Bio Shock By Bob Byrne

I wish I had all my old drawings like Nick and Will posted. I have lots of stuff from 15-18 below but nothing before hand.

This is a card I made for a friend's birthday last week, she's a hardcore gamer.
The story of how my Da made a woman drink spit and dog food on Spazzmoid today

Sequence 4 by Stephen Thompson

Hmm, I have no idea where my childhood comics of epic crapiness are right this minute so I'm dumping another clip of my current book on here. This one's a bit of a hybrid, the figures are inked with real ink but the background elements are digital. I'm enthusiastic about the idea that's been put forward that we post photos of our studios next week. That'd take even less effort if that's possible.

MEGA OLD ART DUMP by Will Sliney

So, inspired by Nick's delving into his past drawings, and because of the fact that the folder of these pics happened to be right beside me when I was coming up with what to do for this weeks Micks piece. I've unrooted a ton of my old drawings. Its great to know that even when I was 12 years old that I was still better than Mooney
P.S. Mighty props to my Mom who saved all of these

So lets start with this one....
SOME DUDE!!!


I have no idea who he is, Can not for the life of me remember. I do know that I was designing a Street fighter Style fighting game (I have tons and tons of half started SNES games from when I was younger). How I came up with the bastard child of Hulk Hogan, Wolverine and a snake I do not know.
The only other guy I can remember was Waterfall, and he was just liquid! Inspiring stuff



These guys were.... wait for it

TEAM NEBULA!!!!

Looks like this is from around the time I was playing Bomberman by the shape of their heads and eyes.
I pitched the Nebula comic book story to my buddies Martin and Padraig when I was in Third class and was gutted when they just laughed at it. Feckers

Now we begin to venture on into the world of proper comic book characters with

WIKONA and obligatory hot girl



Look above and you will see my very first attemt at Comic book colouring. Jeasus I remember that after applying a gradient you would have to wait 5 minutes for it to load along with that old ticking loading sound computers used to have.

So thats enough of the self created characters. Lets delve into the old Fan art

This one is Possibly my fav of all the pics. Its from when Sugar Puffs gave out free x-men toys when you collected enough tokens. Eaach box had trading cards in them too. I strongly remember colouring it. Oooh yeah check out those abs!


Really old Spidey Pic. Dont remember much except doing the background



Now this I'm quite proud of. Drew it when I was ten and I've never drawn a better Batman since

Here we go. X-Men time.

My dad gave me 96/100 for this one. He graded my drawings for some reason.
Look, I used paint once.

Ah the Joe Mad Gambit. Possibly the strongest single costume/character design that made me want to draw comics.


Heres an X-Men costume redesign. Looks like I went back to the crayola pencils for this one


I might show some of my college stuff next week. Including the Mighty Batman Year one Fan Film where Declan Shalvey gets the shit kicked out of him by Detective Flass. Ahhh good times

ANGEL

Drawing at Stephen Mooney's Moonbase/studio today and yesterday and i wasn't sure what to do this week, so i asked the Moondog himself if he had any pencilled drawings i could ink. He had this Angel piece lying around that i quite liked so went with it.

Was a lot of fun. The drawing was really, really solid and suggested lots of area of embellishing, so i just went to town on it. The figure in the middle was really tightly outlined but i decided to get much looser and make the silhouette more ambiguous.

Dec.

Howling at the Moon(ey)

Wolverine presenting, from the look of things. I think the rumpiness of it all got away from me a bit with this one.

CAPTAIN IRELAND

So, I realised this week that this month marks the fifteenth anniversary of Issue #1 of Captain Ireland. "What is Captain Ireland?" I hear you collectively murmur. Well, Rocheteers, prepare to learn (at length) of a secret chapter in my comic book career...



In 1995, I approached the local Arts Office looking for cash to self-publish my own superhero series, set in the far-flung future of Wexford, 2010. The previous year, I had cobbled together a photocopied anthology series called 'Alternative' with two school chums (Wayne Daly and Lee Kelly)featuring our own home-grown superheroes that shared a universe, Image-style. Captain Ireland made his first appearance in the one and only published issues (though we got as far as completing #3)along with Buzzer, and Razorblade, and the comic became a mini-cult happening, gaining us an interview with on the Pat Kenny radio show. (Weirdly this inspired a printer to call in and offer us our own professionally printed superhero team book. We realise now he just wanted his company's name broadcast on air, but we had meetings and he asked us to cobble together a first issue to go to print in under thirty days, in the same month we were due to sit our Junior Cert exams. Having completed the project, and almost failing the exams, we traipsed up to Dublin only to be told it was a no-go...)The other two lads lost interest, but I smelled glory, and if there's one thing better than the smell of your own farts, it's glory...



So I decided to have Captain Ireland go solo trying to solve the case of local businessman - turned - bodypart cleaving serial killer Abattoir. Why was he called Captain Ireland? Fuck knows. A hubristic delusion that MY superhero must be better than everyone else's in school (When it was clear that Wayne's Razorblade held that honour)was probably the basis for it. I name of my home country was the sum total of my knowledge about the place, and kind of all I wanted to know. But I think part of me knew that it was an easy commercial sell.



So Lorraine Comer, local Arts Officer, greenlit the comic's production, and with full use of the local County Council's printing presses too! Woop!In the time-honoured style of a comics publisher, she wanted the comic to go into production immediately, whereas I had planned to stockpile the three issues of the mini-series. The reason for this was that it was the start of the summer, and she rightly reckoned the comic would sell well to tourists. Americans sucked this puppy up. It got a big launch at a local summer festival too, so it was on the radar of the unsuspecting visitors and townsfolk attended. It was my first and best summer job; having my own comic bankrolled and getting to keep all the profits for myself.



Local shops and newsagents carried it, and even Kevin in Forbidden Planet stocked it, all taking the smallest of cuts. (I think the RRP was 75p)That was the worst thing; distributing the comics and picking up leftovers, and/or the takings, but there was a kind of buzz around town about it. Lots of local press and radio coverage. It even got a mention on late-night RTE weekend show The End, or so I hear.



Sadly, only two issues got produced. September came crashing upon me as I tried to finish #3 while going into my final year at school.I got about half of it done, but because I'd missed my monthly production deadline, I figured I'd just have to discontinue it. I didn't realise that it was the nineties, and late comics were in vogue. (And that in 1995, a comic late by one month wasn't even considered late.) There are elements from the comic that still live on in my brainhole, that I think could breathe again in some form. But either way, it's still a massive deal that I managed to get something like this off the ground (with a lot of help) aged fifteen.



(Jesus, I could have finished #3 in the time it took me to put this together...)

M.M.M.S.

Mean Machine Mug Shot

iPad Rhino by Bob Byrne

My first ipad sketch using SketchBook.
New tangent on my webcomic starting today

Nightwing by Stephen Thompson

Here's a reeeeealllllly old sketch of Nightwing, probably dating from around the time of the original Batman Animated series. I'd say that cartoon is still my favourite version of Batman in any medium including comics and live action.

SATURDAY MORNINGS by Will Sliney

Heres some work in Progresses from two commissions I'm currently working on. Both 80's icons from two of my favourite shows that I watched as a kid. (I say as Im in the middle of rewatching He-Man!)

SWEET TOOTH

I read Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth Vol.1 recently and really enjoyed it. A bleak, dark story with a foreboding sense of doom? I'm all over it. Jeff said something very kind about me on Twitter the other day, so I thought i'd return the favour by drawing Gus, ie. Sweet Tooth.

Dec.

Maul

Running out of things to draw that I can colour black and red...

Don't Judge Me...

Here's a doodle for my young cousin Libby's birthday. If she ever questioned my love for her, posting this on the notoriously macho and judgmental Eclectics Micks Blog should spell it out for her.

Davros

He's the Daddy of the Daleks.

He hates the Doctor.

He probably smells like a nursing home and diesel.

404 page not found

An image from my site that you probably will never see...I hope.

My new site is more or less ready, this weeks SPAZZMOID is on clamnuts instead along with a classic pic of me from when I was 9

Real Ink

I'm still busy but I couldn't stand to just stick up another bit of the comic I'm drawing right now, so instead here're a few random doodles. I've been doing all my work digitally for quite a while now but I broke out the real brushes and dip pens today just for fun and this was the result. 'Twas very enjoyable so I'm tempted to ink my next book 'old-school-Shalvey-style' as we say in the biz.

Farscaping, across the universe

Heres a non spoilery page from the next issue of Farscape. Really busy at the moment setting up a studio space here in Ireland. Lots of cool things going on though, will talk more about them in the future.

ROUGH PANEL

Had an awful time trying to come up with something to draw yesterday. Thought i'd do another Thunderbolt as practice and flog it up here but i don't want to keep milking that. So then I kept starting a character and then changing my mind, til i got fed up and just drew this. I like it though.

Dec.

The Man Without Fear

Did a fairly sucktacular Daredevil on the blog a ways back, been meaning to have a better stab at him.

I Got Kitty Pryde...

...And Lockheed too. I love it when I'm not drawing robutts.

Heavy Duty Dalek

I love Daleks, but the Beeb have always been a bit unadventurous when it came to variants. The Heavy Weapon Dalek, who looked like a cross between Ned Kelly and a WWI Tank was a bit weak. I liked the fan made Dalek Storm, though it seemed a bit too polished and slick for the pepperpots.

So I took the best from both and came up with this bit of nonsense- a Heavy Weapon Dalek with a silly central cannon and stumpy eye stalk.

Puyol

Spain are in the finals for the World Cup and the country is going mad, I have no interest in football really but its hard not to be sucked in over here. My girlfriend is a football nut. The only player I recognise is Puyol. This sketch started off on my iphone in SketchBook then 'finished' in Manga Studio

Tame page on Spazzmoid today but next week is a killer, literally.

Sequence 3

In a move that's sure to annoy and disappoint Mooney here's yet more crap from the book I'm drawing at the moment. This is sure to be almost the last time I take a shortcut like this.

Punisher

Bit stuck fro time after the mayham that was the last two weeks of New York. So heres a quick punisher...wearing a jacket for some reason

CROSSBONES

Sorry to milk these but I spend days on these sketches but cuz I wasn't supposed to talk about what I was doing, i couldn't show anyone.

For those who don't know, I just got a little 2 issue fill-in on THUNDERBOLTS for Marvel. The above character is Crossbones (the guy who shot Captain America). The regular artist has a new design for him in the book; I tinkered around a bit with it a little so I could get comfortable with it. Something I tried here (and have been meaning to try on sequential pages) is a little greywash with some old-school zip-a-tone effects. I've played around with tone in colour, but not that much in black and white; definitely not on interior pages. Since this is a new, bigger project, I thought I'd bite the bullet and finally try it out. We'll see if it works.

Dec.

Cvclops 2001, a Sketch Odyssey

Here's an old sketch of Cyke I found a little while back, from way back in 2001, drawn when myself and Thompson shared a studio(and so very much else). Still kinda like it, which is very weird for me. Usually i don't like anything I've drawn a couple hours after completion. I think this one is from when Leinil Yu re-designed all of the x-peeps cossies during some x-crossover or another, I really ate that stuff up.

The Name's Pond...

I've fallen right back in love with Doctor Who again following the most recent series. So to offset the familiarity while I'm pencilling Transformers #13, here's a quick doodle of current companion, Amy Pond.

Ta-ra.

More Farseeker

Farseeker is taking a small break for Independence Day this weekend, so here's a few nib and watercolor concepts I knocked out a few years ago when I was first germinating this idea. The response so far to the series has been great- if you've not read it yet, the story starts HERE.

Gwan Dec!

I think we're all beaming with delight on hearing about young Dec's triumphant trip to the States bearing fruit. The way I heard it he was walking down the street and a piano was about to fall on Stan Lee, Dec slides in on a pool of his sweat and shoves him out of the way just in time...and the rest is History. Love ya man.

Spazzmoid clocks up another painful slice of memories for me today

Sequence 2

I'm still drowning in busyness so here's another sneak peek at the book I'm working on at the 'mo. In more interesting news our own Declan Shalvey has been snapped up by Marvel and he'll be drawing a couple of issues of Thunderbolts. Read all about it here.