Our Studio by Stephen Thompson

I've shared a studio with my girlfriend, painter and illustrator Lisa Jackson, for more than four years now so this place is a bit of a mixed bag. Starting from the left we have a big bank of built in wardrobes where I store a lot of my comics and various assorted crapola. Stuck to the front of these is a bit of paper where I mark off my pages when they're done. Then some IKEA shelving of dubious build quality which hold novels, manga and heavy art books/absolute editions along the bottom. Lisa keeps her creepy japanese dolls along the top of the shelves. Beside these are a skinnier set of shelves which hold dvds. In the centre of the room we have our desks facing each other so we can get lost in each other's eyes when we not working. Lisa has an easel set up to her left to fulfil her painty needs. On my desk I have the Cintiq front and centre 'cause I do almost all my work on that these days. Behind the monitor you can see the A3 scanner/printer for the rare occasions when I do physical art, nothing worse than having to stitch bits of a page together on Photoshop. Behind that are the windows (which always have the blinds down) and the door to the balcony. Then we have my big squishy office chair and behind that are the shelves that hold comics with art I really love, close at hand. And then that just leaves the door.

STUDIO by Will Sliney

I must've missed the email where we all decided to do this but its fun none the less. Of course as we all know, none of us can compete with Mooneys Castle, and like Declan, I too am in a temporary set up in my old room seeing as though I hva just come back from New York.

Anyways, lets get the ball rolling shall we.

Heres the main drawing area. Including a chair I robbed from my old college. I searched all over Cork for a proper curved table that I can swoop around going from computer to drawing board but the cheapest one was 500 euros so Ive come up with a temporary solution by combining desks. The table set up goes from Art Materials, to drawing board (Soon to have a lightbox on one side of it), to laptop, to cintiq, to iPad. I use the iPad a lot now for scripts and referance as its quite quick and easy to navigate. The laptop just powers the cintiq and usually plays a DVD or some music. Above the desk are old Everton and Ireland match tickets and to the right are old comic book panels that have been in my room since I was a teenager.
Look closely and you can see Crichton and Aeryn from Farscape peering over the cintiq, willing me to get the pages drawn.


Next up we have the library. Its mainly Marvel stuff to be honest, and mainly Spiderman at that. Although the DC collection has been building up a bit more in the last year or so. See those things to the left Declan, they are called weights.


Standing tall and proud atop the bookshelf are those Marvel Figurines. I stopped collecting them about a year ago but I do intend on picking up a lot more. I have a lot of things planned for when I build my own studio. A shelf housing these guys is one of those plans.


The reason why I loved those little figurines is that they stopped me buying tons of action figures. I couldnt resist these MOTU ones though. The designs on these figures are amazing. Doing a He-Man comic one day is definately an ambition of mine.

Art materials. My favourite are the Zebra pens got from JET pens online. Cheers to Bobby Timmony of DC's Night Owls for the heads up

And finally an old, old Spiderman painting from one of the five times in my life that I painted

WORKSPACE

I say 'workspace' as this hardly qualifies s a 'studio'. I'm back home working from my old room at the moment, so it's a pretty basic set-up. Only 'the ladies' get a tour of my bedroom (It's just a bed and some boxes at the moment) so this is the only thing i have to show you people.

Yeah, pretty big step down from Mooney's PALACE yesterday, but what're you gonna do? Working on a spoilerific Thunderbolts page today so i have to cover that up. What's on the screen might be of interest though... Don't tell anyone....

Dec.


EDIT:

Uncle Will here jumping in with a bonus Pic of Dec hard at work in New York

Magical Mystery Studio Tour

So I'll get the ball rolling on our 'Studio Tours' week here on the old Mickage blog.
After I got married a couple years back, we moved into our new house. I got the chance to design my perfect studio/imagination bachelor pad since we were having the house built from scratch.
I of course made sure to urinate on the structure every few weeks during the building process so as to assert my territorial claim on the land.

And so to the studio. I found it hard to take any one picture that encompassed the whole room as it's pretty large, so I'll take you round it in bite-sized chunks. The walls haven't been properly painted yet, so forgive that aspect, I'm thinking a nice azure blue. I made sure to take the opportunity to tidy the place up before taking the photos, as who doesn't love laborious housecleaning?

Picture the first:

This is my computer desk and work area. I recently got the new i7 27-inch imac and am totally in love with it. If I weren't already married I'd make it my wife. You can see my toy cabinet on the left with some of my japanese masterpiece edition transformers. On top of the cabinet is the picture of Thompson I keep for inspiration and arousal. Over the computer hangs my original Adam Hughes cover art for a Batman issue. The shelves hold various art and reference books, eg the Complete Calvin and Hobbes, various art of books(Drew Struzan, Mike Mignola, Sebastian Krúger... etc). You can also make out the cool Raiders Lego in front of the Gorillaz boxes.

M

My drawing board adjacent to the computer desk, where all the 'magic' happens....
Some more shelves and drawers on the left hold original art and supplies. More transformers up top.
Graphic novels underneath.

Another shot of that side of the room. Note the sweet Technic Lego Ferrari Enzo and the countless versions of Trivial Pursuit I've collected over the years. Comicbooks on the shelves underneath. These are the ones I haven't been able to find in trade form, and so hang onto.

A view of the other end of the room, with the bar on the left and the lounge area on the right.

Close up of the bar. I imagine once i develope the inevitable drinking problem that this will become an issue. A wee nip of courage in the morning before, during, and after work never hurt anybody, right?
On top of the bar among the various bottles is the lovely Nespresso machine I got as a wedding present. Sweet java eases the pain. That's Angel Puppet from the 'Smile Time' episode of the show taking a load off on the recliner. He's earned it.

This is the lounge area, where I get my movie/videogame on. The room has great acoustics for the surround sound, so this is where I spend most of my (minimal) spare time. Had a great couple of days recently with Dec killing zombies on Left 4 Dead 2. On the wall Thunderball-era Sean Connery surveys proceedings. You can see 'Cover Run', Adam Hughes' new art of book on the coffee table.
The teeny pic on the windowsill is of the wife, Jackie. Note the pretentious decanter of Brandy on the side table.

 View of the other end of the room from the TV. That's our stuffed penguin, Charlie, knocking out some z's. I really need to paint those walls...

My DVD shelves beside the drawing table. On top of them are my sideshow Buffy/Angel toys, and the wondrous Lego Milenium Falcon. Beside those is the beautiful premier edition sideshow statue of Indiana Jones from Raiders, my favourite toy. Jackie bought it for me as a wedding gift. She also got me a macbook as an engagement present after I gave her the ring. Truly she is the king of kings.

And finally the other side of the room, with the guest artist desks. On the wall is my original Ivan Reis art, the double-page splash of all of the yellow lanterns approaching Earth from Green Lantern issue 24. My two brothers got it for me as a wedding present, and I adore it. Also on the wall is a photo of the future(bigamy-permitting) other Mrs. Mooney, the delectable Ms. Portman.

Some mook posing as an artist.

Bat Brush

More booty from my recently unlocked treasure trove. An experimental Batgirl done wiv brush; a country that is usually alien to me.

More on this theme next week...

Doctor Fate

Now for something completely different- after last weeks detailed stuff, this one is more in the style of DC's animation. Doctors Strange and Fate are amongst my favorite characters the the rosters of the Big Two.

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