Category: Comics

For whatever reason, I thought it would be a good drawing exercise to start taking some comic pages I really dig and try my best to recreate them. Thus, I bring you the first in the JLR’s With Apologies series, in which I do just that.

First up: page 76 of Vertical‘s release of Black Jack vol. 9 (which is great, you should pick it up). Remember, it reads right to left.

Click to enlarge!
As you can maybe see here, Black Jack is adrift, and is fending off sharks with scalpels. I don’t have the original to show you, but I assure you it looks much better than this. One thing that’s off by a decent margin is the framing; I couldn’t quite line everything up right on my 5.5″ x 8.5″ sketchpad with my Pilot Precise V5 (I love those but they’re kinda thick for this).

Also, I learned it is really hard to draw as perfectly as Tezuka and I think I appreciate his art even more now, if that’s possible.

Hey, you should all check out the debut EP from Sean “Daemon9623” Babbitt, because it’s a rowdy collection of tracks that will take you through a gnarly chiptune zombie outbreak and leave you a tattered mess of ragged flesh and bone. It’s available here via Concatenation Records.

This is the Joseph Luster Report, so naturally there’s a JL angle to this post. I did the cover art:

Click to enlarge!

Could it be? Has the Living Tribunal returned in 2010? I think so.

I don’t know how I’ve lived this long without jamming the soundtrack to Chojin Sentai Jetman, a Famicom game based on one of the very best sentai series. I haven’t even played the game, but the music is ace, and it’s worth a listen for the titillating title theme rendition alone. If you’ve never seen it, soak it in first:

Hot dog, can Hironobu Kageyama ever croon! Composer Hiroyuki Iwatsukitaru knew this well, and faithfully translated said crooning to the Famicom soundchip. Being a kind gentleman, I ripped the NSF of Jetman into a .zip of MP3 files for your downloading pleasure. Get it!

Chojin Sentai Jetman (Famicom) [.zip, 40mb]

There are definitely shades of Capcom in the soundtrack, Mega Man specifically. I plan on popping a ROM of the game in when I get back to Hoboken. It’s a Natsume title that’s apparently like Shatterhand with giant robot battles.

I like this one because it looks like they’re about to fist bump
All images viciously swiped from this cool page on Natsume.

Slowly deleting comments from this post, which has become the Pearl Harbor of blogging. Thanks, Japan, see if I ever make a soundtrack based on one of your comics again!

So 2009 is winding down, and you should expect some posts once more. However, thanks to the kaiju kommenting attack, there are some increased restrictions! I’m like TSA over here but slightly less lazy.

JoE Shieh—you might know him as That Taiwanese Dude That’s Obsessed with Lists—wants me to do some top ten nonsense, but I don’t know about that. There will definitely be some kind of recap in the near future, so keep your peepers peeled and don’t remove this blog from your RSS feed or whatever you use to browse Sandra Bullock’s The Net.

Or add it back if you already have, you filthy animals.