Way back in 1989, I joined up with other local cartoonists in a group formed by the few professionals in the area. Over the years, we did a couple of self-promotional comic books.
Earlier today, random circumstances and a few random clicks on my Wacom tablet (which gets a little squirrelly sometimes and clicks where I don’t intend) threw this into the corner of my vision. It’s our second promo comic! Still available on Lulu.com. In it, I teamed up with Adam Shaw to illustrate a translation I had made of Der Erlkönig. Not your typical comic book fare, I suppose, but it was fun. There’s a lot of other cool stuff in there, too.
Feel free to click on it and see if you’d like to add to your grand collection of Cravens Obscure Cartooning. You might even find a link to an earlier promo comic where I illustrated a thing called Flapdoodle. I liked it very much. I think the kindle version is free.
If you really want a challenge, you could try to find some of the old Caliber and Malibu comics I worked on. I spotted one for sale a while back. It’s an old Caliber Presents anthology with a Fugitive story in it. I did the cover, which was terrible, I think. Ah, youth. The Fugitive stuff was fun. It was a futuristic detective chasing an insane serial murderer through old TV shows. I can’t remember how many episodes we did, but there was a Rocky & Bullwinkle one, and Lassie, and Hogan’s Heroes, and Bewitched, and MTV, and Gilligan’s Island, and even Sesame Street that was a comment on the passing of Jim Henson. For Malibu, I worked on a Planet Of The Apes annual/anthology. It was fun, too. The penciller for a lot of that stuff was James Tucker (now of animated Batman fame.) He’s amazing.
On the other hand, if you want something a little fresher… or even more ‘underground’, depending on your definitions, you could go check out the first issue (and associated goods available) of the Ninja comic I worked on. It’s HERE. The site offer is a big ol’ bundle of stuff that gets shipped to you. It’s on the ‘adult’ side, so 18 and older only.
Haha I’m going to hit this up because I love obscure stuff. It’s a pain to find collections of even popular mainstream newspaper comics. Outside of Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, Zits/Baby Blues, and their ilk, it’s impossible to find printed collections. The internet is great now because sites have started including complete collections but it still feels like they could disappear at any moment without a physical presence. I don’t think they’ve even made a Curtis collection despite it being one of the few mainstream African-American comics.
Sorry, I rambled. I just find preserving art, especially comics, because they capture a unique place and time in history (ie Zits a teenager in the late 90s to a teenager now) and I personally enjoy seeing how an artist’s style evolves over time.
Yay, Greg! Craven Comics, for when you’re craving… whatever.
I wish I could get the Stoned Ninja bundle, except it would never get past Japanese customs. Sigh.
I don’t know what the customs laws are, or whether they’d just be upset that an American was insensitively appropriating Japanese cool ninja stuff. Frankly, ‘Stoned Ninja’ isn’t anything I would have written myself. My generation had Cheech and Chong as exemplar of cannabis culture, and I was kind of a geeky outsider. I’m lucky to be working with Gabe on that project, who does care very much and is happily taking care of the business side of it all.
Japan has very strict laws regarding recreational drugs, and there are indications that they’re about to get a lot stricter. A lot of manga aimed at adults and college students do portray people taking drugs and getting stoned, but at some point this is going to get censored.
Japan is all about cultural appropriation, and as long as money from the appropriation continues to flow into Japan, no one here is going to complain that it’s happening elsewhere.
This Ninja reminds me of that old “Whisper” by Stephen Grant and Rich Larson. Was a good comic.