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RIP Alan Rickman – more Hans than Snape to me. But always great, no matter the role. watercolor 17×24 lanaquarelle cp Posted by Bill Sienkiewicz on Thursday, January 14, 2016 We lost another great today.     Bill Sienkiewicz post his tribute on FB and I wondered how he could have done one so fast. I […]

§ A new Abhay Khosla review, this time of The Names by Peter Milligan and Leandro Fernandez is always a Cadbury Milk Tray of unexpected flavors, and this one includes a brief but smooth swipe at The Vertigo Brown:

A quick note to Vertigo colorists: If you are working for Vertigo, there is a belief that both Vertigo and you get a gross, throbbing weiner-boner everytime you get to make a page all brown. People believe that because it’s 100% true, and the only possible explanation for why all Vertigo comics ever published have been so drenched in the color brown. Nothing else makes sense; no other solution to that equation. Please consider defying your brown-obsessed masters. Look into your hearts. You know what you see? If you see the color brown, something has gone horribly wrong. I’m not a doctor, but that probably means someone has shit into your heart and you have feces pumping through your arteries. At the very least, it just sounds unhealthy from a cardiac-perspective.

Why are Vertigo comics so brown? I’ve never been able to answer that question and I worked there, and all my books were brown, too.

§ Several attractive covers were floating around on my social media yesterday:

Bill Sienkiewicz for Jupiter’s Circle, the sequel to Jupiter’s Children by Mark Millar and Wilfredo Torres.

Goran Parlov also for Jupiter’s Circle.

And a teaser image and cover for Invisible Republic #1 by Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman with colors by Jordan Boyd.  It hits March 18. Lookin; good.

§ Jennifer Sorenson contributes a comic about Charlie Hebdo and all the rest. If you haven’t been following the comics section at Fusion.net you need to.

§ Robert Kirby has the lowdown on New Minis from Kus!

Kuš! (pronounced “koosh”), the Latvian comics collective launched in 2007, released this new quartet of minicomics late 2014. Each Kuš! mini is a 24-page stand-alone story culled from their growing roster of international artists. Many stories feature elements of fantasy, science fiction, or magical realism, but even the ones that don’t exhibit fanciful or otherworldly qualites. The artists featured by Kuš! tend to dwell in the conceptual rather than the actual, using the art of cartooning in unique and sometimes challenging ways.

These books are so awesome. I’m not really into mail order but the Kus gang doesn’t often some to my hemisphere so…

§ A British politician totally ripped off the ‘V for Vendetta’ logo for a new nationalist party he’s trying to get off the ground. If you’re going to rip off some one rip off the best, but come on.

§ Matthew Meylikhov has announced he’s stepping down as EIC of Multiversity Comics. I always enjoyed my interactions with Matt so I’m going to miss him but send my best regards.

To some this may seem a bit of a shock. I told a few people about this before our public announcement, that I had made the decision to move on, and the most consistent response I got was, “How are you feeling?” I think people expect me to say that I am sad, which is perhaps inevitable; how could anyone not be in this situation? After all, when you spend over five years of your life working and developing something like this, it’s not exactly easy to just pack your bags and go. But I’m not sad, nor do I think should anyone else be. If I could, I’d make a video montage of all the fun memories and things I’ve gotten to do because of this site overlayed with “Eternal Flame” by the Bangles, because I have nothing but warm thoughts and fuzzy feelings for the site, its past with me and its future without me. I couldn’t be more proud of the site and everyone here, all the accomplishments and the adventures we’ve shared; from our various annual charity events at conventions, to late nights out until 3:00 AM or that time I got food poisoning at a White Castle while rooming with 5 other staffers during a con. This site and its staff encapsulate some of my favorite people and fondest adult memories.

§ Fashion retailer Poprageous is offering an outfit made from Benedict Cumberbatch images. The complete outfit sells for $125 but just the leggings—which are the essential fashion item of this time and place in the universal meta stream—are only $80. completely your red carpet look NOW. Bam! Benedict Cumberbatch leggings. BAM!

Photo by Leonard Pederson

Via Leonard Pederson’s Facebook page here’s a photo of me interviewing Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz about Elektra Assassin at the Golden Apple in LA c1987. I guess I could make a better guess to the time by looking at the books in the background. Void Indigo, Mage and The Far Side.  I think that’s Mikal Gilmore with his back to the camera.

One small note, the shirt I’m wearing was manufactured for, I think , the 86 or 86 San Diego Comic Con in support of Jack Kirby. I forget who made the shirts but I think it was a group including Miller and Marv Wolfman. At the time Kirby was engaged in a fight to get his artwork back from Marvel, a struggle you can read about here.  I’m sure I still have that shirt, probably in storage somewhere. Because I am a packrat.

BTW upon looking at old pictures like this, one is tempted to exclaim “But I was so young and cute and skinny!” but then you realize that being young cute and skinny did not prevent you from dressing in very very unfortunate styles.

I totally stole this from artist/producer Denys Cowan’s FB page, but it’s an interesting little sidenote, Back in the 90s people still read magazines, and liquor companies would purchase full page advertisements in these magazines. Man, history is SO WEIRD, right? Anyway, Dewars scotch ran a series of profiles of debonair achievers attempting to convince you that if you drank their scotch you would also be a debonair achiever. Cowan, then well known for his Batman and Question comics and about to co-found Milestone Media, was a fitting choice but it did seem like a win for comics at the time. This predated the Rob Liefeld Levis commercial, but both are a reminder that cartoonists as media figures is far from a recent phenomenon.

Which reminds me that I forgot to mention that Static Shock is getting a live action series as part of Warner’s Blue Ribbon digital division, with Reginald Hudlin producing. Static was created for Milestone by the late Dwayne McDuffie, the late Robert Washington III and John Paul Leon, but Cowan produced the previous Static Shock animated series. He’s a sturdy character and it’s good to see him getting a reboot.

As long as we’re making this The Denys Cowan Post, here’s a cover to Shaft #2 that Bill Sienkiewicz finished over Cowan’s pencils.

I had to post a lot of images for this week’s Comics Illustrator of the Week, because Bill Sienkiewicz has so many amazing pieces of art to share. I only just scraped the surface of his body of work! One of the first comic books I ever read was Dune, the Marvel comics adaptation of the David Lynch film. I didn’t really read it, so much as I absorbed the dynamic art by Sienkiewicz within those pages. It was the first time I’d really seen an example of comic book art crossing over into the “respectable” fine arts realm.

Bill Sienkiewicz (pronounced sin-KEV-itch) is best known for his magnum opus, Stray Toasters, and his work on Elektra: Assassin for Marvel. He incorporates a combination of oil painting, acrylics, watercolor, mixed-media, collage and mimeograph into his art, which is very rare in comics. Sienkiewicz has done a lot of work for Hollywood, including The Dark Knight, The Grinch, and The Green Mile just to name a few.

He recently worked on the critically acclaimed Daredevil:End of Days series with friends, and fellow comics legends, Brian Michael Bendis, David Mack, Alex Maleev, and Klaus Janson. His variant cover for Wytches #1, the highly anticipated new Image series, is truly disturbing, and shows a master artist at the peak of his craft.

Other works of note are Voodoo Child: The Illustrated Legend of Jimi Hendrix, Santa: My Life & Times (An Illustrated Autobiography), and a stint designing multimedia stage productions for Roger Waters’ 2006 Dark Side of the Moon Tour.

Bill Sienkiewicz has recieved numerous awards, and nominations, but one of the biggest honors was a  2004 Eisner Award for DC Comics’ The Sandman: Endless Nights.

You can read more about Bill Sienkiewicz’s illustrious career, and see more examples of his art on his official website here.

For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com - Andy Yates

While the party is going on here at HeroesCon, a few faces are missing, among them writer Steve Niles, who had to cancel due to deadlines, and also the fact that he is caring for two young rescue kittens. Niles has been plastering his Facebook page with pictures of the young cats and after one look, you can tell why he wanted to stay home. As delightful as HeroesCon is, watching kittens romp and play might just be even more delightful.

Here’s more kitten porn from the Niles Files.

Niles actually has a 9-critter menagerie including his giant turtle Gil, seen above with Yob. Could you leave the house with this floor show?



Niles also has an art collection featuring Gil. This is a piece by Bill Sienkiewicz which is a great reminder that Bill Sienkiewicz can draw nearly anything and make it amazing. 

And luckily for fans, Bill Sienkiewicz IS at HeroesCon!

The Criterion Collection is lauded for its special edition releases of “important classic and contemporary films” on DVD, but what’s always grabbed me about their work is the packaging. The series sports original artwork for each title, the designs of which are shining examples of restraint, simplicity, and elegance. No giant red type screaming EXTREME UNRATED EDITION here, folks. Take this cover for Robinson Crusoe on Mars, for example — simple, bold type over a Bill Sienkiewicz illustration. They make it look so easy.

Via the comments of a blog post called An Ode to Criterion Box Art, I discovered that much of Criterion’s design work is by designer/illustrator Eric Skillman who was certainly born into the right last name. Eric also keeps a design process blog called Cozy Lummox.