Move almost done, also, a few decent illustrations

Based on this illustration by Tabary. I never was the biggest fan of Iznogoud but it's one of these cases where after Goscinny stopped on it and Tabary kept going, the comic turned for the better (unlike Lucky Luke and Asterix). The more paranoiac-depressive Iznogoud gets, the best it is.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

More after the jump.




This one's actually one of the few I'm kind of pleased with, on the technical end. Again, it would stand to get another render/detail pass if I wanted it to look more convincing, but for what it is, I'm glad to have developed the skill and speed to do this sort of work.

In other news, I bought a bed and a desk and I'm moving out of here and in the new apartment, hopefully until Thursday max. I'm really looking forward to it, as we (roommate and I) have created quite a nice living space there and this is the sort of change that's good for me. I'll post a few pictures after we're done settling in.

-Helm
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Recent work that I forgot to post

Esteemed mr. Sarkozy and wife take a tour of Libya.


Greek business owners in anguish

Tina mpirmpili, Greek Environmental Minister in contrasting political shades

Daughter of politics and elder vampire father despair over recent poll figures. Yet they always survive.


Of the lot I am partial to the greek businessmen one. For once it printed large and very clear. Also, I utilized my comic art skills more than on the more painterly pieces I've been doing recently. I enjoy utilizing the skills I'm most familiar with, so it's a constant back-and-forth between painterly pieces I'm slowlhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gify getting a handle on and more confident but perhaps styleclashing comic ink & color pieces. I'll follow both muses, split myself in half. From the husk a better man emerges.

Also if you're interested in Helmlife, there's a post in Poetry of Subculture which has more to do with that than with the Gods of Steel, so go, go!

I am listening to King Diamond's "Them". It is very good. What are you enjoying, readers?


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More work, ZX update, more 'what I did', et cetera

Click and click again for larger sizes.

First one is a 'nobody wants to be in charge when they pieces fall' type of thing, the second makes more sense for you foreigner savages if you look at a geographical map of Greece. The person doing the hacking is the esteemed mr. Papakonstantinou, featured once before.

As usual, if any of these strike a chord with the reader, feel free to link them around and whatnot. This is the purpose of political commentary.

Strangely, streamlining my process (to make increasingly hard deadlines) called for a return to digital inking, and a more watercolor type of soft wash. In any case, I'm getting faster/(better?). I regret how the second image is a photo trace, but deadline ridiculous called for 'anything that works' measures.

On other news! I've finally inked half of the missing chapter of ZX. Four out of the eight pages are done right now. The two first are introductory vignettes (seriously ten minutes to draw each), the middle two are heavy duty proper inking proper pages of proper artistry, then there's two sparser Eisner-ian pages that won't take too long to do. And then there's the final page, a comic strip I have in the past been torn on whether to do or not, to give a 'full circle' feel to the comic. I'd say I'm almost halfway with my final obligations towards this comic. Here's a teaser image of one of the more challenging inked pages.


Clicking for bigger sizes will prove fruitless. Buy the comic instead!

I'm proud of how this one in particular turned out. Hopefully next week, at the most the week after that, I'll be putting my final ink stains on ZX. And not a moment too soon, as we'll be going to the printers right after, and on the 8th of April it'll be for sale at Comicdom con. (I'll be posting more about this as the time approaches).

On other other news, one-coining ESP Galuda must have given me extra strength, because this week I managed to defeat an old foe of mine, Dodonpachi. Here's how this old devil plays, to give you an idea.



Actually it wasn't the second wind from finishing Galuda that pushed this one over the edge after years and years of playing. It was Ptoing (fellow shooter aficionado) telling me in conversation that I should switch from the red - laser ship to blue - shot ship, if I want to survive the first loop. So I did, and after a few days of re-training (blue ship is slower and its laser is much, much weaker than I have been used to) I one-coined this one as well! I bombed the hell out of the last boss. Let's just say that if DDP had auto-bomb on bullet proximity, I'd have finished the first loop years ago.

This is meaningless to the reader not familiar with the joys and frustrations of really hard video-games (or really hard hobbies in general, I'd expect) but it's a significant event in the lives of those given to such vices. I've been playing DDP off and on for what feels like at least six years, but it could be seven or eight too. To finally achieve some closure on such an endeavor has surprising psychological benefits. I feel like I can beat up a mountain right now. It's no wonder I inked for twelve hours in the span of two days. When I finished ESP Galuda I was somewhat "meh" about it, but here, after I got the Game Over screen there was straight-up primal hollering and sweaty adrenaline airfists and everything. Yes I realize that saying such things to the internet drastically increases my chances of sleeping alone for a long, long time to come, but hey. I'm Helm, I'm (trying to feel) fine with myself, how are you doing?

My fucking credentials, son



May the long-beaked stoic one reside in the pantheon forever!


Reality check: This is a small victory, as veteran arcade shooter players know. There's of course, a full second loop of Dodonpachi after the first one, which one is granted access too only on specialized conditions (scoring over 50,000,0000 points, only dying once or twice, getting all the hidden score items in at least four stages, that sort of thing). This second loop is somewhat harder than the first and at the end of it you face the true boss of the game, Hibachi.



Here's however that I draw a line. I'm not an obsessive achiever, I played DDP for all this time because it's a fun game to me, it seems perfectly balanced at the exact edge where my skill runs out and just before frustration sets in. I probably will still play it on and off, perhaps improve my score a bit here and there, but I'm completely resigned to that defeating the boss above is beyond my projected skill even years down the line. I have better things to do than train DDP every day concentrated for months (or possibly years) to achieve an one-coin two loop clear. So be happy for me for getting halfway there while still retaining some semblance of a social existence.

Let's see, what else did I do in the days between this and my last post? Did I post this?


I'm not helping my case with these projects, am I?


-Helm
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More recent work

"Troika rep: Excellent cuisine... you owe me one hundred and eighty euro!"

This is topical to a specific situation where representatives of Troika went to have a luxurious dinner in a Greece ravaged by severe economic legislation. But in a way, quite universal as well.


Ex-president Hosni Mubarak. This is a couple of weeks old, it was drawn while he was still in power. Good riddance.

Below the jump, ink and airbrush versions because I like to show steps.







I quite enjoy airbrush work of this type.



I generally prefer my black and white linework to the colored versions I do for work, but for this one I tried a few more soft-color techniques that I think worked out pretty well and look quite hand-made, so I guess I'm getting the hang of it.



... but all this is just a diversion. What you should be really reading is the post below. What I need to know is about the strength of your love.
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If this world is a hallucination, Facebook's like that trip within a trip

Speaking of tripping, esteemed ex-prime minister Mr. Simitis in unpleasant shades of puke. Reference. I tried a gradient map this time (these last few ones are drawn in grayscale first) instead of multiply & overlay layer, it has this particular clean 'graphic design' look to it. Then I did the sweaty highlights on top, it's a simpler piece but I rather like the end result.




So I joined Necronomicon-Facebook and connected (and re-connected in a few cases) with friends and acquaintances from the past. It's a weird thing, to see the faces of people you haven't seen in ages, see them all grown-up and yet still have an internal representation of them as kids. Unsettling, really. I walked around in a haze of "what year is it?" all day yesterday.

Anyway, the predominant comment I got from disparate sources was something along the lines of "you're the last person I ever expected to join Facebook". Well apparently I am the last person to have joined Facebook because they locked registration right after me, so that's a redundant comment on the factual level (this is a lie). Secondarily though, as to the spirit of the comment, it's really fascinating to me the sort of guilt those statements have behind them. Do you guys not want to be on Facebook? I don't like the dark corporate forces behind the service either and I don't intend to make it my new god, but I don't think that's what the comment is about. I think these people feel guilty for wasting too much time on Facebook and they're distraught to see yet another victim fall in the hole.

I'm very aware of what I am going to use Facebook for and for how much. I'm not going to play farmville compulsively or stalk highschool almost-girlfriends. Is the supposed indignation over a perceived shift in my ideology that allows for this new Facebook Helm? I'm afraid I might have come off as like a hardline vegan or whatever when it comes to some communicational platforms I've decided not to use in the past, like cellphones or facebook. I use others (I am on an irc channel constantly, for example and have been for almost ten years now, I employ three e-mail adresses and their respective instant messenger services). I help run two widely-used forums. I know how to use these things. First time I talked with a stranger on the internet, it was in ICQ - do you remember that can't-take-it-back-now chat client in it where it showed the other person as you typed each individual letter, as opposed to the whole string when you pressed return? You couldn't edit your words, you had to think on your feet. That was cybercore, not this Facebook devil.

Okay, so, it'd be a lie to say that there's no ideology in my not having been on Facebook for this long. I think it's more a case of doing first, rationalizing why I did it second, mostly. I simply thought I didn't need it to be a good friend and keep in touch. I had telephone numbers and msn addresses, right?

Well, wrong. I've come to slowly realize that a lot of people I would like to communicate with have migrated fully to that service and have trouble keeping in touch otherwise. It really seems just picking up the phone and cold-calling someone you want to talk to is becoming more and more difficult. Instant messengers still get a lot of use but try keeping your contracts in order when you've got a hundred business connections there along with friends and people who just added you and perhaps said one thing to you, ever. So instead of hermiting down and getting off of the internet (my usual fantasy), I've made yet another account for yet another internet thing. Am I glad that a scary corporation will keep my corpse alive on Facebook even long after I've been on this world? Not really, though it's a perhaps morbidly fascinating idea on some level. Am I worried about my privacy? Not that narcissistic, really - I don't think anyone will care about me being in this picture or that besides the people that I wanted to look at those pictures anyway. I'll nevertheless be careful with what's I put on there just because that early-internet-adopter paranoia is hard to shake off. I generate my ten-digit passwords randomly with assorted utilities for Christ's sake. I've almost read half of the car-crash that is Snow Crash, I've pondered on the digitization of the soul, I'm not afraid of fucking Facebook.

(Though I am. I am really scared of how it shows me how faulty my memory for faces and names is.)

The lesson I need to learn is I suppose, to not frame my utilitarian choices in an ideological facade (wait, mixed metaphor) -- I'm actually not sure if it's wholly my fault or that people prefer to interpret me in that way, but it's something to keep in mind. And I am looking forward to when the internet migrates to some new variation of Facebook that isn't owned by some evil corporation - and then five years after the rest of the world, when Greece will also adopt it. That'll be nice. Until then, my name's in the dead book.
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Playing with History

Greek minister of Education makes history an opt-in course in the last two years of highschool. Drama ensues. Small moves lead to bigger repercussions.

I wish I had a few more hours to render the kariatides statues, but all in all I'm please with the piece. I appreciate the cruel slapstic of capturing this exact moment in the picture, before the real mess. The "oh nooooo!" factor.

On other news, today was a difficult day but tomorrow will be better, and the next day after that, hopefully. Sense of balance will be restored, I'll have to keep working on it. Sorry for being cryptic, more of a personal reminder when I read back on my posts a few years from now, perhaps.

-Helm
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Here's one I had absolutely no ethical compunctions about

When I got this job I used to joke how I wish they'd let me draw mr. Pagkalos. He's a Greek politician of our 'socialist' party, PASOK. He's a very special breed of person. Here's what he looks like:



The reason I wanted to draw him is not because he's fat or funny looking. It's because he's one of the few Greek politicians I've noticed displaying outright cruelty, malice, base hatred fueled by so much cynicism he almost becomes a real-life caricature of the scheming opportunist politician -- until one realizes he is an influential person that used to make, and is poised to make again, very ruinous decisions that affect the future of a whole country. It's not so funny then.

So Mr. Pagkalos recently went on record about all Greek civil servants, that they are "mutts" and that if he (and his government) are at fault for embezzling public funds, then these citizens are as much if not more so at blame for going along with it for their slice of the pie. The stunning implications of such a statement are, as the internet says, stunning. Such a statement would be career suicide in most other countries, but not in Greece. Greece is in serious peril, but Greece isn't serious.

So here's a caricature of a caricature. The drawing is powerless. Mr. Pagkalos will matter more in geopolitical terms than anything any sane person can do to make the Greek situation better.


"At least I am of a certain pedigree"

First drawing of the year. Happy 2011.

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