New bag drawings!

I'm sending out bags with nothing in them to show my support to people who helped me keep my forum, the JNN afloat.

People seem to dig them, so why not? I like to draw on 'em, and I also adore the way the bags hold my turkey & cheese on marble rye, too. That doesn't hurt.

Cop POWERS #15!

My man Mike Oeming drew me in his new issue for a couple pages. Gotta love that guy.

Go show him love.

Sketches for Bruno!

. . And everybody else - but here's stuff from my falling-apart sketchbook...

AND WHY YOU WEAR THOSE GLASSES?

SO I CAN SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEee!

New specs, man. Finally.

The weather (And the young toughs) outside be frightful

Just a reason to post this image, done for the Webcomics Examiner last winter. As I clean out my files, I'll post stuff here.

HAPPY THANKS GIVING YA'LL

Them devillllled eggs had better have some Pap uh Reek uh up on them, or they won't get et.

Turkeys, Tutorials and thoughts on Boogaloo

Happy Holidays.

So todays post, I thought would be good about giving thanks, and all that. I'm real thankful for a lotta stuff, like my good friends - civillian and comic book pals alike.

Another thing I'm thankful for, was the opportunity to work on DETECTIVE BOOGALOO over at superstar Kevin Smith's moviepoopshoot.com site. I have nothing but great things to say about the crew there, and I'm still friends with them. Editor Chris Ryall (The same Chris Ryall who is now head honcho at IDW) gave me free reign to do whatver I wanted and never had a bad word to say about me or my stuff. He's a saint. Now go buy IDW comics!

Going with that train of thought, I was cleaning out my files and found a row of tutorial files that I probably did for my old group, the Indy Cred All Stars. This was for the second strip from the Detective Boogaloo run on poopshoot, and back when I was putting a WHOLE lot of time into each strip. Not that I didn't put the time in - but I was still the virgin, and wanted to make sure I represented every week. I believe these used to take me around 10 hours to do. What killed was

a) I still didn't know the characters well, so I was still trying to find the right voices and look for them

b) I was still teaching myself how to color digitally

c) 'stuff just takes time to do'.

Also, that I went through a couple of stages each strip. Basically when you do your own stuff with no other hands in your cooking pot, you're essentially drawing the same thing 3-4 times. From roughs, to tighter roughs, to layouts, to penciling, to inking, to coloring, to lettering, there's a LOT of steps in there. Just pray that the computer demons don't decide to freeze your system at 3:00am. I LOVE when that would happen. SAVE EARLY SAVE OFTEN!

Anyway, what I have brought to the class today, is a little dialogue on how I approached the strips at the time. Look for new Boogaloo stuff at the begining of the year, as I'm planning on restarting the property.

Figure A here, is what my general roughs 'version one's' turn out to look like. I have an idea of where I wanted the strip to go, so I'd set out to lay out the page/s and block in some notes I had to myself, so I wouldn't forget them later when I was inking. As you can see I had 2 pages here, which got turned into 1 page. I forget why now - probably because of time constraints. A lot of things get shaved down by not having enough time or energy to do something else. If you can look closely at that rough up top, I have a couple of gags on Ice Tre's 40 bottle, - like calling it 'Assed Out 800', a play off of Old English 800 - more effectionately known in the outer provinces as "Old Gold", "8-Ball" or "OH EE". Anyway, I cut it out because I just didn't think it was necessary. I cut out a lot of stuff, like I was gonna have Ice Tre' rapping in the strip, so I wrote out a couple of bars for him to spit in the recording booth, but again, Cut. There's a lot of cutting that comes into my strips when I did them every week - I had more ideas in my head than room to fit them all.

OH! Also in the balding reporters hand, he has a copy of 'The Sauce' - my riff on THE SOURCE magazine. In Bling City, Ice Tre is the Alpha Rapper, so he's always on covers to the big magazines.

Ice Tre' got defined in this strip, where I wanted him to be an amalgalm of every 'pretty thug' type that was in Hip Hop at the time. Tho he looks most like Nelly, he's not supposed to be Nelly - but he can be if you want him too. He's Fiddy, he's everybody. An ebodiment of where my head was at about the music at the time. Every rapper had some sort of gimmick, so instead of the band-aid like Nelly had, I gave him football eyeblack under his eyes, and ice cubes instead of diamonds on his ears. Also his gold medallion is a gold ice tray, with real ice cubes in it. Now in hindsight, I never showed him using it - maybe when I bring the strip back, we'll see him make himself a drink and crack ice in the glass from it. Now that's pretty funny.

I remember a while back reading some dood on a message board who tried to snap on me about Tre' and how it had been 'done before'. People take things so literally - I've always tried to avoid the obvious joke and go a little deeper. Sometimes I succeed - sometimes I don't, but Tre', cheesy name in all, I really dig. His name is SUPPOSED to be bad. DUH.

After I did the rough stage, what I normally did was go over the stuff I was gonna keep in a felt tip marker of some sort (I'm known for being a 'whatever's in front of me' type of inker - I don't care, if it makes a mark I'll use it) and tighten up the rough. After that, on 11x17 Strathmore Bristol, later on smaller stuff, I'd lightbox the tighter roughs in blue col-erase pencil, and then ink it. I think for this strip I used all microns, and maybe some other stuff for the thick outlines. I'm not a huge Micron mark - I use brush nowadays just as easily as a techpen - it really depends on what kinda line I'm going for. Then I ruled out the panels.

Another little tip - I HATE ruling stuff out. I'd rather just free-form it, because when I do use ruled lines, it seems like I have to now follow that ideal through the rest of the process. There were a lot of times where i'd rule out my panels, but not use a straight edge to ink it - just to keep it loose.

I also pulled out the old zipatone and laid in that pattern behind Tre's head just to break up the flow of the layout. I love mixing the oldschool with the new. Zipatone is almost impossible to find besides that manga stuff - but to me, the original zip and Chartpak is where it's at.


After the inking is done, I'd go into Photoshop (6 I think I had at the time) and drop all the colors in . When I felt up to it, I did my 'Disney Style' meaning I'd do color holds on the outlines of the characters. Later on - I'd stop doing this because it'd take me HOURS to finish a strip at the color stage. I'm no coloring genius, and I traditionally don't color like everybody else - like I don't do 'Flats' and all that stuff - I just go in there and attack the page until it's colored with the palette that comes with Photoshop - no tweaks or brushes. I still work like that.

As you can see at this stage, I'm just laying in the color - no words yet.The FINAL stage is doing the lettering, which I did as well in Photoshop. I know it's best to do the stuff in Illustrator, but doing a weekly strip for me was more about getting it done than how you did it. Photoshop is faster in this case. Now if this was for print and I was doing a book, then yeah I'd do the lettering in Illo, but this is just getting zapped to 72 DPI and it works good enough. BOOM.

And there it is - the quick and dirty Boogaloo strip. Hope you enjoyed the little look into the way I work(ed). I'm looking forward to starting up Boogaloo again, because I miss it - and somebody's gotta put a foot up hip-hop's ass.

Might as well be me.

Glasses, Boondox and FABRICARI

Exhibit A - Jamar's busted-ass specs. Snaps by Mike Manley.

So, let's just jump back into things.

First things first - I can't really see right now. I called my eye doctor, the best (only?) I've had, to make an appointment. You see, I've had the same pair of eyeglasses for damn ear 5 years, and I finally broke them. With things that expensive and fragile, I usually break them in under a month's time, as I'm known for being 'expensive'. I like and want nice things, then summarily break them just as fast as I get them. Nice clothes? Ruined. New phone? OOPS! I dropped it into the toilet. (Well, that never happened, but you see where I'm going with that).

Anyway, her secretary, who is also very nice, asked me if I wanted to come in 'right now' and with no good excuse not to, I rolled in the eye spot at 4:00, and in quick order was blinded by eyedrops that rob you of your sight. My pupils are the size of manhole covers, and when going into the supermarket after dinner, I hissed at the lights like a cornered vampire at dawn.

So yeah, my eyes hurt. I'm all squared away now, and now join the NEW GLASSES LEAGUE, like my good personal friends Mike Manley and Mike Wieringo. Well, not yet - I haven't gotten new ones yet, but I'm closer than before. LATER, CRAZY-GLUED NERDFRAMES!

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CHECK THIS OUT!

So yo, my man Steve 'Fabricari' Harrison and I go way back. Actually, It's weird when you think about it - but I've been in the 'industry' for close to 10 years, and I have a lot of great, old friends. Fabs is one of them. He was one of the earliest guys I met in the game doing comics, and his selftitled FABRICARI comics were off the hook, and he's still on his grind.

He just launched a little project where he makes movies of him drawing pages, and it's really cool. Also cool is that in this one, he's drawing to my man Cat Garzas' band. Go show him love.

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ALSO, About the BOONDOCKS? Remember what Mr. Horse from Ren & Stimpy said?

"Hmmmmm... Hmmmmmmmmm.... NO SIR, DIDN'T LIKE IT."

I mean, it's interesting, but it's not hitting me yet. I'll keep watching it, but it's unpleasently not what I expected. No hate involved.

ONWARD.

Back to Attack

Back to work. More Blog this week.

Paper Bag Halloween Dump

Happy Halloween (If you're into that). I gots more of these to show.

Prismas on Paper Bags. You'll see more from me in this medium.

The night the Devil came to Georgia

YOU DA DEVIL!

Now for something entirely different... (Invisible Man)

One of Seven. Gotta Catch em all!

Come Stalk me in Person.

I will be out and about in lovely Middletown, Delaware on Friday 10/21 at BEAV'S COMICS, the new shop run by my good pal, Rob Beaver, from 6-9pm for his annual ART EXPO! I don't know what's gonna go down, but I'm bringing art to sell, since it's, yunno... an art expo.

http://beavs-comics.com
124 West Main Street
Middletown, DE 19709
1-302-449-5581

6-9 pm COME HOLLA.

EYE! FEEL! GOOD! . . .

ABOUT CANDY!

Come on you people - if you don't know that's an old L.L. joint, turn in your hip-hop hallpass.

Man, does THIS bring back memories. I had almost this whole deal, 'cept the blonde eyebrow.
Some lady on the train, who looked like she was having the worst day of her life every day of her life.

Cartoon Candy 2: Electric... Ah, You Know.

Here's some more lil' pages from the past couple of days. I'm really enjoying this.

Cartoonist Candy - First Sketch

10/12/05. Tiny little doods. My brushpen scarred up the marker hits. What can you do.

She Watches Channel Zero

Paying for cable is an expense that I lived without for several years, and didn't miss, until I moved a few years ago, and during a point of duress, decided why not treat ourselves, and hunkered down and got Us Some Cable TeeVee.

It was awesome for the first month or so, then I stopped caring. I care more about the cable internet connection that I get a barely noticible discount on, but for all intents and purposes, I don't watch TV anymore. Let me rephrase that - I'm not a TV guy. I used to be, when I was younger. I'm sure most people in their 30's-40's grew up in front of the TV when there were only 3 channels and a smattering of UHF. That's when the world was a little closer, in an odd way - because if say, The Motown 20th Anniversary Special came on CBS, EVERYBODY was watching Michael Jackson moonwalk across the stage and make the world lose their freaking minds. Now, there's 500 channels of nothing on, and a social disconnect that TV didn't have before now. TV WAS what brought America together.

Before I go onto a rant about what I think about the world and how everybody thinks they deserve to be famous, let me get to the point of the post - I pay too much for cable, and I don't even watch the damned thing.

That's pretty much it. I have a TV in my studio, but I'm not hard-wired for watching/creating - it destroys my mindflow. I'm a music, background noise person. If I put a movie on in the studio, I'm just gonna watch the movie. I can't do those two things together, but music is where it's at for me. So here's my conundrum. I feel since I pay so much for this crap, I force myself to watch cable television. I come in to the workspace, turn on AMC and watch Karate Kid and Young Guns for the 900th time, just so I feel like I'm getting something from this necessary purchase to keep my household happy. I think if I get a DVR box and tape stuff I'd actually watch but not hunt for, I'd be happier. Like maybe Battlestar Galactica 2.0, Adult Swim, RAW, etc. Right now, I think the guys who set up Philadelphias schedule tree were on crack. Let's see - 14 HBO stations? Let's put them ALL OVER THE FREAKING MAP, not right behind each other so that you can find them. Cheese and Crackers, dood... but then again... when would I sit down and watch all the taped stuff? Man.

Anyway, I just wanted to share. Continue on.

The Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Minds of Cartoonists

If I didn't hold it on, it'd have fallen off by now. Snaps by Mike Manley.

As I start trying to get this little part of my mind-empire back up to snuff, I try to figure out what I'd like to put on here, what I want to share with the world. One of the things I think is under-represented on the internets with cartoonists, is how they tick and what goes through the head of someone whos' mind is constantly buzzing, fluttering and spinning. My mind is definately like that, and my cartoonist friends are usually the front line of my whirling dervish act.

As my life takes another interesting change, I'm here working on getting back into creating every day. Lately I've been so backed up, it's hard to unblock the dam and get it flowing, so doodling, sketching and warm-ups is really important. I used to be a 'one and done' type of cartoonist, but stopping to get the art juice flowing wasn't something I really had time to do, and I think my art suffered for it.

I've done my best work when I'm 'in the zone' and it's shown when I go to visit my good pal Mike Manley, world-famous cartoonist, and we destroy forests of trees sketching the night away. Being in that enviornment gets the most out of me - I think I'd thrive in a studio enviornment. Maybe one day!

Cartoonist candy: Little blank sketch journals

Last weekend, I procured a little group of mini sketch journals, blank on the inside with a nice tooth ('tooth' is the grain and feel of paper. If you ever hang out with artists and see them feel up a sketchpad in the store, that's what we're checking for. Kinda like when people fondle honeydews in the market - same thing), and I can't wait to stain them up. I'm thinking about maybe doing a color sketch a day in them and posting them here. We'll see what happens. Maybe I'll start today. . .

There's a million things trapped in our heads, and you try to get them out before they drive you insane. These little doods will help. Come back and see what happens.

Jamar Nicholas, Mild-Mannered Editorial Cartoonist

Pennsylvania Gov. Rendell pacifying SEPTA - PA's local transit amidst money woes (Again)

As most of you do not know - I am the current editorial cartoonist for the Philadelphia Tribune - the nations oldest Black Newspaper. I've been doing it for almost 2 1/2 years now, 2 strips a week off and on.

It's been more off than on lately, as I don't get much input from the paper on my stuff, good-bad or indifferent, and in some cases makes it hard for me to gauge where a piece needs to go, or to make a story link up with the focus of the OP/ED page. I sometimes get the paper to find my cartoon has no relationship to what the paper is speaking out against that day, and it frustrates me. I am really the type that needs the constant back/forth with clients to let me know that things are still moving forward. I LIKE input! How forward of me.

It's odd how I fell into doing this - it basically began with me looking for a new freelance gig, and I walked into the paper offices and asked if they needed a cartoonist. Comes to find out they did! I did some samples, and next thing you know, I'm rolling thick, with 24's on my car, and iced-out air fresheners on the rear-view. Heh.

But for real, I just kinda started doing editorial strips. I never thought of this as something I'd ever do - but I always followed the big editorial cartoonists, my good friend Signe Wilkinson, Jim Borgman, the late Jeff McNelly, Mike Peters, Pat Oliphant, Horsey - yunno, the good ones. Even new cats like my pal Keef Knight, Lalo Alcaraz - they made it look easy. I still struggle at it, and it's once in a blue moon that I strike on a jewel of an idea, and it makes me feel like it's all worth it.

baby steps

Jacked from my man Mike Manley's blog. Photo by him.

Just getting back into the blogging mix after my man Mike Manley dropped such a great post on the SPX/EXPO we just went to last weekend. Plus I like this new brownish layout. It makes me feel fuzzy inside.

Getting Back on the Bus

trying out new white pens on a brown envelope. Pretty snappy. Finding a white pen that leaves a good mark is as hard as finding a parking space in Manhattan.

You may not know this about me . . .

But Bill Murray is close to the top of my famous people I most admire list.

It's been a long time, Sorry I left you. . .

Just testing out the place again. I've lost and recaptured my website, causing my blog to upend, along with a lot of stuff in my career. But let's see where this adventure takes us this time. I have a million places on line to post my thoughts, and I really should get rid of one of them, but I may just crosspost on all of them until I figure out a better idea.