5K for Scott Pilgrim

Ramona is definitely my favorite SP character to draw; she's got that great post-hipster/punk/skater/harajuku/courier/no-nonsense-well-okay-a-little-nonsense fashion sense going on, but it's mostly her steampunk/swimming pool goggles that grab me. 

Inspired by a totally inaccurate recollection of this Nick Manno Fredda poster, a week-long head cold, and that pink shirt I gave to Salvation Army like a year ago.

Watch Your Speed

No one throws a Halloween bash like the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. "Cricket?"

The Ultimate Team-Up

My first Iron Man comic featured Shellhead and Prince Namor in roughly similar, though less dynamic poses. The Iron Movie was rather great-- though the villain was a bit unworthy, a bit murky as far as ultimate villains go. Anyone else feeling the timely inclusion of some Chinese adversaries anyone? Mandarin? Fing Fang Foom?


Just a little ponderous puffery from the little dork inside.

Iron Bam

Getting pumped for the Iron Man movie. Realized just the other day how much Tony and Rhodey totally rocked my mental mega man. Heck, my first real comic book was an Iron Man Annual with Namor as his tense and hesitant super wingman. Bought in a drugstore in Maine.




Those little widgets slung around belt? Hip phones. Similar saddledrags won't be hip for another decade or so, but just you wait.


Stark Enterprises: a thought ahead.


A thought a head.


A thought; a head.

Fast of the Dough Deacons

Mäk and I headed south this summer, deep into the uncharted forest of confederacy known as Linville falls, North Carolina. A particularly memorable trail blazed was Chimney Rock, home to relatively summit-level vistas, innumerable rickety stairways, energetic packs of sandal-slippered tweens, and former shooting locations for the '92 version of Last of the Mohicans. A set up to stop all pacemakers.


This week, on our newly ongoing column 'Mäk Writes':



I immediately remembered a sketchbook page from earlier this year, scrawled briefly after our retrun from the smokies and slightly past my late night library rental of the same film. Nothing like previously unreleased road trip pics:



Can't you just hear the soundtrack fiddle pumping? Doesn't it make you wanna turn insomniac?

Harp Like the Hedge of a Samurai Lord

After over three weeks of borrowed shelf-sitting, finally watched Shinobi: Blade Under Heart. All the rage in Japan. I can't say I remember them being the most ragey society these days. More like typical iconoclastic culture-bending gender-neutral techno cool hip folk. But we all have our violent outlets. Beyond a few bizarrely under edited cgi moments, this happily weird slim plot pickins flickins seems to pay homage to my all time favorite manga, Blade of the Immortal by Hiroaki Samura. The effects are a hodgepodge of Romeo Must Die, Crouching Tiger, and, interestingly enough, Shaolin Soccer.


Nowhere near Shaolin Soccer, though. Nowhere near.