3 days left in the Sparkplug Books Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12! Virginia Paine has announced that if we get $2,000 over our goal, Sparkplug will be able to publish a Yumi Sakugawa mini.
I originally drew this four-page comic for J.T. Yost’s Digestate anthology in July 2012. I used a lot of patterns from Vortex for it.
Click here to see the rest of The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard.
We’re entering the final week of the Sparkplug Books Kickstarter for Vortex and Reich #12. Thanks so much for all the generosity in links and pledges that y’all have shared with us so far, I really appreciate it!
As you probably know, we only get your pledges when we meet or surpass our goal of $6,450 by 11:29am CDT on Friday, October 3rd. Your support will get us there!
We’ve added some new rewards during our campaign that may intrigue y’all:
One 13×16″ CMYK digital print on semi-gloss photo paper with white border. Colors will be slightly different because of the printing process. Ships rolled in a tube with a pair of 3d anaglyph red and blue glasses.
And you can still get the complete print Vortex for just $20 or an original, custom acrylic painting by me for $250.
Your help will make these books a reality – if you’d like to see a print Vortex collection or the end of Reich, please consider buying a reward or sharing our project on social media.
Sparkplug Books is running a Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12. I’m doing a series of blog posts called The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard that show how the protagonist of Vortex has evolved over the years.
The rest of this hiizzztory is going to be comics that I did for anthologies but haven’t posted here yet. I did this Miizzzard comic, Miizzzard Munch, in December 2011 as bonus content for Cate Wurtz’s downloadable comic Lamezine 001. I sent Cate a super wide horizontal png for the comic but I’ll break it up into pages for y’all:
Sparkplug Books is running a Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12. I’m doing a series of blog posts called The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard that show how the protagonist of Vortex has evolved over the years.
In early 2011 I started but never finished a new Miizzzard comic. I planned to draw the whole thing in Photoshop and then color it like my acrylic paintings. Particularly, I wanted to tell the story of a battle between the Miizzzard and the Wojrollox, as depicted in this 2010 painting:
The Wojrollox Chomps the Miizzzard; the Miizzzard Attacks with Frogheads and Laser Vision
Here are the first 11 pages of the story:
I drew all these “pencils” in less than an hour in January 2011. I was going to go back later and color them but I never did. I’m not sure why I didn’t keep going on this comic after I exhausted my initial wave of excitement. I think that all that coloring seemed too time consuming. In June 2011 I started Vortex on a whim. I revisited the idea of coloring a comic like my paintings for Skew (with a much more simple process) and recycled part of the plot for my comic for Future Shock #7.
Sparkplug Books is running a Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12. I’m doing a series of blog posts called The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard that show how the protagonist of Vortex has evolved over the years.
In 2009 and 2010 I switched from longer comics like Hyperbox to one-page comics because I was submitting to newsprint anthologies like Smoke Signal and Secret Prison. In 2009 I also got a Wacom tablet and MangaStudio and made the switch from ink drawing to pixel drawing. It’s saved me so much time that I spent scanning and fixing things in Photoshop! The main danger of digital drawing is the allure of endless undos.
Here are some one-page Miizzzard comics that were part of a larger series of loosely connected one- and two-page comics called ATTACKS:
First appearance of the Floating Crystal Witch and the current look of the Miizzzard. Originally published online by Reynard Seifert at hahaclever.com.
The sequel to the previous comic. Originally published online by Jason Leivian at Arthur Mag.
The end of this first trilogy of comics about the Miizzzard and the Floating Crystal Witch. I drew this in black and white in 2010 to submit to Taffy Hips, but it was the wrong size. Josh Burggraf colored it for me as a Christmas surprise in 2012.
Hi y’all, we’re past the halfway point of the Sparkplug Fall Books Kickstarter to crowdfund the collected Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12!
First of all, a big Thank You to everyone who’s backed our project so far!!! At over $2,000, we’re almost a third of the way funded. If you’re unfamiliar with Kickstarter, we only see a cent when we meet or surpass our goal of $6,450 by October 3rd. Your help will make these books a reality – if you’d like to see a print Vortex collection or the end of Reich, please consider buying a reward or sharing our project on social media. We appreciate it!
Two of the rewards that we’re offering are my original art – a 9×12″ India ink drawing or a 2×3′ full-color acrylic painting. These rewards are for a new, custom work (I’ll take your requests for imagery) but I thought I’d post some examples of my previous work:
Hypermorph #103 – 9×12″ India ink drawing.
The Rise of the Miizzzards – 2.5×4′ acrylic painting.
If some original artwork interests you, we’re offering it at a discount through the Kickstarter – $75 for the 9×12″ India ink drawing and $250 for the 2×3′ acrylic painting.
Sparkplug Books is running a Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12. I’m doing a series of blog posts called The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard that show how the protagonist of Vortex has evolved over the years.
The look of the Miizzzard and my drawing style changed in 2007. I switched from a bamboo brush and India ink to Faber Castelli marker and brush pens. I also used the computer to color a lot more. Here are two full-color Miizzzard drawings from the fall of 2007:
I think I wrote “The Miizzzard Returns” because I had recently moved back to Austin, but it could also be because I hadn’t drawn the Miizzz in a while.
The Miizzzard is riding the Lizzard. Sometimes the Lizzard has a crystal head. And the Miizzz is smoking because I used to smoke a pack a day?! So glad I quit in March 2009.
In December 2007 I started my third mini-comic series, Hyperbox (the first two were Omni, with Lanneau White, and Trash). Hyperbox features my semi-autobiographical character Mark. In Hyperbox #1, Mark gets teleported to the Hyperverse and meets the Miizzzard. Here’s that issue minus the postlude that leads into the second issue:
The frog character was originally from the comics I did for the University of Texas student newspaper, The Daily Texan. My series was called Fists: Free for All. Most of those strips are incomprehensible. Subsequent issues of Hyperbox bring in the Lizzard, the Wojrollox, and the Space Yetis. I had a plan for the fourth and final issue but I never drew it. It would’ve brought the Miizzzard back into the story. Maybe one day…
Sparkplug Books is running a Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12. I’m doing a series of blog posts called The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard that show how the protagonist of Vortex has evolved over the years.
When Lanneau White and I performed in January of 2007 and I debuted my Miizzzard persona, we gave out a mini comic called Omni. It contains what may be the first comic appearance of the Miizzzard. In this story, the Miizzz is born when Tarpman drowns Mark P. Hensel in a tarp (all drawn in india ink with a brush):
Omni Page 10.
Omni Page 11.
Omni Page 12.
Omni Page 13.
Omni Page 14.
Omni Page 15.
In that drawing of the Miizzzard on the last page, I’m just drawing myself in costume. Here’s a closeup of the Miizzzard mask I wove from a February 2007 video still:
Next post: Hyperbox #1!
Sparkplug Books is running a Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12. I’m doing a series of blog posts called The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard that show how the protagonist of Vortex has evolved over the years.
I’ve been portraying the Miizzzard in various forms and media since at least January 2007. The oldest Miizzzard documentation that I can find now is these photos from a performance art piece that Lanneau White and I did that month. Here we are assembling a hyper gate:
The Miizzzard is on the left in the brown corduroy jacket and red, Karl Sapien (Lanneau’s persona) is on the right with the green skeleton mask.
The Miizzzard began as my performance art persona. I took a lot of performance art classes in college, mainly under Mike Smith, and then after school I continued to do performance and video art for a few years. Here’s one of the only videos I did then that I’m still into, with a text intro from July 2007:
The moon was low and large and distant in the sky. The inter-dimensional machineries churned to keep the Trans-Dimensional Hypercastle in place, and the haze produced fuzzed the moon, as if she were the ghostly final slice of a peach. The crystalline lattice of fluorescent blue light tubes slowly unfolded under the heavy-lidded lunar gaze. It seemed to be grasping at the whole of night.
The Miizzzard walked up to it and began to play his Hyper-Crystal Mind-Organ…
I had a brief infatuation with weaving in late 2006 and early 2007, when I made the Miizzzard’s mask and other fabric scraps:
The name of the Miizzzard comes from Roy Wood’s Wizzard’s Brew album:
My first blog post in May 2007 was about the origins of the Miizzz:
The Miizzzard no longer exists. He died circa 400,000 B.C.E. while trying to discover the transformative secrets of the Space Yetis.
His ghost haunts the digital realm and possesses various weavings and synthetic fabrics in the material world in an attempt to recreate Scriabin’s ‘Mysterium,’ a Gesamtkunstwerk that destroys this earth to give birth to another.
He is a figment, a warm bowl of minty fig meat topped with a spoonful of cold jellied plum.
I have also heard that, although he has lived out only twenty-three years, the path that he traces thru spacetime is discontinuous: he shook to Marie Curie’s radioactive boogaloo, procured pamphlets from Le Sony’r Ra in Chicago, was a starving outcast with Grettir Armundarson on Drang Isle and pissed blue thanks to Yves Klein. His last known location was drunk out of his mind at the Deep Eddy Cabaret, singing karaoke alongside the shade of Rrose Selavy.
All we can know for sure is that he’s a weird guy.
More hiizzztory next week!
Yesterday Sparkplug Books launched a Kickstarter campaign for their fall books: Reich #12 and Vortex.
I’m super stoked about this! Vortex will collect all four mini comics in a definitive edition with a cover by my partner Glade Hensel:
More preview images on my Tumblr. I’ll continue to post previews here and there throughout the campaign.
I started Vortex, my first graphic novel, on June 4th, 2011 and I’m looking forward to holding a copy in my pixel-stained hands. This summer I’ve poured over every page, fixing mistakes, editing some text, messing with the patterns, and redrawing pages. I’m really proud of the final book and, if you like psychedelic sf, I think you’ll dig it! Please support this campaign with a share or a preorder. I’d really appreciate it!
