I cannot believe this is the first post of 2013...then I look back and I see I didn't post anything in 2012! Well, I must admit that Facebook had stolen me away for awhile. Things have been happening though, all in a good sense. Tom Sniegoski and I are collecting our Dogs-O-War mini-series, originally published by Crusade Entertainment, into a beautiful soft cover collection featuring a new cover by me and a few never before seen pin-ups and character designs. The graphic novel should be delivered in time for FREE Comic Book Day this Saturday. For this event, I will be at Mike Murray's comic Shop in Agawam, MA along with local artist Christopher Peck and Scott Hanna. It should be a fun day as we sell our books, hand out freebies and sketch for the fans coming by. So along with collecting the Collection and digitally coloring the Freebie book, I've also been working with Christopher Peck on his War Dog book. Chris is an amazing talent and I'm proud to call him a friend. I've been designing his book along with lettering it and providing color to his covers. I've also done quite a bit of freelance work this past year, especially for a large insurance company. that's was a short deadline project, but it was a lot of fun and a lot of hours. I hope you like the new art and I will check back in and let you know how FCBD went! Cheers.

The Fury Splash Page

Here is the finished Fury splash page written by Mike Dobbs, pencilled, lettered and toned by myself and inked by Bill Anderson!

Enjoy

James Robert Smith and his writings

Not much to be said that hasn't been in this article except Bob Smith is a wonderful man, a friend and a great collaborator.

Cheers

The Living End...The Graphic Novel

It's been months that I talked with writer James Robert Smith about adapting his novel The Living End into a graphic novel. Our first foray was adapting his novel, The Flock, into a GN but once the rights were signed over to Warner Bros for the movie deal, all publishing rights went away. After having an early Winter storm that knocked out our power, and still has, I found myself with time to sit and take one of the more picturesque scenes in Bob's novel and lay it out as thumbnails. I changed the zombie money shot a little bit, but I still think it works very well. My goal was to also give our dog star BC, a little more personality, especially with ear, eye and tail positioning. I think he's a huge star!

Fury Update!

Editor-in-Chief Steve Bissette really liked the Fury piece, but he did want to see a few edits. One was dropping the half-face device popularized by Steve Ditko during his run on Spider-Man in the 1960's. SRB felt it was too much of an homage so I drew in the entire characters face. One idea to hit home that this main character was The Fury-in-training was to have the floating head motiff popularized in the 1970's by such stalwarts as John Buscema and Gil Kane. Able Bill Anderson sent me over some reference and I got to draw the entire Fury mask. But now what to do with the credits circle? Easy! Tack it up on the telephone pole! It was an empty spot so I curved the Fury logo and sketched in the creator credits. Now it's time for Able Bill Anderson to work his ink magic.

N-Man & The Fury!

Hello and welcome to "Mark finally draws something!" I've been very busy over the past few months designing and promoting the Panel To Panel book you see on earlier posts. Recently I was asked to provide a pin-up for Mike Dobbs' The Fury script. I've known Marvelous Mike for a long time and I was excited to work with him, so here is the splash page for The Fury's Day Off. The Fury ©Stephen R. Bissette. Speaking of Steve, last year saw me pencilling a couple covers and a 5 page N-Man story. Steve graciously offered to ink these pages and now we see the first Masztal/Bissette team-up! I used the pen name Wild Mark Hare after a signature style I used way back in high-school. Steve brought a different light to my tight pencils...and I like it!

More Panel to Panel from Paint & Pixel

Here are some more images from Paint & Pixel, a couple promo pieces I had promoting P2P and a nice shot me and my friend Phil Owen. That's me on the left, before my severe hair cut of this past weekend.

Cheers