turn it into something "cool". I ended up with a strange oblong shape to the right side of the page and that eventually became the head of TUMOR DOG. I'm particularly fond of the kid's shirt and the fart cloud.

Well, thats it for now. I'm hoping to get back into the regular swing of sketching for fun (aka: not just for class and projects) sometime in the near future. Of course....I wanna play some video games too....Hmmmmm.

Skool Arts

I haven't been drawing much lately because I've been helping my wife Bequi out by inking her pages. So unfortunately, there's not much new and fun stuff other than a few odds and ends I've done for the Art Academy class I teach. Here are some of my favorites from the last term.

The object of the creative exercise (warm-up) was to draw someone that had something to do with water. So I drew this rather pissed off life guard creature.

This Creative Exercise was a bit more complex than normal. We gave the kids 3 options of action to draw. Someone running, someone sitting and someone flying. I chose sitting as you can see.....And we've all been there before, haven't we.

Like the week prior, we decided to have the kids choose from 3 options again. This time it was from a princess, and alien or a wrestler. I chose a wrestler AND and alien in the ring. I'm still annoyed with the spaceship dome....the shine effect looks forced....but...to be fair...I did it in in the last 20 seconds before we had to call time..

This is my favorite from the whole term. It was on the last class which is always a free-draw for the creative evercise. Here I depicted an evil "Skottie Young" style kid with a Super-Soaker and hid pet PugDragon posing for a picture.

Meet James Crow and Rex!

Inspiration comes in many forms. In 1988 mine came in the form of two dinosaur stuffed animals. Back then I was really into making little audio skits with my dual cassette recorder. I would often compose news reports or comical adventures with various recorded sound bytes recorded from TV or radio integrated here and there. I was inspired in this by local DJ's and their integration of sound clips into their intros and such. Also my love for the Dr. Demento show played a huge hand in it as well. Most of the time these were only funny to me, my cousins and my friend Pat but we all loved making them and listening to each others newest creations.

One summer day I decided to make a parody of James Bond. I needed a lead character fast but didn't really have one fresh in my mind so I began looking around my room. My eye was drawn to two colorful and cute plush dinosaurs sitting on my book shelf. A purple Pterodactyl and a blue T-rex. Why not?! But I needed a name to play off the James Bond Parody. James was a must but I needed the last name. Out of my love of Mystery Science Theater 3000 came CROW from the character CROW T. ROBOT. The sidekick was a desperately easy one since he was a T-rex. Somehow Johnny Rex was a no brainer for me. So with my 2 lead characters figured out I created my first audio skit of JAMES CROW. I even used a TV recorded James Bond theme as the intro. It was a hit with my cousins and especially with my friend Pat. Soon Pat was creating James Crow skits too and we would each spend hours recording them as well as sharing them with each other. With each new episode we would try to raise the bar on funny sound clips and clever plots...although, most of the episodes followed a certain repetitive formula. It didn't seem to matter to us though....we we young and easily entertained.

After years of doing the audio skits it was time to bring the James Crow characters into a new visual medium. Pat and another friend named Eric started drawing their own comic books in school under the FAR-CRY comics monicker. I was encouraged and inspired to do my own so without hesitation I went straight for James Crow. Doing it in comic form was far more liberating than doing the audio skits. Now I was able to see the secret agent characters in action and further expand their universe.

In issue #2 of James Crow I introduced a new character called THE VOID. Though I loved James Crow, eventually he ended up taking a back seat to this new super-hero character. I still did an occasion James Crow book here and there but I mostly focused on developing THE VOID.

One notable villain in the book was the BABY NINJAS. If you've followed me on the convention circuit, you probably know that I've published 3 comic strip style books based of the Baby Ninjas and I still sell copies of those books at shows today. Though they had origins from mock newspapers I drew up years earlier, their inclusion in the James Crow comic book was where these terrible tots really started to develop for me.

It was in the hayday of the IMAGE comics years that comics became dark and brooding and so did our titles at FAR-CRY Comics. Not even James Crow was exempt. Death and tragedy had creeped it's way into the once comical and slap-sticky comic and in a lot of ways, I think it sort of sullied it. The darkest moment was when Johnny Rex ended up dying on a space station in some convoluted crossover I tried to do with JAMES CROW and THE VOID. That was the last time I drew the book.

Poor James Crow and Rex only showed up in the occasional sketchbook or FAR-CRY pinup in the years following the last comic appearance but I could never forget these two. They like all my children are very special to me and I would always come back to visit them.

And so I did visit them again a few weeks ago in the warm-up exercise for the class Becky and I teach. I pretty much kept the original design elements but tweaked their anatomy's just a little to give them more structure and style. It was fun drawing these old friends again and the kids really seemed to enjoy them and the brief back-story that accompanied the drawing. I even brought my old plush dinos in the following week to prove to them where my inspiration came from.

This has got my mind going on maximum warp a bit and I plan on going back for a complete overhaul on these characters again very soon. Maybe make them look more like the actual dinosaurs they represent. I'll keep you all posted on the progress as it developes.

Third Post.....GRAB BAG OF AWESOME!

Yes indeed....another one. I figured since it's been a while since I posted that I had some catching up to do. As you can tell from the title of this one, this is just a bunch of random sketches I had floating around. That Top one is from a warm-up creative Exercise from the class i help teach but I can't, for the life of me, remember the theme that inspired such a beautiful creature.

My buddy Pat Gleason who is the penciller on DC's Green Lantern Corps was over a couple weeks ago and asked me to help him sketch ideas for a new villain in the book. The CORPS is full of all kinds of weird monsters and aliens so I was noodling around with a few creepy alien heads here....Oh yeah...and I sketched Pat and our mutual friend Tim (as they appeared in or just out of High School) there as well.

Speaking of drawing friends...heres Pat once again. I was planning on drawing some of my friends as the captured scientists in the AGENT MONGOOSE and the Hypno-Beam Scheme book I worked on for Lerner Publishing. I didn't end up using Pat in that book but I did happen to use.....

My other buddy Andy.

And finally, here's my character Jane once again. This was for last weeks warm-up which happened to be the last class of the term so it was a free-draw. No theme...just draw whatever you want. I really like how she turned out here. Especially since I really screwed up her eyes in the beginning and threw in the Aviator Shades as a last ditch effort to save the drawing....and it worked! I'm really happy I went with the shades here! I also gave her a shirt that was worn by a character named Renji on a couple episodes of the Japanese anime' BLEACH.