Bittersweet Life

It's Lee Byung Hun season chez Martin. New to me, I loved him as 'Storm Shadow' in the hilarious GI Joe and can't wait to see him in The Good, The Bad, The Weird (I didn't even know he was in him!). My friend recommended A Bittersweet LIfe, and my god it's good!!! Check it out if you haven't seen it.
There's one amazing, amazing scene, where our hero is about to be killed by gangsters and he had to fight them all - about 30 of them - with one broken hand!!!! Check it out!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS_2A6ktnvI

The home stretch

Well I'm almost there with Spandex #1...kind of...
The art is done, and now I just need to wait and see if I'm going to get lottery funding to print it up... That's pretty much the final thing now - sorting out 'thank-you's' on the intro page (I have gone blank and forgotten who I need to thank) and if I get the funding I may have to put a lottery symbol on there or something. (If I don't get the funding, I will be using all my savings, uh-oh, don't tell my parents...)

However...I thought the art was all done...but I started going thru it all with a fine tooth-comb...and my goodness... so many little things to tidy up, and a couple of glaring errors that I'm glad I spotted. Scary. So still going over and over it, going slowly insane... I spent 5 hours on Monday night and 5 hours last night after work - it's very tiring! I mean, I think all comic creators go thru this towards the end, and it happened a lot on O Men, but Spandex is all colour, which is too expensive to print out. So I'm proofing black and whites and then spotting even more things online.
Oh and another moan - god only knows what's wrong with my Photoshop, but half my original files are now corrupt and have strange lines all over them! Thank god I've been saving Tiffs - so I'm not working on flattened Tiffs. So if Spandex becomes big and successful, I'm sorry but I don't have any layered Photoshop files to send people lol

Anyway, I'm sure it'll be worth it.......

Websites!

I have a new website!!
Kind of...
My previous website, The O Men one (www.comix.org.uk/theomen) was handled by my friend Dave, he did it all for free, bless him. But I wanted to make a new one for Spandex, and this time round, I felt it was unfair that someone else do all the work so i investigated making my own site.
I felt this kind of blogging site here was a bit limited, so I put it over on Wordpress, and it's been quite hard getting my head round it all, but i think i'm getting there. I bought a 'domain name' to make it sound more attractive - so everything just gets re-routed there now.
Anyway, it's at www.spandexcomic.com
I'm still 'building' it, and figuring out what to put on it, but at least I've made a start. I'll probably put a 'Store' on it - Spandex T-shirts would be so cool! If anyone has any suggestions, please drop me a line!

In other internet news, I'm putting all of O Men online here:
http://www.myebook.com/index.php?option=ebook&id=12734
The idea is to set up a group on Facebook and announce it more when I've got a lot more pages on there. I''ve been trying to put a page up a day but I do keep forgetting hehe. So this isn't really officially 'live' yet, but it's there...

The Cast!

Here is the final version of my Spandex cast pic.
left to right, from bottom row up:
Prowler, Liberty, Neon, Indigo, Butch, Mr Muscles, Diva, Chunk, Glitter, Ms Fantastic, James Bend, Pussy, Incognita, Hag, Crusader, 50 Foot Queenie, The Pink Ninjas and Seagull Man...

Cast pic

I thought I'd show you some rough versions of my latest Spandex cast drawing, to show some little secrets of how I work.
First up, this cast shot is going to appear on the inside back page of Spandex 1, and it's the final thing I've done for it. Originally I was going to put an advert there, but I decided to go with this instead.
This type of pic is something I've toyed with for a while. It's kind of influenced by the cover to Love and Rockets 50, and when I first did it, it was only the main 7 Spandex people, so they were much bigger. i decided to add everyone into this version.
I started this on Tuesday, I think, then tinkered away, colouring when I had chance during the week and finally spent pretty much all of yesterday, Saturday, finishing it - a lot of work.
As you can see if you compare the original drawing here and the final version, pretty much every character changed! Can you spot the differences?
- Originally Prowler had his tongue stuck out and Neon was winking, but I thought that was a bit too much, so i made Neon look normal and gave Prowler the wink. I completely redrew Prowler's face.
- I thought Liberty looked really boring so I redrew her head.
- I was really happy with Indigo's expression. I wanted to add a cigarette but thought that would take away from the way she looked.
- Mr Muscles wasn't working for me, so I just copied and pasted Butch's head (they are twins) and made it more male.
- For the central image, I thought Diva looked very bland, so I totally redrew her, to sex her up.
- Chunk wasn't working for me. I tried stretching her down in Photoshop but in the end I redrew her.
- Ms Fantastic's face was redrawn.
- I liked Pussy's hair and look but the face looked too freaky with the ears on top of her head. I redrew the head and I don't think I'll ever draw her with her hair drawn back again!
- Seagull Man isn't even in this picture because I couldn't remember what he looked like!
- I really liked the casual way 50 Foot Queenie was just there in the background, slightly obscured, but it didn't make sense to me why James Bend was so high up. So I lowered him down and added more of Queenie's face - very hard to draw on Photoshop (and I don't have a Wacom tablet).
- Even when I was all finished and I put this on Facebook and on here, I tinkered further and added some more Pink Ninjas and I redrew Queenie's eyes.
All in all I think I spent about 11 hours on finishing this yesterday lol. A lot of time, but I really do love it.

Absence makes the heart...

Big plug for my chum Martin's new comic The Absence!
It's just come out and is a really engaging read about a fella who comes back to a small town after the war - and he has brought lots of secrets with him.
Reminded me a lot of Moore and Campbell, and it's nice to read the kind of small press comic I thought they didn't make any more.
Check out more details here, absencecomic.blogspot.com, but honestly, give it a whirl!!

Iron Tran

Some work I did this weekend - a spoof 'Spandex Origins' cover for our resident transvestite superhero Liberty.

Book of Lists

Quick plus for my chum Paul Rainey's book Book of Lists. Paul is one of the funniest creators in the UK small press and i love his work to bits. I can't wait to get my hands on the Book of Lists (if/when I ever get some money) - 120 pages, full colour - but if you want to beat me to it, go here@
http://www.pbrainey.com/shop.htm

Red Eye

Red Eye Magazine is back - thank god!
i've really been missing any kind of decent UK comics mag - especially something focusing on the small press.
The issue looks amazing, can't wait to read it, altho i already read the feature on my chum Bridgeen Gillespie. Liz Baillie looks interesting...
Best of all there's a li'l Spandex news-piece plus an ad for issue one - showing the cover. Hehe shame the image I sent the editor for the news is a bit unfinished - the balloons haven't got tails and they're all over the place - but ah well, hopefully no one'll notice eh? ;-)
you can download it from here:
http://www.enginecomics.co.uk/redeye/reframeset.htm

Dark Spandex

Every now and then i see an image that just makes me want to draw...
I'm loving the Marvel house ad for the Iron Man comic - Immortal Weapons Thingybob... It's beautiful...
Made me want to try a dark Spandex image - something mean and moody...
Still a work in progress, but have a sneak peek.