Sex, Drugs and Candy Canes: The Santa Claus Story

My Graphic Novel is available digitally on Amazon!

I actually finished this at the start of the year, so I'd just missed Christmas 2013 and waited to put it out during this season.  Here's the official synopsis.

The true untold story of Santa Claus with all the sex, drugs, and violence Bing Crosby didn't want you to know about. 

In 1964 Kris Kringle is killed by the mob for welching on a gambling debt and it's up to his estranged nephew, Santa Claus, to take over the mantle as Christmas gift giver. Content to live out his life on a government pension and a cash settlement from a bus accident, Santa has no interest in such things. But when his wife, Sasha, accidentally kills a neighbour with some questionable baked goods, forcing them on the lam, the North Pole seems as good a place as any to hide out. Those living arrangements come with a price though and now Santa and Sasha have to race the clock as they search for the magic sack, conjure the elves and track down the reindeer, while staying alive and free against mobsters, yetis, the feds and a slew of other dangers. But was it really Sasha's baking that killed their neighbour? And if not, who or what did? 

  Here're the first 5 pages of it!

  The idea for the book snowballed(no pun intended) as many of my ideas do, out of a doodle.  I drew Santa with a sexy Mrs. Claus and some twisted evil looking elves trudging through the snow like 5 years ago or maybe even longer and for a couple of Christmases in a row revisited them with different drawings and eventually started writing down ideas for where the elves came from, why a sexy Mrs. Claus(her name's Sasha in the book) would interested in such a fat slob and started coming up with ideas for the reindeer and other elements of the mythology until eventually I had a pretty detailed outline for the plot.  The book is 116 pages long and is a fast, fun read.  You can get it at Amazon, HERE.  And hopefully through some other sites soon as well.  You can also get the cover art on tshirts and mugs and stuff at Society 6 and Red Bubble.

More Combat Fairies!

Holy Shit Balls Batman!  Another blog entry in one day!  How could this be!  It be!  It be!  Just finished doing something and have a window of time before doing something else so I figured what the hell, lets keep "Project Get Blog Up To Date" going.  So now lets talk Combat Fairies!  If you look back a couple posts you'll see the first Combat Fairy.  At the time she didn't have a name, but now she does, it's Aela.  She needed a name because characters need names and they especially need names when they're gonna be sharing space with other characters.  So now I introduce...insert drum roll here...Enora!

But wait!  Aela and Enora aren't in this alone!  You also have to meet, Kiani!

But these three aren't in it alone either!  Well they are for now.  My plan ultimately is to have a team of 5 and maybe a sagely commander type character that wouldn't be in on all the action and fun.  The first one was just a doodle that went wild but as you may have have guessed, I'm planning more for these characters in the future.  After that first one I came up with what I think are some really cool ideas for a back story and some fun adventures to send them on that will be in comic book form.  It'll be a while yet before I get to actually making that comic though.  I'm preoccupied with a new film project at the moment (there'll be a post on that soon, it's one of the motivators to get the blog back up to date) but once that's done a Combat Fairy one shot will likely be the next order of business.  In the mean time though I'll continue to put up images like these of the other characters as the ideas come to me and as I have the time to do them without slowing my other stuff down too much.  And I'll be writing notes and honing the ideas I have for the characters.  Projects seem to work better when those ideas have time to incubate and grow.  That's all for now but if you like these characters they're all available as prints and tshirts and phone covers at both Society 6 and Red Bubble, check em out!  Might even be time to make a Christmas gift out of it!

Big Brother is Watching

It seems like every time I post on my blog I start by stating how regretful I am that I haven't been updating my blog often enough.  And as I start writing this entry it occurs to me that I haven't been updating my blog often enough.  Weird huh?  The reason for this is that I haven't been updating my blog often enough.  I'm not gonna spit out promises that this will change because despite my best efforts I can't promise I'll be able to up my post frequency.  The fact of the matter is I just forget and neglect really often.  I have Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Deviant Art...I'm a bit better about posting art work and random ramblings over there but on Blogger I like to write more stuff to go with my post...which then leads to procrastinating and ultimately forgetting.  So if you want to see regular, more constant stuff from me, follow me on any of those other places I mentioned but continue to follow me here because I will keep it going as best as I can.  In fact if you're reading this the day that I posted it...I might even post again tomorrow.  WHOA!

At the start of the summer I had some art in a local art gallery in Vancouver.  The gallery's called Hot Art Wet City.  The show was a tribute to movies from 1984.  The title of this post suddenly makes more sense now doesn't it?  No?  Well then google that shit and get back to me.

I don't very often submit art to gallery shows.  Mostly cuz I'm busy on other projects and by the time I hear about a show I might want to be involved in I don't have time to do anything for it.  The timing by sheer luck for this one worked out.  I heard about the show with lots of time to come up with something.  I'm a huge movie geek and I was born in '84 so it would've been almost sacrilegious to ignore this particular show.  Turns out all that time was actually maddening though.  I couldn't decide for the longest time what movie I wanted to reference.  The first movie that came to mind was Ghostbusters which has been among my favorites since I could talk, but the problem there was that it's the favorite of so many people I figured for sure there'd be tons of Ghostbuster entries.  I decided I wanted to do a mash up of a bunch of different movies of '84 but I couldn't come up with a design I was happy with.  I finally thought I had it and then stopped drawing when I hit the half way point...I just wasn't liking it.  I decided I was over thinking the whole thing and just did a Ghostbusters poster anyway.  Here it is.

Aaaand then I also did this Toxic Avenger one.  Largely cuz I thought it would be fun cuz I like drawing monsters and stuff but strangely don't do it that often.  The Toxic Avenger has a special place in my heart and yet I've never actually seen the movie.  There was a short lived Saturday morning cartoon based on the franchise called The Toxic Crusader.  Being a fan of the cartoon my dad suggested we rent the movie; he'd never seen it himself.  When we found it in the video store it had a special sticker on the cover warning of the graphic content of the movie.  Dad shrugged it off cuz I'd grown up on horror movies and wasn't easily shaken.  When we pressed play on the movie we were greeted by two...count em...two on screen warnings about the graphic content of the film.  I think my dad was starting to have second thoughts at this point but we still decided to stick it out.  That is until the first scene concluded with a pack of wild teenagers running over a little kid on his tricycle and then backing up over his head.  Evidently I looked a little freaked out and we stopped the movie.  In the years since growing up to the desensitized individual who's writing this I haven't come across the movie to watch it again.  But mark my words...one day I will see this movie and its several sequels.