ABC Challenge #21: "Big Ugly"

Here's our assignment for this month's Art by Committee:

...followed by my entry!

Eagle Scout Court of Honor

This is from today's Morning Times, the paper in Sayre, PA. I can remember the first night I walked Dan to Tiger Cubs. Going to scouts quickly became his favorite thing to do, and remained so for years. He liked to try to get every badge and pin he could as he moved up through the ranks of Wolf, Bear and Webelos.

It meant a lot to him when he "crossed over" to Boy Scouts, and he especially enjoyed doing a lot more camping -- including those below zero temperature "Polar Bear Campouts". Scouting is a great program, and helps boys become well-rounded young men with merit badges in academic areas, survival skills, and civics. I really believe in the values they promote, and I'm especially proud of my son for going all the way and achieving the highest rank.

In the photo he is taking the Scout Oath one more time before receiving his Eagle.

On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.

Crash! Boom! Bang!

I made this comic a couple years ago. It was for an anthology that never saw print. The idea was that every artist would draw their interpretation of the scene below:

"You are in a dark room when you hear the following series of sounds: chrrt, vreep, plink, skssst, blurgle, ving, frungt, paf, spang, wfft, tchug, tchug, reeeee, ka-tong, wham, smurchle boof, tsss, ting."

No additional sounds or words were allowed. Here's what I came up with.

Wednesday Comics are here!

Today was the day the first Wednesday Comics came out. I sat down to read them and Nathan immediately crawled into my lap to be read to. One of my favorite childhood memories is Mom or Dad reading the Sunday Funnies, and this new weekly comic from DC provides the same kind of weekly serial reading experience. The difference is that they are all adventure stories about Superman, Batman and many other superheroes, including some of the lesser known characters like Kamandi, Metamorpho, and the Metal Men.

It looks like they have some of the very best writers and artists working on this. Some of the art looks very retro -- which makes me happy because I say, "There's no school like the old school."
Wednesday Comics can be found at your nearest comic shop.

ABC Challenge #20: Black Dots

The Art by Committee challenge is a sketch game I play each month. It's sponsored by the Gurney Journey, and I just figured out that this is my 20th challenge. My responses to these challenges have generated 40 pages of comics.

As an experiment, what I've been doing, is trying to make as many of the prompts as I can go into the same story. By jumping around a lot, I can make a lot of them fit. As it turns out, the two pages I made for this month's challenge flows nicely into the very first one I did! Because it makes a nice punchline, I'm reprinting it at the bottom of this post.

Eventually, they'll all appear in an issue of Eclectic Comics.

Anyway, this month's challenge was to interpret this random, out of context line from a science fiction novel:

“But when the dots did not vanish even after he scrubbed his fists across his eyes three times, he shouted hoarsely…”

Here we go!

100 Tips for Teaching with Comics

Someone compiled a massive list for different ways to use comics to teach all kind of things. Some of them I had already been familiar with, but many are new to me. This list is a gold mine!

James Gurney pointed out to me that #11 was a description of his visit to my art room!

If you're interested, check out the list of 100 Tips for Teaching with Comics.