this little piece was done for the lille comics festival, in lille france, which i will be attending this coming weekend along with cameron stewart and karl kerschl as part of our european tour. for a full convention schedule please check my blog.

if you happen to be in the north of france swing by and say hello!

Earlier this month i had the pleasure of attending the Komics Festiwal in Łódź, Poland. The people were great and very welcoming, in fact when I did my scheduled one hour signing in turned into a 3hr extravaganza!

above is one of the quick doodles i did.

to know more of my travels or if you’d like to see if i’ll be somewhere near you during my tour meander on over to my blog to lear more

(ps. sorry for the lack of updates on the art side of things. as most of you are aware i am traveling through europe attending various conventions and festivals. if you’re not aware visit my blog and learn more.)

I’ve been an avid reader of Scott’s work since i first came across it years ago when beginning my first webcomic BNS. I am honoured now at the opportunity to lend my own vision to PvP, a comic that has inspired and made me laugh through out the years. Thanks Scott.

this past weekend saw the return of the annual toronto fan expo and the show was explosive! so much so that the fire marshal shut things down for a while on saturday as the doors and lines overflowed. from what i hear the shows attendance was up by nearly 25%!

pretty crazy.

regardless of the chaos outside i had a great time inside. i met a lot of great fans, signed a lot of books, drew a fair amount of doodles and just bantered with the fine folks who lingered at my table.

a big thanks to all who came out to play, you made this fan expo truly memorable and inspirational!

ps/ above is the first of many sketches commissioned said weekend.

continuing my look back at machinations of doom, a story i wrote and drew back in 1999/2000 for palladium books, i present to you o.j. and shakes. the two characters were named by the original writer i collaborated with, coleen britton. o.j. a “juicer” was named for the obvious pun, and shakes as a name for a “crazy” seemed quite tackily appropriate also. to be honest o.j. was my least favourite character and least favourite character class of the rifts rpg off which he was based. however the class was a fan favourite so i thought it best to have a character based on the class included in the story.  i stuck to the basic design of the classic juicer armour and added a few details of my own. funnily enough, though never becoming my favourite, o.j. grew on me. his backstory became one of the richest in my mind and he developed into a character i cared about. in fact he was one of the characters i really wanted to do a solo story on after mod wrapped up.

shakes on the other hand was a vehicle utilized as a vehicle for comedic relief and pure strangeness. he was the character that i could do anything with and it’d be okay… cause his mind wasn’t firing on all synapses. yeah… to much fun. i really miss these characters and would love to revisit and tell more of their tales.

the fun thing about the RIFTS universe created by kevin siembieda (and propagated by palladium books!) was that it is teeming with such a rich array of choices for creating characters. everything from aliens, monsters, mutants, humans, cyborgs, dogs, rats, dragons… ogres… you name it! and yes, i said dogs. this is where bowie comes in. bowie, a free-born dog-boy (escapees of the genetically created dog-boys of the coalition army) and part of our group of desperados. he is their resident mechanic, driver (of petunia their off-road transport), and all around go-to guy, er dog,  and the heart and soul of the group. the teams best friend if you will… sorry couldn’t help it

on the flip-side of bowie we have magali. the leader of the rat resistance ensconced in the underground catacombs of the coalition’s lone star complex. i modeled magali after calisto, a bad-ass chic with an eye-patch, from my years of reading the uncanny x-men. i figured make her a rat and you just one-up the bad-ass quotient

when MOD was collected it finally gave me the opportunity to give it an official title page which it lacked with it’s original serialized run. i wanted the title page to also double as a lead-in to the story. these kinda of images (the title aspect aside) are what i often refer to as “beat” panels or pieces as they enhance mood and/or pacing within a story. when collecting MOD i originally wanted to add in many pages like this through-out the story to smooth out elements i thought were often rough or lacked finesse. back when i was writing MOD in 1999 i often cut pages or sequences due to space as i was alotted 8-10 pages per chapter. one of the biggest was a showdown between the burster of the group (johnny) and the aishwarra, the large alien creature that plays a pivotal role in the story. however, 10 years later i felt my style would be far too different and the pages would be too obvious and perhaps pull the reader out of the story. so aside from cleaning up some panels and character renderings the art you see in the collected edition is virtually untouched.

as i’ve mentioned MACHINATIONS OF DOOM was a truly wonderful project to work on. one of my favourite aspects of the series was creating and embedding the jin-ro species (that’s what bodakhan is) into the RIFTS mythos. from what i hear these guys have grown to be favourites of players of the RIFTS Megaverse, and i’m super proud to have been a part of that

as i mentioned i’d be showcasing my character pieces i did for the Machinations Of Doom collection a couple yeas ago. to add to the flavour i’ve included my final pencils before going to ink.

this here is johnny the “burster” of the group of mercenaries. bursters, in the world of RIFTS, are as one can gather from the image, characters with flame based powers, not sure what the proper term would be… pyro-kinetic? y’know like liz sherman from hellboy or johnny storm from the fantastic four…. that kinda power

well do i have a solution for those who might like all those kind of things but are just not to inclined to visit various websites in their hectic schedules…

allow me to introduce you to the CALAVERA STUDIO SUPERFEED, an amalgamated rss feed that collects all my various site rss feeds into one handy dandy one! sign up and relax…. click above in the url bar or the calavera studio logo button in the top left of the left sidebar.

cheers!