Category: Smile of the Absent Cat

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Back to the old drawing-board…

I decided to ease back into drawing with a rendition of our cat that I did as a birthday present for Shel:

(Oh… and speaking of cats, some of you may be wondering what ever happened to the ‘Smile of the Absent Cat’ story I had been working on for all that time. Well, it’s in a litigious limbo that I have no say in and will in all likelihood never see print. Yet another reason that it’s hard to stay motivated in the “Comics Biz”).

 

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Having limbered up a bit, I decided to do the simplest commission on my list; something I could have a bit of fun with:

Which is, of course, based on the classic cover:

Okay… what’s next…

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Octeract Cat

I got a very nice comment from Derek Gray on the Dec 11 blog post:

“Absolutely gorgeous, and a superb illustration of Grant’s script. Just reading his description was enough to give me a stress headache!“

Thanks Derek, I really appreciate it. My first reaction to reading the script for that panel was, “Oh… okay… uhmm… wait — what?!!?”

For most of the pages I have one Photoshop file for the layout. Some I have two, maybe three versions. That page, I have eleven.

Here’s another finished page (minus the word balloons) from chapter 5:

I believe it’s in issue 296 of Heavy Metal. Which I believe is in stores now. I don’t know for sure. Nobody tells me anything.

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Back to the cats…

I’m still wrapping up the layouts on the final chapter. I don’t have any new art to show just yet. So here is a page from the previous chapter.

This is what Grant’s script called for:

“Big pic. We’re behind Wain in his chair. He’s dwarfed by the incredible show in the background – a vast psychedelic fractal head of Tommy Catkins. The idea here is to combine Catkins face with the image of the octeract… to create the origin of the Louis Wain psychedelic wallpaper cat from his allegedly schizophrenic period – here, the suggestion is that Wain’s insanity did not impede his progress as an artist – that he was an Edwardian sentimentalist, THEN a Futurist, THEN in his fractal flower-face drawings, a pioneer of blacklight hippie art and computer animation. Feel free to interpret this in the manner of your choosing, Ger.”

So here is what I came up with:

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We’re on a Hallway to Hell…

My drawing board is under there somewhere.

In response to the comment left on last week’s post:

I am trying to finish the last chapter of “smile of the absent cat”, but it seems that every time I start to work on it again, life gets in the way.

The latest interruption was suddenly having only two weeks notice to pack up, renovate and move. We are still in the middle of moving and painting.
All of my drawing stuff is buried under a mountain of other stuff in the upstairs hallway. As soon as I can get back to drawing again, my number one priority is to finish that last chapter.

There were 4 previous chapters published in Heavy Metal Magazine as they were completed. Chapter 5 is coming out soon in issue #296. I am hoping that chapter 6 will be in issue #298.

The whole 48 page story will be collected into a book and published by Heavy Metal. Hopefully some time early next year.
I have no idea why they have already solicited for the book saying it will be released Oct 2019.

That clearly isn’t the case.

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Getting ready for Baltimore

Working on a couple of commissions for the show but I can’t post those yet. Nor can I post, just yet, my contribution to the Baltimore Yearbook featuring “Blacksad“. So here’s a drawing I did of the house in which we rent our tiny, little “tree fort” apartment. (It’s the window at the upper left)…

… and I haven’t posted a “Smile of the Absent Cat” page for a while… so:

Click below for show info:

October 18 – 20