Christmas Comics

"Oh man, for Christmas comics, or winter in general, there’s only one answer: Calvin and Hobbes."

A bunch of comic creators, including myself, talk about their favorite Christmas comics over at Broken Frontier.

Zudist Colony

Comic Book Resources' interview with some of the Zuda contestants in the month of December.

(John comes off fine, I come off like a bit of a pretentious wack job. But as Zissou says "that's me. I said those things.")

The House Always Wins - Jackie Laika

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From the script:

Jackie is a short, freckled girl in her early 20s, with bleached blonde hair. No makeup except some heavy dark brown eye-shadow. She wears a black zipped hoodie. Dark blue jeans and scuffed work boots finish the look.

In the story:

Jackie is a psychic, which means her short life so far has been more than a little bizarre. She hides her ability by passing it off as a preternatural skill at observation; she COPES with her ability by helping people. For someone whose head is constantly picking up mental radio signals from Wherever, she's remarkably level-headed; probably the coolest head of the field team

Behind the scenes:

Jackie's role on the team is to be The Girl, but I tried to offset that by making her the only one who can really deal with the ghost thing on the ghost thing's level.

To some extent, I imbued her with a character trait near and dear to my heart, which is that when life gives you shit, you go out of your way to help folks so as to not spread the shitty feeling around.

I didn't want to make Jackie full-on Goth or emo; it was too easy, for one thing, and I wanted her to be a little more action-ready than that. So: hair dye and eyeshadow as a shorthand for spooky girl, work boots and jeans in case she need to actually do things. If she's anything, she's punk, but maybe more pop-punk than London/New York 70s punk.

"Jackie Laika" is a name recycled from a four-issue thing I wrote and discarded called HOMECOMING KING. There, she was a former teenage shitkicker turned free clinic doctor; here, she's a psychic pretending to be a fake psychic (or something).

The House Always Wins: Jeff Lovering

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From the script:

Jeff is a 30-year-old scarecrow rocking a pair of John Lennon granny glasses and a slightly ratty doctor’s coat over a t-shirt with a tuxedo pattern on the front, khaki pants, and dirty sneakers. He has a shaggy mop of brown hair, with the nape of it tied into a short ponytail; the ponytail doesn’t actually pull any of his hair back, just consolidates it off his collar.

In the story:

Jeff Lovering was, a long time ago, a self-described black-market anatomist. He's deliberately vague about the subject, but it seemed to have involved doing medical examinations on corpses that, for one reason or another, needed to not be examined through official channels. Essentially, this means that Jeff is pretty unflappable at a crime scene and quite good at figuring out causes of death, no matter how bizarre. On the down side, Jeff's also quite the weird little bastard.

Behind the scenes:

Every team since the A-Team has needed a "quirky" guy. A wild card, as Always Sunny put it. Ours is Jeff, who's less wild/crazy and more weird/ass.

The basic design, and the idea of a black-market anatomist, was me riffing on the sort of shady, model-thin sociopaths Kazuya Minekura populates her books with. Minekura's kind of a guilty pleasure for me, and a J-Horror-y crime book seemed like the ideal place to acknowledge her influence.

In the first draft, Jeff was a lot more...I dunno, zany? Whatever you want to call it, it was just grating. You're not meant to like Jeff much, but not because of that.

What I ended up doing was dialing him back a bit to get a Jeremy Davies vibe to Jeff; which is to say he's still the crazy one, but it's in a muttery, off-in-his-own-world way rather than a zany way.

(In the script, I described Jeff as rocking back and forth on his heels. I was picturing a kind of Bugs Bunny motion; John has him just sort of twitching in place, which is just far, far better.)

Jeff comes from nowhere in particular; I do have a friend named Jeff, but they've nothing to do with each other. Lovering, on the other hand, comes from Pixies drummer David Lovering; I think I was inspired to use the name when I saw him go a bit strange in the loudQUIETloud documentary.

(Jeff, you know, would be, uh, muttering about how Blur and Pixies, like, are both referenced in this story, and they both have drummers named Dave, that's kind of weird, y'know?)

((James Clayton was the first to spot the Pixies connection, which made my day.))

The House Always Wins: Charlie Albarn

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From the script:

Charlie is in his late 20s, and built like a rugby player. He’s clean-shaven, keeps his hair buzzed short, and judging by the smooth arms poking out of his t-shirt, shaves all his body hair like a swimmer. He’s wearing a plain t-shirt, a vest covered in pouches, and cargo pants.

In the story:

Charlie's the point man of the detective team. He was a professional rugby player and a bit of a lager-eater not long ago, but he's traded both for being a private detective with an emphasis on forensic science. Charlie's good at spotting patterns, and is used to being the smartest guy in the room, but he's still better at tackling people than he is at detective work. For now.

Behind the scenes:

I knew I wanted an athletic, relatively normal type to go with the less-athletic, nowhere near normal Jackie and Jeff. A George-Eads-on-CSI type. I took, as a starting point, my friend Charlie, who played rugby in high-school and is disturbingly good at complex mental math.

(Charlie also lent me The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly back in high school, which led directly to me writing The Grave Doug Freshley. So, loosely basing a character on him is my way of saying thanks for my first comic script.)

((The way Charlie lends you things is to tell you, in minute detail, all the awesome parts of the movie until you borrow it yourself to shut him up. And it works.))

The name Albarn, and the phrase "lager-eater", come from Damon Albarn of Blur (one of my favorite bands), who was, back in the '90s, known as a bit of a lager-eater. Big on drinking, in other words. Charlie doesn't show too much arrogance in the 8-pages available, but he will later, and that too is taken from Albarn to an extent.

Zuda Voting Guide

So, the Zuda contest relies on votes. Not unlike American Idol, actually. And if we win, we get to do the comic as an ongoing series that we get paid for and everything. Which would be great, I tell you what.

So, here’s what we need from you:

1) Go to http://zudacomics.com

2) Either sign in, or make a new account at http://zudacomics.com/user/register

2a) If you’re signing up, just fill out all the required (red asterisk) fields.

3) Go back to http://zudacomics.com once you have an account, and sign in.

4) Go to: http://zudacomics.com/node/1550

5) Click the button marked “Favorite” on the sidebar.

6) Click Five Stars on the “Rate this Comic” section, also on the sidebar.

7) Finally, click the big “Vote!” button; again, right column. That, Favorites, and the Rating all count towards our winning the contest.

8) Feel free to leave a comment as well. I don’t know if it counts for anything, we just like hearing from folks.

Actually, wait, speaking of comments: we’re also running a little side contest. Basically, whoever gets the most votes for us gets drawn into the series as a victim of the ghost.

First prize is that and a copy of the Eisner and Harvey Awards-winning anthology Comic Book Tattoo, signed by me and John (we were both in it). Second prize is just you being in the comic.

So if you get other people to vote on our behalf, make sure they leave a comment saying it was you who got them to do it.

The House Always Wins

So, me and future-art-superstar John Bivens have a comic in this month’s Zuda competition, called THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS. Short version of the plot:

“An agoraphobic detective and the crack team of assistants who do his legwork are hired by a real estate reality show to investigate a house whose spectral curse kills all who enter it.”

Because to certain kind of person (ie, this guy), a detective who never leaves the house is the obvious guy to drive a pretty blatant ribbing of THE GRUDGE.

Basically, what we’re doing is taking the “grumpy-genius-and-attractive-young-subplot-generators” genre (think HOUSE, SHARK, LIE TO ME) and throwing it headlong into a blender of berserk J-horror (think GYO, DEVILMAN).

It’s a comedy. Kind of. In a mean and bent sort of way.

(Our preview features a ghost coming out of a TV, and a plumber proceeding to whack it repeatedly with a wrench. Because I know when *I* watch THE RING, I just think “She’s halfway in a TV, you dopes, crack her one before she comes out.”)

(Important SFX note: if you’re hitting someone in the head, with a wrench, in a comic, remember that KRAK is horror, WUNK is comedy.)

Anyway, I’d appreciate your vote (and Favorite and 5-star-rating). Because I’d actually really like to do this as a series, because John’s basically an art genius and I’d like to see him get a mainstream-ish gig like this, and because the ending to the first season is one of my all time favorite ideas. Made me laugh for just minutes and minutes, let me tell you.

Oh! And we’re also running a little side contest:

Get your friends to vote, and leave a comment saying it was you who got their vote on the site.

Whoever gets the most votes for us gets to be drawn into the strip as a victim of the ghost, and wins an autographed copy of Eisner/Harvey-winning anthology COMIC BOOK TATTOO, signed by both me and John (who were both in it. Not on the same story, mind.)

Second place is “just” getting drawn into the strip as a murder victim.

So, basically, be our internet street team and we’ll murder you.

Um. In the comic.

Which is much more likely to make your friends jealous, frankly.

Crossposted from all sorts of places.