OutlawTerritory003
Originally uploaded by Joshua Hale Fialkov.
Here's some art for an anthology I'm in. Art is by Dub.
Filtering by Category: My Comics
CBR Talks ‘Bout Postcards
CLICK HERE FOR THE WHOLE STORY
While e-mail and text messaging may be the new communication crazes sweeping the world, the idea of the postcard still carries quite a powerful nostalgic power for those familiar with these bite sized messages. Many of us imagine epic loves kept alive during wartimes through these carefully worded messages, and some know postcards as their first indication that their family members might just be vacationing in Florida. No matter what memories first surface when you see a postcard, there's no denying the mystique these little pieces of history have acquired over time. With that in mind, Jason Rodriguez has collected a unique assortment of postcards, added in some acclaimed creators, and assembled a 168-page hardcover anthology entitled "Postcards," set to debut in 2007, as a self-published original graphic novel. Rodriguez took some time out of his busy schedule to discuss "Postcards" with CBR News and answered the first question on the mind of people who have seen the book's gorgeous art: what's "Postcards" all about?
I'm so psyched for Jason, and when you guys see all the crazy shit in this book, your heads might just blow up.
Elk’s Run Lands at Random House Imprint Villard!
Villard Acquires Rights to Fialkov’s and Tuazon’s Elk’s Run
New York, NY – June 5, 2006 – Villard, a division of the Random House Publishing Group, announced today that it will be publishing Elk’s Run by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Noel Tuazon. The graphic novel will collect the complete eight-issue comic book series, and will give readers their first opportunity to finally read the story all the way through to its explosive conclusion.
Elk’s Run has been nominated for an astounding seven Harvey awards (Best Writer, Best Artist, Best Limited Series, Best Letterer, Best Cover Artist, Best New Talent, Best Single Issue). The acclaimed comics series has had an interesting publishing history. Originally self-published by Fialkov’s Hoarse and Buggy, Elk’s Run moved to Speakeasy only to have the fledgling company go bankrupt in late 2005, leaving the story unfinished and its fans anxiously awaiting its exciting conclusion.
In an era filled with threat levels and faceless enemies, the people of Elk's Ridge have created their own slice of heaven--serene. Serene, safe, and completely cut off from the rest of the world. When the evils of the outside world start to invade, the townspeople will do anything that it takes to keep their existence intact... even murder. Forced to decide between a life of isolation and fear, or the unknown outside world, the teenagers of the town must face their parents and their own worst nightmares in a game of cat and mouse that can only end one way.
The story was hailed by Variety as “creepy and fun in a good way” and given a grade of A- by the paper. Entertainment Weekly gave Elk’s Run a solid A and commended the series for its “tactile sense of dread.”
“This has been one the most unexpected adventures in publishing I could possibly imagine. I never dreamed that one day we would end up with such a wonderful company and incredible people like the folks at Villard…” said Fialkov. “Our devoted fans and their undying support have really kept us going.”
“I’ve had my eye on Elk’s Run since last summer,” said acquiring editor Dallas Middaugh. “There’s a reason reviewers and comics professionals have been so excited about it. I’m very, very happy to be able to publish the complete series at last, and to give it the presentation it deserves.”
About the Writer
Harvey Award Nominee for Best New Talent and Best Writer Joshua Hale Fialkov is the creator of the hit indie anthology Western Tales of Terror, as well as the internet cult hit Poorly Drawn Animals. His comic work has appeared in books for Boom Studios, IDW Publishing, and all across the internet. He was raised in Pittsburgh, and currently enjoys a writer’s life in Los Angeles.
About the Artist
Harvey Award Nominee for Best Artist Noel Tuazon was born in the Philippines, but has lived most of his life in Toronto, Ontario. His work has appeared in several anthologies (including Taboo Especial, Cerebus Bi-Weekly, Dennis Eichorn’s Real Stuff, Drawing the Line 1 & 2, Frecklebean Comics, Adventure Classics, Fleshrot 2 & it’s Halloween Special,) plus a handful of mini-series (Arianne by Rafael Nieves, Redchapel by Caleb Monroe, and Johnny Repeat by Jason and Elizabeth James). He most recently illustrated the children's book Sunny Bear's Rainy Day by Caryn A. Tate.
About the Publisher
Villard Books, named after the Stanford White brownstone mansion on Madison Avenue that was the home of Random House for twenty years, was founded in 1983. It publishes a general nonfiction and fiction list that has positioned itself on the leading edge of popular culture. Among the bestselling authors it has published are Jon Krakauer, Eve Ensler, Governor Jesse Ventura and Peter Greenberg, the "Travel Detective." It is also known for its titles in the areas of humor, personal narrative, and new-voice fiction, including the books of Laurie Notaro and Jon Katz. Visit the Villard website at www.villard.com
Elk’s Run Nominated for SEVEN Harvey Awards!
Hey gang, Just wanted to send out a quick congrats/thank you to everybody who's helped and been a part of the Elk's Run team. For those who don't know we were nominated for SEVEN Harvey Awards (Best Writer, Best Artist, Best Limited Series, Best Letterer, Best Cover Artist, Best New Talent, Best Single Issue).
It's a real privliedge and an honor to be nominated, and each and every one of you have been key to keeping the word alive about this book. Your advice, well wishes, kind words, and generosity have made what's been a very strange and bumpy ride one that's filled with reward and pleasure, and for that I'll be forever grateful.
So, without further ado, you can see the complete list here, courtesy of TheBeat..
Thank you all again, we couldn't ask for a better bunch of friends.
Poorly Drawn Animals on YouTube
I've started uploading the Poorly Drawn Animals cartoons over on YouTube. Here's The First One
Me and Keating Talk About Elk’s Run
So, Keating and I talk almost constantly while he colors Elk's Run. It's a very... interesting process to me. Anyways, I just had my first chance to see 95% of the book colored (And that's nearly 200 pages of comics, people) and I got a chance to see just how much of a genius Keating is. So, we talked, I copy and pasted, and here's what's hopefully not a boring ramble about the creative process behind Elk's Run. This contains some spoilers if you haven't read the book at all, so, be warned. SPOILERS FOR ELK'S RUN 1-4 BELOW!
josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: what's nice is that the colors that we've used through out are now just totally opressive. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: like they've come to a boil. Keating: okay Keating: so here's the thing Keating: This was my plan for the coloring of this thing. Right from the start. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: heheh. Keating: The colours have a bunch of purposes. Different lighting situations, etc. Times periods. All with different qualities. Keating: But as it gets going, what happens is that the colours start coming together. Little bits in different 'sets'. As the more and more things start happening to the town/citizens, the color spreads to them. But not the family. So, if you look at the townsfolk in the 7th issue. They're colored as a group. They've become a single entity. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: you've officially put more thought into the book than I have. Keating: And during the SPOILER DELETED, the family, especially john jr and sr become totally seperated from the background. Everything else just bcomes 'the town' Keating: So, the other characters take on more of the background color. So everything is focused on the family. Because, in the end, it's really only about them. Keating: And that's it :) haha josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: Right. Keating: And the last thing is that the colors the characters wear tie into their place in the story. Keating: So, john and john start out both wearing blue. His mother has a slightly greenish blue. Keating: As john becomes seperated from his family, he loses he jacket and takes on a grey shirt, since he doesn't belong anywhere. Keating: In the end, only the father is wearing the blue. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: yep, 10x as much thought as I have. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: the jacket thing was intentional, actually. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: it's my little Ibsen nod. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: Ibsen was obsessed with when people took off and put on clothes. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: it was a symbol of vulnerability. Keating: It's awesome. I was really happy as I read it, since I saw so much opportunity as the colorist to sort of back up what was happening in the narrative. Keating: rather than just color things as the color they are. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: i love page 10 josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: makes it that much sadder. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: which is the thing. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: it's not just sad for Jr. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: it's sad for Sr. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: He's a man out of time. Keating: Yeah. Keating: And it plays against the 'drop out' coloring that we do. Which is normally when the character seperates himself from his surroundings. But this is the town's people seperating themselves from him. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: and ultimately from the town. Keating: Yup. Keating: It's good stuff ;) josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: I've been in creative meetings all day, and have been sort of bickering about plot and semantics and things like that. It's nice to get to talk about the actual fucking craft of the book. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: and, the thing about this book, and why it works so great as a comic is that it's more than the sum total of it's parts. I think there's magic between the three of us. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: and as we try and disect the plot and break it down into set pieces and elements, you start to realize that what makes it fly is the subtlety and the pacing. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: Honestly, that's Noel's strong point. He controls the pacing so well. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: Despite giving you 10,000,000 extra panels to color. Keating: The pacing and he reigns in the drama, I think. Some of the scenes could be drawn very heroic and romantic. But instead he mostly draws at an even sort of level. Which, when the town starts to burn, really works. It's like a slow build. Which adds to the tension, because we expect 'big' moments but they never quite get there. Until the last pages of issue 7 josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: and you sort of realize how Jr. is really rising above the whole thing. because they have this lackluster miserablely mundane existance, and he finally steps up and does something remarkable. Keating: yeah Keating: And this is coming from a guy who absolutely hates colouring this book :) haha
Warren Ellis Says…
From Today's Bad Signal
And I've read CASANOVA #1 by Matt Fraction & Gabriel Ba, which is a total mindfuck, Moorcock via Steranko, Nino and OUR MAN FLINT. It, Gillen & McKelvie's PHONOGRAM and probably Fialkov and Chamberlain's PUNKS are looking like the singles of the year so far.
Elk’s Run 7
Originally uploaded by Joshua Hale Fialkov.
Look what I got in my mail box today. Only the colors on 8 remain before the book is done. I got tons of exciting stuff going on with the book... none of which I can talk about. Soon though. Soon.
Scott Keating on Newsarama
Elk's Run Colorist and World's End Artist Gets Interviewed on Newsarama Including never before seen World's End art!
Get getting!
As the humming bird churns
I've been clocking in full time hours at the day job and fuller time hours at the writing desk, so I've been a bit absent, save for the quick posts here and there. So, here's your mega-crazy-fantastic-crazy-monkey-update.
The "WHERE THE FUCK IS ELK'S RUN?" Fan E-Mails continue, and, I, unfortunately, still can't talk about it. We're getting everything in order now, and the announcement, as I've said repeatedly, is pending. Keep coming here, and you'll be the first to know.
World's End is on a temporary hold, as Keating finishes up the coloring chores on Elk's Run 7 and 8 (I should have some art to show off in the next few days... maybe even something special for FCBD.)
Punks has many wheels in motion, including some pretty groovy merchandise manufacturer types expressing interest. Kody and I are on the phone plotting and scheming literally every day, so, there ya go.
The script for what is shaping up to be the next Fialkov/Tuazon book is getting underway still, and I'm just about through with my preliminary research, so I'm sure I'll be talking about it more and more in the coming weeks.
I'm wrapping up a screenplay I've been working on for far too long already in the next week or so, that might just end up in comic book form sometime in the near future. That's what these were for.
The Miller is being reworked a bit before I finish it up. I've read something like 3 or 4 dozen pulps since I started it, and came to terms with some realities of structure etc. that need to be worked in before I can go any further.
Both Red Mob and The 8th (nee Ritual Homicide nee Vodou) are on hold. Datsun Tran, artist on Red Mob, had to drop out because he just didn't have the time, and Chris Burnham, artist on the 8th had to drop out because the son of a bitch has some REALLY cool projects coming out. The 8th, you'll remember was my mini-series about a super-natural serial killer in New Orleans that causes the city to get swallowed up by a hurricane that causes the levees to break, and the government to abandon the city. We'd actually come up with a way to salvage the book and it's art, and take advantage of Chris and my mutual childhood years in Pittsburgh, but alas, the man is destined for bigger things. For now. Working on a new thing with Screenwriter Gary that's been percolating for a while, and pays tribute to our mutual adoration for Coast to Coast AM.
I've got stories in about four upcoming anthologies, two westerns, one horror comedy, and one anti-romance drama.
And that's it. Just makin' my way, the only way I know how
Most Ominous Spam I’ve Ever Received
How's it going,You still seeking for a place to get ur meds. LINK DELETED the place then for sure.
those who support the existence of the entity called fate believe that human progress is pre- my ill-fated luck I fought and won against my own father whom I killed. Worse, fate made me ma
Eric
I received that while doing the final proof on the lettering script for Elk's Run #8. The tone was... remarkably appropriate.
Tony Fleecs Draws Pancakes For Jimmy
Tony Fleecs Draws Pancakes For Jimmy
Originally uploaded by Joshua Hale Fialkov.
Here's a page from a little 4 pager I did with Tony Fleecs of In My Lifetime fame. I'm honored to work with the guy, he's as good as they come. No sure when the actual book this is in comes out (I think around San Diego) but I'll let y'all know.
-- Sent Via E-Mail
MIA
I've been MIA because this weeks been apeshit insane. I did a quick update over at Creator Direct about what all I'm working on currently, and I didn't add that I'm also powering through hours of day job, and contracty type stuff during most of the days. Oh, and the very specific bus line that Dina takes to work and school is on strike, so I get to spend a couple hours a day racing around town trying to get from here to there in order to get where I need to be and get her where she needs to be. And to top it all off, I had to suffer through American Idol positively butchering Queen. They deserve to be punished severely for their sins.
Sean Maher has also seen Punks…
And he said a little something... like this:
The thing is apeballs. I've never read a comic quite this nuts; Josh is writing a series of characters that read like brain spasms, a series that seems to be aiming more to send electricity up the spine than anything else.
Read the rest, and of course the stellar blog of Mr. Comics himself, here.
Creator Direct
I forgot to mention this (or mentioned it and forgot, one of the two). Anyways, Kody Chamberlain (of ye olde Punks fame) started Creator Direct, a blog featuring a bunch of us young creator types. It's lots of fun and info, though still in its embryonic stages, go and check it out.
Noel Draws Punks
Noel Draws Punks
Fossen’s seen Punks…
Friend and Blogger Mark Fossen had this, and more to say about the first 12 pages of Punks which we casually sent his way as part of our 'feedback phase.'
"Punks is the kind of thing you find when you wake up passed out on a friends couch with a splitting hangover. It's crumpled under your head, and as you come to consciousness, you read Punks and say : 'Dude. What the FUCK is this?? Where are the rest?' .... And then you spend the rest of the day calling your buddy 'Noisy McNoise-Noisenstein', and quoting lines from the book."
So, go read, get excited.
Or else.
Ego, Super Ego, Id, and Counter Ego
or, How I Over-Analyze Punks, a comic about four guys setting each other on fire and punching each other in the nuts.
I had a long intellectual conversation with my manager about Punks today. He has a great knack for finding a greater depth to what I do then I ever really touch on. He’s also a real ball breaker in negotiations, but that’s beside the point.
So, one of the things he gave me to chew over was the idea of Ego, Super Ego, and Id. This pretty successfully covers three of the four main characters of the book, (and for that matter, just about every sitcom character structure there’s ever been.) But, we have one piece that doesn’t fit.
Ego, is that rational middle ground, trying to balance pleasure with survival, rationality with living a satisfied life. In Punks, that’s Abe. He’s the emotional center of the book, his whole thing is chewing over the right and wrong, the real and unreal, and while not necessarily always deciding properly, his decisions come from a place that is at the very least balanced. For those unfamiliar, using Seinfeld, he's the Jerry.
Super Ego is Dog, the self-doubting, self-hating, angry young man. He serves as that voice in the back of your head saying “You’re not good enough, and everybody’s on to you.” Again, to Seinfeld, he's the George.
Id is Skull. Skull is pure sensation. The pleasure in violence, the lack of interest in anyone other himself, and a temper that’s only matched by his need to feel in a very guttural sense. He is what he appears, and does what you’d expect (although, the uses he finds for duct tape are pretty remarkable, if I do say so myself.) So, now, and maybe this is a stretch, in Seinfeldian, he's the Elaine.
So, that’s all your Freudian labels applied, and yet we’re left with Fist (or, our Kramer). He’s the guy in the Mentos ads. He’s not particularly interested in where he’s going or what’s happening around him, and because of that, he tends to always come out, if not on top, at least better off than the rest. So, for the sake of this conversation, I’m looking at him as the Counter Ego. He goes against both Super Ego and Id, neither filled with rage nor self-doubt, and, further, has virtually no interest in figuring out which option is best. He simply is. And that’s why he succeeds.
Punks, as a book, is about a world that shits on you. We live in a time where we’re constantly attacked by world events, from the crush of gas prices to a whole generation sent off to a war with a purpose, at the very least, that’s unclear. In the comic, this comes across as a positively surreal wash of constant insanity that never quite manages to get the boys out of their self-obsessed funk. So, in theory, all the comedy comes from how these four parts of the mind deal with it.
And lots of groin punching.
Fucking Hell
My car has been randomly dying in the midst of my scuttling around town, so, with the week off from my day job I decided to get it fixed. I figured "A couple hours, couple hundred bucks, and it'll be right as rain." That was at 10:30 this morning. Took them 3 hours to look at the fucking thing, and then they handed me a quote for 1400 bucks to made the car 'road worthy.' My favorite note was "Well, you don't have to replace the axle, but, you hit a big enough pot hole and it's 'Goodbye Tires!'"
So, to make the most of this zombifying dead time, I've been trying to work through the second script for Punks. The highlight thus far being the coining of a new non-swear swear, "HOLY ANAL BEADS UP A MONKEY'S BUM!" It's a particularly angry script, I suppose mostly due to sitting in a cramped hard metal chair at Pep Boys for over 4 hours without internet to distract and pacify me.
Hopefully, I'll be done in 3 or 4 hours, and will return to a slightly less homicidal state of mind.
Here's a page of Punks #1 that Kody's showing off. To make this post something other than piss and vinegar with a heaping helping of bile.
