From the Department of Amazing Stories:
Carve out 30 minutes of your weekend to read this. Trust me. I haven't read an article as fascinating as this one in a LONG time.
This story has it all, poison with crushed diamonds...a royal family forced to live in a train station...a crumbling old mansion in the middle of the jungle inhabited by a reclusive prince. It's a Hindu Grimm's fairy tale. And the writer unfolds everything expertly.
From the Fan Art Acquisitions Office:
A couple Sundays ago it was my birthday and I asked my kids for fan art drawings of my characters. They delivered, but what was strange was an unusual amount of other fan arts that popped up this week as well. Thought I'd share them all with you here.
Parker Kids: Calvin drew Little bot and Sparrow. Penny drew Skull Chaser and his new girlfriend.
Tate drew CC and Benson in a cool ballooncar:
And Miles drew a Skull Chaser Star Wars mashup:
My friend Aaron Painter surprised me with a Missile Mouse drawing!
Ilya Prosvirov and Kiel Figgins worked together to make an amazing Skull Chaser model and rig: LINK
Milo Galileo made a model, rig, and animation from a character I posted on Instagram: LINK
And Kyle Beaudette hand sculpted a beautifully wonky Skull Chaser maquette: LINK
I absolutely love getting fanart of my characters. It’s probably the highlight of my career, knowing that something I’ve made has impacted someone enough to spend their free time on making something with it.
-Jake
From the Department of Amazing Stories:
This has always been a fantasy of mine; to live on a deserted island for a couple months to a year. Eating cocnuts and spear fishing. I think I watched too many episodes of Gilligan's Island growing up.
But it really happened to a group of boys in who were stranded on an island in the pacific for over a year. And no, they didn't kill each other and worship a pig head.
Read this short article about it here: LINK
From the desk of Jake Parker:
In a simpler age, long before the social media giants had risen from the depths of the ocean to eat away the online landscape and rule it with their algorithmic iron fist, there was a peaceful archipelago of thriving websites. People could hop from island to island at a leisurely pace and consume content at their discretion. It wasn't gamified, and it didn't exploit the underlying motives of human nature.
One of these islands was Flickr. A simple platform to share photos and creations. I used to spend a lot of time there over a decade ago. I recently found myself there again this week and rediscovered all the images I favorited. It's a nice collection of everything rom 70's futuristic architecture to amazing LEGO creations. There's lots of old toys and pulp covers.
This is the stuff that influenced my work 10 years ago, and I feel bad I had forgotten about it, drifted away from it, and got lost in the sea of Pinterest and Instagram. The algorithms end up working in a way that shows you stuff it knows you'll like. Which means you rarely get surprised anymore, and aren't exposed to new things as much.
Surfing Flickr may be less efficient, but it has what I call the "library effect" on you. When you go to a library to check out a specific book you have to pass through all the sections of the library that might not be what you're currently interested in. However, by walking through you get exposed to books that catch your attention, and make you think about something tangental or adjacent, or even the opposite of what you're interested in. You end up leaving the library with a stack of books that you had never planned on cracking open when you walked in.
When I compare my Pinterest/instagram (P-I) feed to my Flickr feed the P-I feed is much more targeted and narrow. The flickr feed; much more broad and varied. The effect these two have on me is after surfing P-I everything feels derivative, and I feel as a creator that I don't have much more to offer. After surfing the randomness of Flickr I feel inspired because so many different things are bumping into each other making me connect dots that I never thought to put together before.
Anyway, that's my case for surfing blogs and flickr, and pining for the old internet. Here's a random page from my Flickr faves: LINK
-Jake
In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics there’s a section in chapter 4 on Time Frames about the “polyptych” in comics. I’ll let him do the explaining:
He then draws a nice example of how a single image works to tell a story and move us through time and space regardless of gutters and panels:
I wish comics artists (myself included) did a little more of this. It's something you can't do in film or prose. We artists have a ton of cool story telling tools unique to the art form of comics that we're neglecting in favor of animation style storyboarding techniques.
With that, here’s several examples of the polyptych in comics. From this twitter thread.
By @NickDerington, @Dragonmnky and @BRIANMBENDIS
Crazy Quilt: Scraps and Panels on the Way to Gasoline Alley LINK
Gasoline Alley by Frank King LINK
By Gianni de Luca
By Gianni de Luca
By Gianni de Luca
Lewis Trondheim's Les trois chemins
La Jeunesse de Mickey by Tebo LINK
From Mr. Invincible: LINK
Moon Knight
From These Savage Shores
Saving these here so I don’t forget about them. Really want to try this out in my next comic.
-Jake
Someone posted this album art for an collection of John Williams music and I don't think the artist had ever actually seen a Star Wars film.
This is how you would draw Star Wars if all you've ever seen was Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comics and someone was describing Empire Strikes Back to you. And I think it is AMAZING.
I mean, look at that interpretation of Darth Vader!
I'm going to track down this artist and see if did some Return of the Jedi art. Am dying to see how he would've done Jabba!
I shared this with my newsletter, and this is was I though until a guy named Chris emailed me back to say that this was all a total marketing ploy. All of the music choices mentioned are covers and unlicensed. He went on to tell me that he thinks they drew a cover that suggested as much Star Wars as they could without having to actually pay licensing or worry about copyright infringement. In his words, “It’s like hack illustration work at it’s best.” Thanks for the info Chris!
Regardless of it’s origins, this might be a fun exercise for illustrators: Redesign a prominent IP so that people can tell what it’s from, without pinpointing any one thing that says you copied it. What this would teach you is what design elements are essential to recognizing that IP and what is unnecessary. Which will come in useful when you sit down to design your own IP.
So where is the threshold? What makes something uniquely IT? I want to see how someone would do this with Marvel, Harry Potter, Toy Story, or Star Trek.
-Jake
