Meathaus SOS Comics

I love comics, all kinds of comics. I don't think I'm that good at making them, but I want to get better at it. It's tough drawing characters and places over and over again. In most of my illustrations, I am very detail-oriented. But with comics, I believe you need to let go of some of that for reasons of consistency, economy, page flow, and just being able to finish a story in a decent amount of time. When drawing comics, I force myself to do a lot more brush work, so I don't get bogged down in the details with small pen lines.

I love the language of comics, how the reader engages their imagination to fill in the gaps of what happens between the panels. It's a unique art form in that way. You drive your reader - panel to panel, page to page.

The piece below is a six page story I did in 2007 for a comics collective I belong to called Meathaus. Meathaus is an amazing brotherhood/sisterhood of indy cartoonists and comics makers. I've gotten a lot of my freelance work just from being affiliated with this group. It has shown me that there is safety in numbers. Publishing as a group gives you so many advantages. You have a collective of people to give you constructive criticism. You can pool your financial resources for printing costs. You can work on smaller projects that don't make you feel like you have a boulder on your back. I'me very thankful for the "Haus".

I had the idea for this strip for years. It's loosely based on an old story I heard from one of my relatives. I waited until Meathaus published our first full color book, Meathaus 9, S.O.S. It was our second anthology published by another company. This go-round, the folks at NERDCORE published our book. So we didn't have to put up any of the printing costs at all.