SPACE CADETTE LAUNCHED!!

 

There are few, if any, musicians out there as creative, versatile, and visionary as Sal Baglio.  Back in the '80's, Sal fronted Boston rockers The Stompers, singing, playing blazing guitar, and writing most of the bands many hits.  I met Sal later, some 20+ years ago, when he was performing in an acoustic duo with ace singer/songwriter Allen Estes at an amazing little restaurant and pub that seemed to be a magnet for some of the best musicians in the area.  Recently, Sal approached me with the idea to use one of my illustrations to promote the release of his new single "Space Cadette."  The piece that caught Sal's eye was an illustration I did for the Washington Post a couple of decades back, a "retro-comic book" image which I had available for licensing as stock art.  I was delighted, to say the least.  Sal is not only a world-class guitarist, but also one of the most innovative songwriters in the business.  He is currently recording with a select group of musicians under the name "The Amplifier Heads."  There are  a number of albums and singles available, some as CDs, others for download at theamplifierheads.bandcamp.com.  "Space Cadette" has just become available.  You can find it, along with my humble art piece, here: rumbarrecords.bandcamp.com/album/space-cadette.   And while you're at the Amp-Heads Bandcamp page, check out all the other music available there.  Sal's songs are original, high-concept, deep and eclectic.  They often summon details of the past, filling in the gaps with memories we didn't know we had.  And his concept albums cry out to be enjoyed in one sitting, as they wend across a wondrous audio decoupage of myriad sounds and themes.  The diverse guitar work, lyrics, and vocal harmonies may evoke sounds of the Beatles, the Kinks, or even Tom Waits, but the music is always original and in Sal's own distinct voice.  Just when you think you know where a melody line is going, Sal takes you somewhere new, surfing on the crest of his sometimes hard-rockin', sometimes wistful arrangements.  Sal and I share an appreciation for retro science fiction.  Space Cadette will take you on a rockin' flying saucer ride to the edge of space and back.  And for two bucks, it's a heck of a lot cheaper than SpaceX!

To get back to the art for a minute, Sal chose the above image and asked me to add the band name and title which I did.  Not being able to leave well enough alone, and having done that piece when I barely knew how to use Photoshop, I did a number of variants, adding highlights and gradients to some of the art, in one piece little moons and planets to the bow-tie, and some comic book halftone texture and color to the background in the last one seen below.  Sal also had two ideas for the word balloon text.  "Klaatu" won the day.  As always, click on the images to see the larger versions.

Sal, you might already know this: you rock!!

 

NILES NEMO & SONIC THE HEDGEHOG IN SEGALAND-Episode 6

From the final issue of Sega Visions Magazine produced by The Communiqué Group, the Winter 1991/92 issue.  This issue featured the winner of the "Draw a Sonic the Hedgehog Comic Strip" contest, a talented youngster named Kuanray Huang (who must be in his 30's by now!).  I worked from a single photo of Kuanray, as I recall, and can only assume the likeness was reasonably accurate.  With this episode, I finally stopped using a Rapidograph pen for the lettering, switching to a broader-nibbed Micron marker, and was much happier with the result, as I also was with the improved color registration.  I think the layout for this spread was one of my very best, and there was plenty of good action.  Too bad it was the last installment before Sega took the whole project west to San Francisco with new corporate oversight, and Niles disappeared into Segaland for good.  FUN FACT: As I have mentioned in my oft-referenced interview with Ken Horowitz, the Sonic game was new at the time, and I was the first artist to draw Sonic in comic book form.  A short time later, Sega produced a small, Manga-style Sonic comic book, and over the years, many others have been published.  This two-pager was the first Sonic The Hedgehog comic appearance, however.  BONUS FUN FACT:  A few years after Niles ended, I had the pleasure of meeting one of my all-time favorite comic book artists Gene Colan and his wife at a Boston convention.  We had a long, very enjoyable chat, and I showed him some of my work, including the Niles/Sonic spread.  His very genuine and generous response was "Oh, you know what you're doing!"  I remember that most fondly, indeed.

********SUPER-BONUS SPECIAL FEATURE!!********

In a complete departure from everything I've ever done before on this blog, I am showcasing art that was produced by someone besides me!  Here is the never-before-seen "lost" Niles Nemo adventure which was plotted, scripted and produced in layout form by none other than Boisterous Bill Kunkel!  I don't know why Bill did a layout for this episode, maybe just scratching an itch, but it's the only one he ever did for a Niles adventure.  I always worked from a general script.  I recently found this two-page layout in my files.  It is reproduced here from a photocopy of a FAX, and has some rough spots.  I retouched the lettering where it was broken, but did not change it in any way, not even Bill's backwards (or perhaps lower-case) "N's."  There are a couple of places where the lettering was too broken to decipher, but you can get a good feel for the story.  This last and lost episode, featuring "Basketball Dexter," was mentioned in my Sega-16.com interview with Ken Horowitz, but at that time, I didn't even know a copy of it had survived.  Here it is for the first (and probably last) time ever!  Click the image, and enjoy!!

And there you have it!  Everything you always wanted to know about Niles Nemo In Segaland, and a whole lot more!

NILES NEMO visits the Consumer Electronics Show-Back cover house ad

From the Summer 1991 issue of Sega Visions Magazine.  For whatever reason there was no Niles adventure that issue, so we ran this promo on the back cover.  Not sure if all the anatomy is spot-on in that drawing, but ya gotta love those shoelaces!  They're as loopy as Spider-Man's webbing!  Oh, and there's my buddy Dave LeBlanc again, last seen in the "Columns" episode...

Next: The final episode of "Niles Nemo In Segaland!!"

NILES NEMO IN SEGALAND-Episode 5 "Niles & The Ninjas In The City Of Fear"

From the Fall 1991 issue of Sega Visions Magazine.  This was a pretty straight-forward Ninja game, as far as I can tell from this adventure, with the possible exception of some robots and a big green floating head being part of the fray.  There are lots of fun action poses here, and the layout had some nice twists.  Cool Asian-influenced lettering on the logo, too.  Maybe a little too much purple...  FUN FACT: I'd long been unhappy with the color registration on these comic pages.  As I detailed in my Episode 2 "Columns" blog post, I very laboriously and meticulously applied the color to a separate overlay, which I carefully registered to the line art (using those old peel-off registration marks of yore), and yet the registration was always off on the printed art.  After seeing the mediocre printing on this episode, I inquired of Creative Director John Sprague to look into what was going on in the pre-press process.  He discovered that the pre-press people were shooting the line art on a photostat camera, and scanning the color art on a rotary scanner (state of the art in those days).  Well, anyone who's ever used a stat camera knows they are operated by cranks, gears, and pulleys and have more in common with medieval torture devices than digital technology.  You bump into it or even breathe on it, and you change the calibration.  Trying to duplicate the exact size on a separate device is a fool's errand.  Apparently, it was cheaper than a scan, but for the next issue, we finally arranged for both the color overlay and the line art to be scanned.  Little did we know that Episode 6 of Niles Nemo In Segaland would be the last!

This issue also featured the house ad announcing the "Draw a Sonic the Hedgehog comic strip and win an appearance in the next Niles Nemo in Segaland adventure" contest.  Lots of hand-lettering in that word balloon...

NILES NEMO IN SEGALAND-Episode 4 "N.N Meets M.M."

From the April-May 1991 issue of Sega Visions Magazine featuring "Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse™".  Bringing this Niles adventure to life was in some ways a wilder ride than that of Disneyland's Mister Toad!  When I was told I'd be illustrating a story featuring Niles encountering Mickey Mouse™, I was excited at the prospect of drawing my own version of one of the world's most iconic characters.  I assumed that the good folks at Disney would send me some model sheets, and I'd take it from there.  Not quite, as it turned out.  Early in negotiations we were informed that Mickey could only appear on the game box, and everywhere else where he "appeared" in the comic, he would have to be unseen, speaking off-panel!  Disney Corp. retains stringent control over the use of its characters, and no one outside of their auspices could be allowed to draw Mickey, nor could he be shown interacting with characters outside of the Disney oeuvre.  So much for that!  Ultimately, I came up with the pencil art, and that was submitted for approval.  All was okay, except on Page 1, I had depicted Niles wearing mouse ears (like hundreds of millions of theme park visitors have done over the last 60 years).  Nope!  The ears had to go.  I'd originally had Niles discarding his hat in the last panel on Page one.  Now he's juggling a jewel from the game.  So, here comes the FUN FACT: When I laid out the page, I worked out a way that Mickey could subliminally appear!  Only after the final art was done did I share this fact with the Creative Director, John Sprague.  I drew a quick tissue overlay outlining the hidden Mickey.  John's astounded response: "Dave, you are CRAZY!"  Well, it all went to press, and no one ever spotted the little trick I played on the good folks at Disney.  See the progression I created to demonstrate the gag below:

Many years later, in 2006, I very nice young chap named Ken Horowitz approached me out of nowhere to interview me about my experience drawing Niles, and over the course of said interview, I revealed my secret.  The interview can be found here on Ken's Sega-16 appreciation website.  It was conducted via email, and I think it went pretty well, except I said "cookie," where I really meant "Easter egg," which coincidentally is a term coined by Niles co-creator Bill Kunkel, according to at least one Internet source.  Mr. Horowitz also conducted an interview with Bill, which can be found here.  This Niles Nemo adventure may be the most surreal of them all, with wild layouts, painful puns, and crazy characters such as a witch, a clown, several animated toys, and strange creatures of the forest.  Click on the thumbnails and enjoy!

Next time: Ninjas!!

NILES NEMO IN SEGALAND-Episode 3 "Golden Axe"

Moving right along...!  From the Winter 1990/91 issue of Sega Visions.  This third episode of Niles features a cast of barbarians, elves, warrior skeletons, Huns, dragons, a couple of female warriors, and a cameo appearance by me, as I more or less looked at the time, disguised as a one-eyed Norseman (Page 2, Panel 4).  Another complex story brimming with characters and as much plot as Bill could cram into  two-pages while simultaneously demonstrating the basics of the game.  FUN FACT: I originally drew the game controller as the Sega-16 model, it being the current version, but before publication (and luckily before inked art), someone discovered that the game was not available yet for Sega-16, so I changed Niles' "weapon" to the Master System controller.

Next up: Dave Digs Disney, or my complex encounter with the Mouse Factory!

NILES NEMO IN SEGALAND-Episode 2 "Columns"

Here is episode 2 of Niles Nemo in Segaland from the October-November 1990 issue of Sega Visions Magazine, almost a quarter of a century ago!  The Sega Genesis version of Columns was brand new.  Bill Kunkel wrote another great script with some very creative characters and scenes.  FUN FACTS:  The stage manager character is a cartoon rendering of my friend and The NoWhere-Men™ writing partner, Dave LeBlanc.  Dave is not a little person, nor does he normally wear a toga, but otherwise he looked just like that circa 1990.  Also, this was the first Niles Nemo adventure where I rendered separate art for the line art and color, using a fairly complex technique to get the look I was after in the color.  If memory serves, I believe I went through this process because I was less than satisfied with the fact that my hand lettering was printed in color in the first episode, rather than separated out and printed in just black ink.  Separating the line art from the color also gave me crisper black line work throughout. 

Here's the rundown on my technique:

Having done the pencils on a large layout pad, and then inked and lettered them on a light box onto Bristol board, I next rendered the color on a separate overlay. I did this by putting a sheet of watercolor paper over the inked art and tracing the color areas in colored pencil on the light box. For example, Nile’s coat would be outlined in red pencil. Then, I could paint in the colors using overhead light, which gave me more control over the tonalities. Finally, I would add some airbrush effects, more colored pencil, and voila! This was in the early days of desktop publishing, and though the rest of the magazine was produced using various graphic programs, I was many years away from learning how to use a computer to generate art. Today, I still use pen and ink for all my illustrations and then scan, and finish them in Photoshop.

As always, click on the images to see the larger art, and stay tuned for more Niles Nemo adventures!  NEXT:  Barbarians, dragons, and elves! Oh my!!

NILES NEMO-The first adventure!

Here's the first ever Niles Nemo adventure!  It was the only one I drew and painted all on the same layer.  After that, I started doing the line art separately and rendering the color on an overlay.  That was a particularly daunting and exacting process, as I chose to paint the color on watercolor paper, which even when it's on a light-box, is fairly opaque.  I used a combination of colored pencil, watercolors, and an airbrush effect which was accomplished by blowing air from a can over the tip of a marker.  More on that process later!  Meanwhile, here's Episode 1 of Niles Nemo in Segaland, written by the awesome Bill Kunkel and illustrated by Dave Sullivan!

Bill was great to work with, allowing me a lot of leeway to condense the script or discard some parts if I felt there was too much to fit into two pages.  I never took advantage of that, however.  It was more fun to think of creative ways to tell that whole story in two pages.  For example, in this episode, there are 12 panels on page 1 and 15 on page 2 including all the insets.

I never met Bill during the course of our collaborations, as we were thousands of miles apart, but had several enjoyable phone conversations with him in those pre-email/texting days.  We'd been out of touch for some time, probably since shortly after the publication of his excellent autobiography, "Confessions of the Game Doctor," and it was just now, while researching this blog post, that I discovered very sadly, that he had passed away.  Bill sent me a copy of his book, and I was was pleased to discover that it was a breezy read, as they say, even for a non-gamer like me.  He also asked me to draw an updated (2006) version of Niles Nemo which is seen below.  Why Bill wanted that, I can't recall, but I believe it was on his blog for a while. A belated sayonara, Bill.  You were the greatest.

The updated (and now outdated!) Niles seen here has a darker, grunge/slacker look and is outfitted with an iPod, and a wrist brace to help with his carpal tunnel syndrome, a by-product of years of video game playing.  The "Sega" logo he used to have shaved onto the back of his head has been replaced by a tattoo.

More Niles adventure to come!  Stay tuned!

NILES NEMO-From the archives!

I've been thinking for quite a while about setting up a gallery of the complete episodes of "Niles Nemo In Segaland," a two-page comic book feature I illustrated back in the early '90s for Sega Visions Magazine.  So, why not do it here?  I'll add more about the history of Niles Nemo, his origins, etc., as the gallery grows.  Right now, I'm starting with a special, never-before-seen image of Niles and Alex Kidd.  I rendered it as a concept drawing of the two characters before drawing the first adventure.  A smaller version of the scene appears on page one of the first Niles story, when the two characters meet.  You're seeing it here first, dudes and dudettes!

This painting is fairly large, about 22 inches wide, so given the size limitations of the blog, I'm also presenting it in two parts, so you can see the characters in greater detail.  As always, click on the images to see the larger art.

IS THERE A SUPERHERO IN THE NEXT CUBICLE??

Earlier this year, I was contacted by Patricia Bacall, the multi-talented head of Bacall:Creative, to design a series of superheroic images for a marketing campaign for Crucial.com.  The concept was a very clever and original one: First, find the person in your office whom everyone turns to when computer malfunctions erupt, causing widespread chaos and panic, who is uniquely capable of solving the problem.  Then, nominate him/her online for an award: "The Official Unofficial Office Computer Go-To Superstar" Award, to be precise.  The competition seems to be over now, and the website down, but you can read all about the competition and Crucial.com, plus scan some other interesting data here.  Crucial.com's announcement about the contest is available here.

I created six images for the campaign, seen in the above image and the enlarged single hero illustration below.  Click on the pictures for larger views.  Each character was a pastiche of an ordinary office worker and a superhero.  Special thanks to Patricia for finding me and handing me the illustration reins for this very entertaining project!

THE NOWHERE-MEN™ NEW ANIMATED LOGO AND CHARACTERS ART ONLINE!

A year passes like nothing, or so it seems.  The first six months of 2013 are a total blur, as I was busy with a major book project.  The rest of the year has mostly involved catching up with everything I put off during that period.  Hence, it's been over a year since my last post and even longer since I revamped The NoWhere-Men™ website with this very cool and dramatic animated art featuring all of the heroes on the cliff with the logo animated and some striking lightning and lighting effects.  It's an animated GIF and at 2.5MB can be a bit of a download, but is worth the several seconds of wait time in my opinion.  The above image is one frame from the animation.  Click on it for the larger version, or go to the site for the animation  Several more updates for The NoWhere-Men™ site are in the works, including adding Joe Comet™ and Hour Father™ images, as well as animated logos and a wild illustration featuring a face-off between The Maniacal Mister Bones and The Phantom Aardvark!  Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, I've added some new products to The NoWhere-Men™ gift shop, including a very cool new black T-Shirt adorned with the classic cliff scene.  Check it out here!