Tag: comics

Nick Robles

Illustrations by Nick Robles: Set Two

Nick Robles is a self-taught freelance graphic artist from southern Louisiana. His main medium is digital art; however, he has also created artwork in the fields of sculpture and oil painting. Robles acknowledges many and varied influences on his artwork, from illustrators J. C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell to comic artist Mike Mignola and Pre-Raphaelite artist J. W. Waterhouse.

In 2014 Nick Robles started working with BOOM! Studios producing illustrations and cover art for their publications, including the 2014 “Clockwork Angels”, the covers of “Kong of Skull Island”, and work on the 2015 “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials”. He worked with ECW Press, a Toronto-based independent book publisher, in 2015 on Kevin Anderson’s graphic novel “Clockwork Lives”. Robles also did artwork for both Black Crown Publishing and Dark Horse Comics. He is currently working with both Necromancer Press and Vault Comics.

Nick Robles is the co-creator along with author Tini Howard of Black Crown Publishing’s new graphic series “Euthanauts”, a sci-fi graphic adventure into the frontier of death. Robles created memorable characters with crisp details using a palette of warm and cool colors to indicate the living and the dead. His art on this series presents an atmosphere that is both modern and dark, with experiments in panel layouts and the design of the page. There are currently five issues in the series availabe from Black Crown Publishing.

Nick Robles

Nick Robles, “Nightcrawler”, Marvel X-Men Comics

Nick Robles is a self-taught freelance graphic artist from southern Louisiana. His main medium is digital art; however, he has also created artwork in the fields of sculpture and oil painting. Robles acknowledges many and varied influences on his artwork, from illustrators J. C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell to comic artist Mike Mignola and Pre-Raphaelite artist J. W. Waterhouse.

In 2014 Nick Robles started working with BOOM! Studios producing illustrations and cover art for their publications, including the 2014 “Clockwork Angels”, the covers of “Kong of Skull Island”, and work on the 2015 “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials”. He worked with ECW Press, a Toronto-based independent book publisher, in 2015 on Kevin Anderson’s graphic novel “Clockwork Lives”. Robles also did artwork for both Black Crown Publishing and Dark Horse Comics. He is currently working with both Necromancer Press and Vault Comics.

Nick Robles is the co-creator along with author Tini Howard of Black Crown Publishing’s new graphic series “Euthanauts”, a sci-fi graphic adventure into the frontier of death. Robles created memorable characters with crisp details using a palette of warm and cool colors to indicate the living and the dead. His art on this series presents an atmosphere that is both modern and dark, with experiments in panel layouts and the design of the page. There are currently five issues in the series availabe from Black Crown Publishing.

The images above are Nick Robles’s work for the Marvel X-Men series, illustrating the character of Kurt Wagner, known as the Nightcrawler, a superhuman agile mutant with the ability to teleport.

 

 

John Watson

John Watson, “Justice Society”, Illustration for DC Comics

John Watson studied Fine Art at the Cheltenham and Glousester College. He is one of the few remaining comic book artists who specializes in painting in oils. Watson has done a number of noatable cover runs for both Marvel and DC Comics. He most recently painted all the covers of the Marvel “Apes” series and also covers for Marvel’s “Triple-A Baseball”.

RAW: Number Six

Cover Art for Raw, Number Six, 1984, Published by Raw Books and Graphics, New York

“Raw” was a comics anthology edited by Art Spiegelman, a cartoonist best know for his graphic novel “Maus”, and Françoise Mouly, a Paris-born designer and editor. The anthology ran from 1980 to 1991. It was a flagship publication of the 1980s alternative comics movement, serving as a more intellectual counterpoint to Robert Crumb’s visceral “Weirdo”, which followed in the underground tradition of “Zap” and “Arcade”. The anthology “Raw” was one of the main venues for European comics to reach the United States at that time.

“Raw” featured a mix of American and European contributors, including some of Spiegelman’s students at the School of Visual Arts, as well as various contributors from other parts of the world. These included the Argentine duo of José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo , the Congolese painter Chéri Samba, and several Japanese cartoonists known for their work in “Garo”, a monthly manga magazine. Though comics were the main focus, many issues included galleries of non-comics illustration and illustrated prose or non-fiction pieces.

Peter Diamond

The Illustrations of Peter Diamond

Peter Diamond is a Canadian illustrator based in Vienna, Austria. born in Oxford, England, He received his BFA in Fine Arts at NSCAD University located in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In addition to his freelance work, Diamond teaches drawing at Illuskills and works with the international illustration community through the European Illustrators Forum. He is represented internationally by The Loud Cloud.

Peter Diamond’s work owes much of its character to the album covers and self-published comics that were his special focus in art school and the early years after graduation, as well as the punk gig posters of his teenage years.

François Schuiten

François Schuiten, “L’Ombre d’un Doute (Shadow of a Doubt)”, Lithograph, Edition of 1000

François Schuiten is a Belgian comic book illustrator. During his studies at Saint-Luc Institute in Brussels, he met Claude Renard, who led the comics department at the school, and together created several books.  Schuiten is best known for drawing the series “Les Cites Obscures” (Cities of the Fantastic), an evocation of fantastic, partly imaginary cities that he created with his friend Benoit Peeters from 1983 for the Belgian monthly comics magazine “A Suivre”.

Every story focuses on one city or building, and further explores a world where architects and urbanists are the leading powers and architecture is the driving force behind society. Styles explored int the series include stalinistic and fascist architecture as well as gothic cathedrals.

Enki Bilal

The Artwork of Enki Bilal

Enik Bilal is a French comic book creator, comics artist and film director. At the age of fourteen, he met Rene Goscinny, a French comics editor and writer known for the comic book “Asterix”. With Goscinny’s encouragement Bilal applied his talent to the field of comics. He produced work for Goscinny’s comics magazine “Pilote” in the 1970s.

Enik Bilal is best know for the “Nikopol” trilogy which took more than a decade to complete. He wrote the script and id the artwork. The final chapter “Froid Equateur” was chosen Book of the Year by the magazine “Lire”. The third chapter of his “Quatre?” trilogy, entitled “Rendezvous a Paris” was the fifth best selling comic of 2006.

Calendar: August 16

A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of August

Builder of Dams

August 16, 1892, was the birthdate of Canadian-American cartoonist, Harold Foster.

Harold Foster, as a youth, captained a sloop through the Atlantic, and learned to hunt and fish in the wilds surrounding Halifax from his stepfather, cultivating a love for nature that is readily apparent in his art. He left school at an early age. Foster’s career as a professional artist began when he was about eighteen, producing catalog art for the Hudson Bay Company, but before and after that he made his living in the Canadian wilderness as a fur trapper, hunting guide, and gold prospector.

Foster studied at the Chicago Art Institute and other schools and eventually landed a job at an advertising firm that allowed him to move his wife and two sons to the city. But when the Great Depression hit, work slowed to a crawl. Despite his reservations about entering the field of comic strips, when Foster  was given the chance to adapt Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Tarzan of the Apes”, he took it.

Debuting in 1929, the “Tarzan of the Apes” daily heralded a new age for comic strips. A fine artist to his bones, Foster introduced dynamic action, perfect anatomy and fluid body movement to the comics page. Through his hands, the titular character was imbued with a balance of nobility and visceral barbarity, and Hal Foster’s dramatically-lit chiaroscuro panels, accurate nature drawing, and raucous action ensured that “Tarzan of the Apes” was a hit.

Hal Foster produced hundreds of pages, and continuing to adapt his illustrative approach to cartooning, but he grew tired of the material. If he was going to continue working in a medium he didn’t care for, at minimum he wanted creative control over his output. So Foster began working on a story set in Arthurian England that he intended to span decades. After months of research and planning, he pitched his new story to United Features Syndicate, distributor of “Tarzan”, and they turned him down. He made the same pitch to William Randolph Hearst and was offered an unprecedented portion of ownership.

“Prince Valiant”, debuted in 1937 and quickly became the gold standard of the Sunday cartoons. The story begins with Val as the five-year-old son of a deposed king and follows him to manhood, through battles with ancient monsters and beasts, knighthood with King Arthur in Camelot, fatherhood, and adventures all across myth, history, and the globe. It is epic, swashbuckling, painterly, ornate, endlessly clever, and brilliantly plotted story, and without the intrusion of word balloons to muck up the panels. Every frame of Prince Valiant is like a story unto itself: beautifully designed, and rendered with a precision. In the golden age of the newspaper strip it was considered by many to be the pinnacle of achievement in the medium.

Class Comics: Lawsuit and T-Boy

Class Comics, “The Adventures of Lawsuit and T-Boy”, Issue No. 1

Class Comics is a publisher which issues several series of gay erotic comic books of high quality art, captivating characters, and exciting stories. Owned and operated by Canadian illustrator Patrick Fillion and writer Robert Fraser, Class Comics has been publishing their erotic comic books since 2000. In addition to the publishing of their own titles, the company has expanded their comic and art book collections to the French and German audiences through the European publishers Bruno Gmunder and H&O Editions.

Its titles include: Guardians of the Cube, Satisfaction Guaranteed, Camili-Cat, Naked Justice, Rapture, Deimos, Porky, “Rainbow Country” and The Pornomicon. Artists published by the company include French Logan and Max, and Spanish Ismael Alvarez.

Class Comics’ website is located at: https://www.classcomics.com