Vampirella story

SO!
Bissette and I wrote this really crazy Betty Boop inspired Vampirella comic for the second issue of Vampirella Feary Tales. Feary Tales is a Vampi mini series written by Nancy A. Collins and several other cool writers, where the vampire we all desire falls into several classic and weird fairy tales as a character. It seems like a pretty cool series. Bissette and I picked Vampi in Snow White, but the Betty Boop version, of course, because that's what I like the best.

here's one of the alternate covers, by Art Adams!

This comic was a lot of fun to work on, and Steve and I really added all the weirdness and creepiness we could to it, including a musical number, tons of references to Bava movies and other sci-fi and horror, rhyming double entendres, and more!
Here's the title page from our comic,


The issue come out tomorrow( Wednesday the 19th) so everyone go out and buy BUY BUY! get copies for all your friends, perfect for christmas gifts!

Here's the Boop cartoon that inspired us,

BUY AMELIA

Okay, SO!

As you may know you can buy Amelia at Amazon HERE or at Createspace HERE

Now there's an exciting third option, you can buy it directly from me.
Just press the button above, or Paypal me at deniscomix@yahoo.com, 18 dollars (15 for the book and 3 for shipping), in the notes give me your address and name.

"What's the difference?" you may ask

"Well" I clear my throat and begin, "If you get from me, I'll mail it directly myself, which means I'll have time to do a little dedication for you and also throw another comic in"

"what comic?"

"Well I have all these copies of this Monsters & Girls Sampler, see"

"So, yeah" I continue, "I'll drop one of those in, while supplies last" I note, "and, since it's not on sale anywhere else, unless you see me at a comic convention, it's the only way of getting that crazy comic. That has werewolf stories, a vampire from outers-pace (who is a parody character, and I will not explain more) " I say going off on a bit of a tangent, "and a bunch of cool illustrations"

"Wow", you say, then turn to the camera

"What a deal, I will press that button right now"

APE this weekend

Hey folks,
I'll be at APE this weekend!
I'll have the Amelia graphic novel,

 Legend of the Loup-Garou,

and Bingo Baby!
I'll be at table 600A with Caitlin Plovnick,
so come check us out!

Bissette talks Amelia and Sugar Skull

Post by Stephen Bissette.

Amelia for SALE

Hey friends,
Amelia is now for sale on CreateSpace!

cover for Amelia

SO,
I'll be at APE this year, tabling with Caitlin Plovnik, October 4th and 5th, and, if all goes well I should have the complete Amelia there! I'm self-publishing through Amazon's createspace. I'm right now waiting on the proof and stuff, but I'm happy to show y'all the cover,

I'm pretty proud of it, I was having a surprisingly hard time designing the cover. For one I wanted to actually have Amelia, Sammy, and the title on the cover, unlike any of the covers for the issues. I ended up doing about 4 completed covers, including a painted one. Here's the best of the not good enough,

Writing blog roll

There's this writing blog roll thing going around. You may have heard of it, or participated in it. It has rules. Ian Richardson tagged me last week (so did Jesse Mead). Ian's a horror cartoonist and CCS graduate, one time I got insanely drunk at his house, and have been afraid of mixing wine and rum ever since. Jesse is a lovable maniac.

Since I've been tagged twice, which I'm sure is against the rules, my post will be twice as long as normal.

Okay, the questions,

1) What am I working on?

-A few things. First of all, the third issue of Monster Pie. A monster fan art zine I started with Stephen Bissette. The third issue is the first time adding Ian Richardson to the creative pool.  Mostly for that I’ve been doing monster illustrations, which I love doing.

-I also co wrote a Vampirella story with Stephen Bissette for Vampirella’s 45^th Anniversary. I can't talk about it too much, but Dynamite has announced it, and it's for a series called Faery Tales. It's also probably the weirdest Vampi comic that's ever been made!

-I’m making a 2015 calendar with Nomi Kane, called Dogs and Monsters. It’s about both of our true drawing passions.

-I’m doing illustrations for a few monster magazines, Monster! Monster! International, and sometimes Weng’s Chop, all edited by Tim Paxton.

-What else? I’m drawing a horror story that Matt Aucoin wrote, for a Boston horror comic anthology. It’s a horror story, but it’s a much different style and feel than any story I could have written.

-OH! Also, the group anthology Nymphonomena, about the strange fan reactions and making of the almost lost cult scifi genre and gender-bending 70’s movie. That’s been a long term project, we recently submitted that to the CCS book project, so we’ll see how that goes. I co-wrote one story for that with my friend, Cara Sande, and drew that story. I started to write a second story, but haven’t gotten far on it, and might not finish it, not every comic idea gets finished. We all know that.

-Ian and I have been talking about doing an anthology together, it’s still at an early stage. Bryan Stone and I have also been talking about a project…

-Final thing, I’m printing a collected Amelia, my first graphic novel. I never found a publisher for it, so I’m trying to print it in one volume by October.

-Next final thing! I shouldn’t even talk about this because I JUST started writing it, and I haven’t gotten permission from her yet. But I just started writing a comic where my character Sammy, from my graphic novel Amelia, meets Betsey Swardlick’s characters, The Failwolves, in a monster friendly diner and behaves very weirdly with them.

2)        How does my work differ from others of its genre?  

Have you read my stuff? It’s fucked up!

First of all, I’m deeply invested in making personal horror comics in the world of alt comics, which isn’t unique, but is unusual. I really don’t think anyone else devotes page after page to monster genitals penetrating and tearing each other apart the way I do. 

Other than that, I don’t know, I think I’m funny, but not like gag comics funny. One time Jeff Lok was like “try writing a joke sometime!” So I guess I'm not that funny. but I think there’s a lot of funny stuff in my comics.

Okay, here you go, this is what Stephen Bissette had to say about my work when I asked him for a quote on my thesis comic, and I still think it’s mostly true

"Denis St. John's Monsters and Girls is like some

weird, exotic multi-blend tea: at first sip, I savor a

hint of Richard Sala via Rinse Dream, then it's

overwhelmed by the bitter aftertaste of David Lynch

filming a Jack T. Chick tract in the Monogram backlot.

Last gulp, a spice imported from Charles Addams and

Wilson (hmmm, is that Gahan or S. Clay? It could be

either) malingers in the dregs at the bottom of the

cup. From steam to grounds, it all goes down in a few

gulps, and then it's too late -- I've swallowed the

whole damned thing. Here's hoping Denis has another

pot brewing -- I'm already thirsty for more!"

3)   Why do I write what I do? 

Because I must.
I write what I want because it’s what I like and want to see (hence Monsters & Girls)
I also have this whole theory. I know plenty of horror folks, and even though the world in general seems to think horror folks are messed up guys likely to commit unspeakable crimes, that isn’t how it is. They’re all the nicest most mentally healthy people. And I think it’s because they get all their inner demons out on the page (screen, latex, canvas, whatever). So to some degree I think if you’re NOT writing something truly horrible there’s something really wrong with you.

4)    How does your writing process work? 

It varies a lot between projects and depending on the length of the story. For example it took me YEARS to finish Amelia, if I had written it all in advance I would have lost interest and probably never finished it. But I also knew how it would end, and had all the basic answers by the time the first book (of 5) came out, but a lot of stuff happened organically between here and there.

So, process. Ideas come when they come, sometimes in full stories, sometimes in just images, sometimes in the bathroom. I do a lot of writing and drawing in sketchbooks and in emails to myself. If I have an idea that disturbs me in some way, I know it’s a good idea and focus on that, expanding around it. This is also the time in the process where I’m doing research, about particular monsters if I’m using already existing monsters, or places, or specific cars. Like in my Loup-Garou comic I researched a lot of the myths of the cajun werewolf. I also grew up in New Orleans, so I was trying to remember details from my own life that I could use to make the story more real. I really want to emphasize the importance of research. I hate reading a monster story and realizing the author only knew the Universal movie rules. Also, look into biology of actual animals, or history of donut shops in the Midwest, or whatever happens to come up in the story. 
Once the story kind of has a basic shape and clear idea to it, and the characters and monsters are somewhat designed (I don’t do character turn-arounds, I have no interest in that kind of cartooning), the writing becomes more organized.

I break down the story actions into pages. At this point I usually try and fit the story into a three act structure, or sooner if I’m having creative problems. I don’t believe every story needs a traditional structure, but I think it helps me figure out if the story is working and ready or not.  Even a book like Amelia, that operates a lot on dream logic, still needs some sort of form and character progression to it. Does each character change or fail to change?  That kind of thing.                                                   Then I create little thumbnail booklets, usually from stapled together letter sized pages. And break the pages down, I usually go three tiers a page.
That’s the stage where the dialogue starts to come together. Dialogue is important, and should be worked and reworked as much as possible.  Making sure it sounds natural, is in the characters voice, isn’t too long, and has enough puns. I try to avoid narration at all costs, which means I have to give my characters a lot of exposition, which can be real difficult to do and still sound natural.  Sometimes I fail at that, but every comic I write I get a little better at it.

I’ll do a lot of editing at this stage, taping new pages on when the first break down doesn’t work, adding more pages, cutting pages out. This is really the hardest stage. Then I usually scan it in, and send it off to friends who I trust to help me edit. There are a couple things I feel I need in a story, and I think I do particularly well. The ending needs to be set up somewhere hidden in the first act. But it also has to feel like a surprise to the reader. It all has to feel organic, scary, funny, and emotionally real or it’s a failure. There also has to be boobs. And at least one monster. Preferably more than one.

And on that note,
For next week I've tagged Colleen Frakes, David Yoder and Bryan Stone.
Colleen Frakes writes and draws folk-lore, true life, historical fiction, you name it!
David Yoder is awesome!
Bryan Stone is an illustrator and cartoonist, who writes sci-fi, Onions, and old people!
and I apologize to them for my terrible descriptions 

Monster! illustrations

so here's more blog posting! Here's some illustrations I've done for various issues of Monster! A pretty awesome monster magazine, you can buy back issues of it HERE





I have a lot more illustrations coming up in future issues and the first issue of Monster International! Coming SOON
Okay, so next week I'm going to post about writing.
Oh, also, just so you guys know, I co-wrote a Vampirella story that will be coming out in September! You can read the press release HERE and I'll tell you more about it as the time draws closer
so until next week...
Oh, also you can now follow me on twitter I'm @deniscomix

sketchbook pages

OOPS. I kind of forgot about this blog. Sorry if people are still reading it and expecting updates! you can go to my flickr page or my tumblr for more regular updates. But here's a bunch of sketchbook pages I've been posting.














Next update will be some of the illustrations I've been doing for Monster!

Amelia movie news!

So! big news! As the first picture should tell you. Amelia the movie is coming along, the lead has been cast! Now this is still some way from happening, we don't have a director signed yet, or an approved script (for some reason I'm not allowed to write the script*), but Christina Ricci has done the first photo tests, which I've been allowed to show. And man, these look great! Ricci is pretty perfectly cast, and they really look like they're trying to emulate the look of my comic.



*I was confused about that honestly. In the contracts I had to sign I thought I had some script approval, and I'd talked to the producers about writing the first draft, but all that seems to have changed. I maybe should have shown some one the contracts before I signed them, but I was just so excited, I mean I got to meet Christina Ricci! Well, I mean, she wasn't in the room, but she was over the phone (or so I was told, she didn't talk much), but I think I'll get to meet her. I think I'm allowed on set and stuff, if I read the contracts right. They did promise to fly me to LA sometime soon. I bought sunglasses and everything. haha.
Okay, to be honest when they sent me these awesome pictures my name wasn't on them, so I added it. I hope that's okay, I'll be waiting to see the official announcement, should be later today.

Happy St. Patricks Day!

Never drink a leprechaun's beer! Especially if the leprechaun looks like Warwick Davis!

Spider Baby for Weng's Chop

illustration for Weng's Chop 4.5

Women in Horror Month 2014 part 1

It's once again Women in Horror Month, one of my favorite months, and this year I thought I'd interview a couple cool cartoonists. Starting with my friend, Colleen Frakes!
Colleen graduated from The Center for Cartoon Studies a year ahead of me, and since then has been putting out comics at a pretty incredible rate, many of them horror themed.

Colleen and me partying together, 2011

I've interviewed Colleen about comics, life, horror, and Rocky Horror, please enjoy, and then immediately go read and buy Colleen's work!

Did you grow up reading comics? 
I grew up reading Mad Magazine, pulp paperback collections of newspaper comics, and the odd issue of "Archie" or "Ren and Stimpy" comics my parents would pick up when I was sick. I also remember getting to stay up late to watch "The Maxx" on Mtv with my Dad, and getting a few issues of the Sam Keith comic. We tended to live in rural areas where newspaper delivery wasn't an option, and I didn't know graphic novels existed until high school when I came across Jhonen Vasquez's "Johnny the Homicidal Maniac" and Tony Millionaire's "Sock Monkey" at the now-defunct O'Leary's Comics and Books in Tacoma.

How did your life before Vermont lead you to The Center for Cartoon Studies?
Before Vermont I attended The Evergreen State College which has a unique program that puts a lot of emphasis on self-directed learning and self-motivation. It turned out that when left to my own devices all I wanted to do was draw comics. I wrote a one-quarter independent contract where I just tried to figure out HOW to make comics using Scott McCloud's books and circa-2002 internet advice, and ended up with this 20-page mixed media monstrosity on 11x14 illustration board. It was pretty clear that if this was really what I wanted to do for a living, I was going to need help. I applied for grad school both at SCAD and CCS. I was accepted to both, CCS ended up feeling like the better option.

I remember similarly trying to figure out how to make comics in college, and stitching together a hardcover book with original art sewn in for an assignment. They should really teach people how to make mini comics sometime earlier in life. 
Seriously! I can remember so many projects in Elementary school that were essentially "make a book" without any discussion of the parts of a book or layout or anything. I'd rather have gotten that than all the diorama knowledge now taking up space in my brain.

I also applied at CCS and another comics school, Joe Kubert. But CCS seemed so much more interesting, and I think I made a much better choice. I feel like a lot has already been said about CCS and that's not what I want this interview to focus on, BUT since this is a horror themed interview I will say if you're into horror CCS is a pretty great place to go, compared to other comics schools. Would you agree?
I think so, at least given the current faculty. Though a few new schools and programs have popped up since I applied to CCS almost ten years ago, it looks like there's something for every creator now!

Visually your comics are very striking, combining beautiful images sometime with violence that you don't seem to shrink away from. For instance one of your werewolf comics has a pretty bloody image as part of the story. Can you talk about the evolution of your style? Do you think about varying it from comic to comic? 
Well thank you! I don't always feel like I have control over my style, don't think about it much, and I always find other people's reactions to it interesting. Sometimes I'll draw two characters that, to me, look completely different, but then I find other people can't tell them apart. It's just evolved naturally through repetition. If my math is right, between college and CCS graduation I drew 412 pages of comics. Since then it's been over 600. At some point in there a style just kind of found me.

Some of my choices are deliberate- Early in my career I was told off for drawing characters with "dot eyes", told that they would never be expressive enough. This just made me more committed to always dot eyes. I started my creative career as a playwright in high school, and tend to draw panels simply and at eye-level without a lot of camera angles, like on a stage. I use mainly black and white with large areas of spot black because color is expensive, there are a lot of things I can't draw well, and spot blacks cover those up while looking dramatic. I started off doing mainly silent comics because lettering is difficult, time-consuming, and I don't enjoy it. While I've tried to push myself, move away from some of these crutches and grow as an artist, a lot of have stuck around because they work for me. 

Once you've learned how to tell a silent story I think you'll always be better at visual story telling, it's a skill that will still be used in comics with dialogue and narration, and a skill not every cartoonist has. Do you have any advice for folks who are looking to improve their visual story telling? 

I think the best way to improve any storytelling is to consume stories- read, watch movies, attend performances. And seek out things you wouldn't normally- it can be trendy to talk shit about modern dance or mime, but both those are visual storytelling. 

What are your weapons of choice, by that I mean what tools do you use?
My tools are:

Bee Paper Company's 100lb. Vellum Bristol (I prefer Bee because their papers are milled in the US)
Speedball ink and Rosemary and Co. Kolinsky Sable series 22, size 2 brush 

Pentel Pocket brush pen

Zebra Disposable Brush Pens from the Diaso for lettering and a lot of quick comics intended for the web. 

Any old mechanical pencils and erasers, I keep a lot of these around because I swear they grow legs and wander off!

Those Rosemary and Co. brushes are great, I bought some with you and used them for years! I'm still using them, but they're long passed their prime. How long do you use a brush? I also have the same difficulty with mechanical pencils, what's that about?
I use a brush until I feel like I'm fighting with it to get a good line, when they start to split or lose their elasticity, then they go into the "old brush" pile to use for spot blacks and dry brush work. On that note, I really hate the saying "it's a poor artist that blames his tools". Bad tools produce bad work, or at least make it harder to produce good work! 

Story wise you seem to divide your stories between auto-bio and folk tale adaptations. What appeals to you about folk tales? Do you consider the writing of the two genres different? How much of your own personal license do you allow in the folk tale adaptations? One thing that struck me with Three Werewolf stories is you tried to find werewolf rules we aren't used to hearing about, like the tomatoes thing, which is kind of hilarious. How was the research on that? What other weird ones did you use?
The thing that draws me to both fold/fairy tales and autobio stories is a desire to preserve the past. I first started drawing fairy tales after a college seminar where is it was revealed that most of my classmates had never heard of a lot of the stories or folk characters I was familiar with- Baba Yaga, the Basket Ogress, Blue Jay stories, I was disturbed by the idea of these oral traditions disappearing. Same thing with autobio- I avoided it for a lot of years, but when it became apparent that a big part of my personal history (McNeil Island) was just going be abandoned and closed off, I felt the need to preserve it. And the only way I know how to do that is through comics and storytelling.

With autobio I try to be as accurate as possible, though some things are condensed or edited for the sake of clarity or believability (the truth is sometimes just too ridiculous, and even after toning it down I get a lot of "did that REALLY happen?" responses). With the fairy tale adaptations, because they're based on oral traditions when the story changes a little between each person, I allow myself a lot of license. Also, to the complete opposite of my autobio work, I tend to revel a bit in the absurd details and the violence of traditional fairy tales. Evil sister gives birth to a scorpion as punishment for Just Being Evil? That's hilarious! Tomatoes cause werewolfism? Okay! You pissed off these three heads floating in a well and now every time you talk you're gonna spit frogs and snakes? Kinda awesome!

Not gonna lie, the jumping off point for all of my research is Wikipedia, then from there I go looking for more source material. Working for a library makes this easy and fun. 

For my own werewolf comics I've always tried to find something interesting, like the cajun werewolf myth that's completely connected with catholic guilt. There's just so many more interesting variations of things like werewolves and vampires, it always makes me frustrated or disappointed when I see the same rules over and over. The rules that are more based on Universal movies than anything ancient. Did you get anything like the basket ogress told to you as a threat when you were a kid?

The idea of "rules" in monster stories, and they way people get SO UPSET if you "change the rules" (e.g. Twilight)  is kinda funny. These creatures are all fiction. We can do whatever we want with them! It's not like if you change the werewolf rules, a real werewolf is gonna come along and sue you.

The Basket Ogress story was read to me by my Dad when I was a kid, but not as a threat, just as part of a book of PNW Native Folklore.  

Do you think of yourself as a fan of horror? Can you talk a little about horror influences?
I consider myself a horror fan, and consider a lot of fairy tales TO BE horror stories (seriously, those things are just full of monsters and dead babies). I read a lot of Stephen King when I was probably too young to, watched horror movies edited for TV with my little sister, my Dad was a fan of old radio shows and I remember being freaked out by a dramatization of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" as well as "X-1" and "CBS Radio Mystery Theater". Lately "Welcome to Night Vale" has been a huge influence in the same vein- Denis, do you listen to that show? Denis!!

Honestly, I haven't yet. I have the first few episodes on my itunes, but haven't started them yet. I guess I need to. Anything else I should be listening to or watching? 
"Welcome to Night Vale" is the main thing I've been evangelizing lately. I just started watching "Hannibal", though at this point I'm more interested in the color palettes than anything else.

I know you have some history with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, can you talk about that?

Sure! My parents were fans of the movie and use to go to midnight showings at Whitman College, at some point around 4th grade during our latch-key kid years (is that still a thing?) my sister and I came across a cassette tape of the soundtrack and wore that out, found a VHS of the movie and would watch that (fast forwarding to get to the songs) and John Water's "Crybaby" like every day after school. In High School I started attending midnight showings every Saturday at the Blue Mouse Theater in Tacoma, and joined the local RHPS fanclub in order to stay out past city curfew- Tacoma had a midnight curfew at the time for under 18's, but there were a few diners that would  let you stay until 2am with a "T-Town Trannies" ID card. The group has since changed their name to the "Blue Mouseketeers" to avoid the offensive term, and only performs twice a month. Attending these midnight shows helped me feel like I was part of a community during some of the most crushingly lonely periods of my life, and this desire for community is a large part of what's kept me in comics even during the times when making comics just felt So Hard.

Really, the RHPS got me interested in theater, and theater led to comics. Though the "don't dream it, be it" motto has stuck with me. 

What are your upcoming projects and convention plans? 

Upcoming projects include the "Nymphonomena" anthology (my favorite comic with a RHPS-like tie in), and finishing several long-form work like Basket Ogress and Island Brat.

After that, I have a science fiction webcomic in the wings, though my only goals for that project are to have fun, draw because I enjoy it, and maybe stop being so depressing.

I'm trying to cut back on conventions in 2014 in order to finish up some of those longer projects, but will be exhibiting at Emerald City Comicon in Seattle (March 28-29) and the Small Press Expo in Bethesda MD (Sept 13-14), and plan to apply to the Short Run Festival in Seattle (Nov 15th). 

I'm working on Nymphonomena with you, and I'm not sure how much we should talk about it, but I love this project and it's been going on for so long! I think I drew my graphic novel quicker than this project! Anyone interested can look at Nymphonomena.com. 

Now Basket Ogress you've worked on before, are you working from pages you've already done, or starting over?

I've been working on Basket Ogress since 2009. Little work has been done on the project since 2011 when I took a break to submit it to publishers and got some very nice rejection letters. There are two chapters left (remember, the last issue ended with the revelation that there was one more monster left to fight!) then I plan to self-publish it as graphic novel. 

Where can people buy your comics?

You can buy stuff from me at my website:

tragicrelief.com

Through these web retailers:
http://treesandhills.org/
http://secretacres.com/?wpsc-product=island-brat-by-colleen-frakes

Wholesale through Tony Shenton:
http://shenton4sales.tumblr.com/

And here are the stores that have ordered from me recently:

Phoenix Comics (Seattle)

Jim Hanley's (NYC)

Boxcar Books (Bloomington)
Chicago Comics and Quimby's (Chicago)

Fantastic Comics (Berkley) 

Thank you, Denis!

Thank you Colleen!