Over the past few months, I’ve drawn strips featuring a long-eared basset hound puppy. My neighbor adopted a basset puppy and he’s about the most adorable thing on the planet! I’m naming him Spud, after my brother’s beloved mutt. If you’d like to see Spud’s strips you can find them here:
Hey folks, just a note to let you know I’m on Instagram! I’ve got lots of Zombie Boy comic strips on there, and the swipe format is great for reading panels! If you want, you can follow me here. See y’all over there!
Mark Stokes by Dan McMahan
My pal, Dan McMahan drew me recently and I wanted to share it with you guys. Dan is a caricature artist’s caricature artist, his work is instantly recognizable and he’s one of the fastest drawers on the planet! You can follow Dan on Twitter. Thanks, Dan!
Self-doubt and anxiety are common denominators among creative people. Seems these things go hand in hand. In the end I think the only thing that matters is what we accomplish, not what we could or should have done if only those little doubts and fears hadn’t crept up. It’s very heroic of us to smite those fears down not only to do the work, but to share it with others. Creating is a process, and for me, overcoming those feelings is part of that process. Few of us ever look at something creative we really admire and think: “I wonder what the creator had to overcome to put this work together? Did they doubt themselves? Were they paralyzed by their own insecurities?” Did Michelangelo ever have “one of those days”? After all is said and done, none of those things matter much, do they? It’s the work that says it all.
Here’s a short animated clip from a cartoon I created featuring Bippo, a mascot character created for Krashpow Studios. This short film was an homage to those bouncy cartoons from the early 30s from studios like Disney, Ub Irwerks, and Warner Bros. Bubble-headed Bippo has that rubbery appeal of characters like Bosky, Oswald the Rabbit and Flip the Frog. This short was inked and painted onto cels, complete with a hand painted background, and it was shot on a 35mm camera stand. Unfortunately, the actual film itself has been lost, and all I have now is a low res digital transfer. Still, it’s fun to watch!