drawing a blank

reviews are in for killing pickman issue 1

2007-08-07T01:20:00.000-04:00

thanks to anyone who ordered or bought killing pickman issue1 last week! orders weren't quite what we were hoping for so tell a friend or buy another copy yourself or as a gift for your elderly aunt.

here's what the podcasticatory blogosphere has decreed!

podcasts:

quiet! panelologists at work - episode 14 - 38 minutes in
http://panelologists.com/

nerdcast - july 16th episode - 2 minutes in
feed://n3.libsyn.com/rss

blogs:

popsyndicate
http://www.popsyndicate.com/site/story/killing_pickman1/

wednesday is my sabbath - entry for 8/1/07 - best of the week!
http://wednesdaysabbath.blogspot.com/

newseed comics - august 1st - best of the week!
http://newseedcomics.blogspot.com/

comic pants - august 1st -
http://comicpants.com/?p=1911

good stuff.

here's cover art for issue 2!

dig

blogstipation and how to kill a pickman

2007-06-27T00:47:00.001-04:00

okay so it took a long time to squeeze this one out. a really long time.

but we've got some great brown stinky news to show for it! ahem ahem

archaia studio press presents a six issue fully painted mini-series beginning august 2007 – KILLING PICKMAN – story + words by jason becker – art by jon rea.

a long labor of love to be sure, this baby has been cooking in one form or another since 2001. can it be that long? so here's a taste of what's been slow cooking in that damn mental crockpot. here is a pdf of the first 9 pages of the first issue. you may have seen these pages around in the back of hero corp or floating around my website but here they are debuting in color with lettering.

i'll be posting covers and process materials as we go along but nothing that might spoil any of the fun. i swear to all the saints and those who have gone before and to all the sad looking abused elderly greeters at walmart that i'll be much better about posting things here.

as for the book, check us out in previews and ask your local comic shop retailer about ordering it. your support and encouragement is appreciated. but watch out, this one ain't for the kids.

SOME RELATED LINKS
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publisher - archaia studio press

myspace - jonreashouse

my regular site - www.jonrea.com

Philosopher King's of Yardley

2006-10-02T22:25:00.000-04:00

our summer intern, dubbed ‘WinkleHawk ( the winkle is short for periwinkle, the color of the car he borrowed from his parents to drive to work this summer, and hawk because of the mohawk he acquired due to an unfortunate bet that he lost to a rival philadelphia area band) is not only a graphic design major, but also a philosophy minor. a man of my own heart and mind.his disposition and recent educational encounters led to a few lunch discussion about silopsism, intrinsic assignment of virtue and beauty, and the appeal and disappointment of Marxism. this discourse has reawakened some slumbering beasts that I thought had long been turned to compost in my churning mind. it didn’t take long for them to take breath again and stalk me in my waking hours and always in my nightmares.

it should always shock us what low esteem philosophy has earned in our popular culture. but it doesn’t. shock us, that is. this kind of inquiry is dismissed. useless and inapplicable. pointless. i can’t help but feel the opposite is true. our everyday lives can only be enriched by engaging the world around us on a deeper level. interrogate the assumptions we make and investigate why those assumptions exist. everyday. it is the country populated by those guilty of intellectual laziness, and oversimplified ideas which ceases to care or engage, or arguably exist. social, political, global, interpersonal, economic, religious. how we construct knowledge defines us as individuals and as a culture. let us be filled with critique and carry high minds.

has anyone seen adam arcuragi?

2006-07-25T22:32:00.000-04:00

so after a month of sudden and strange reconnections with the past, i am posting my first "stuff i like" entry. i am trying to do this in the least self-indulgent and cheaply anecdotal way, so i'll thank you ahead of time for your patience and understanding as a solidly mid-twenty year old male tries to take stock of his contributions to humanity so far.

some random ruminations prompted me to stumble onto a phrase that reminded me of some lyrics from a choral piece that i performed with my high school chamber choir. this lead me to play a few rounds of "i wonder what happened to..." with some of my friends that came and went before i entered the land of car payments and mortgages. i began tacitly wagering on who of my group of friends from chamber choir may have done something noteworthy enough to be searchable on the internet and figured that adam arcuragi must be a musician somewhere and wouldn't be cool if he was still in the philadelphia area, and wouldn't also be cool if i could go to a concert. so i did what most of my demographic would do and began to google. page one brought immediate satisfaction. and a link to a record label's site that just released adam arcuragi's self titled full length album. wow. good wagering. a quick trip to itunes brought me adam's album in all of it's soaring, swooping glory.

this music is stunning. the poetry is arresting and does what poetry should. words that we use every day (well most of them - not "bacterialite"), rearranged in a way that turns your everyday experiences into transcendent moments of beauty, loss, yearning, and redemption. the diction is striking in they way that it is simple enough not to patronize but subtle enough to provide layers of meaning that pull a little deeper every time you get lost in a track. (also, i think that he was in a contest to write as many songs as he could that had the word throat in it.)

the instrumentation and arrangements are also deceivingly simple and never feel over produced or contrived. always the songs extrapolate themselves in a way that is steeped in the feeling of authenticity. each song feels like watching rough, knowing hands making a ceramic tile, or turning a piece of fine wood. there is something that feels craftsmanlike about the album as a whole. could i gush anymore. maybe.

the content of the songs comes from a place that seems neither slick and urbane, nor raw and rural. that places it in a space that's clearly of a suburban origin, but not "banal, strip mall" suburban, or "ostentatious, consumptive" suburban. maybe "everyman" suburban. that's something that i can respond to.

i guess that i'm shocked by my own fascination with this music. am i fascinated because i feel like i know adam, even though i haven't spoken with him in almost a decade? i'm not sure. whatever it is, i really like this music. you might too.
www.adamarcuragi.net

the incredible cockatoo

2006-06-27T22:49:00.000-04:00

here's a fun little ink drawing i just wrapped up for jason becker for one of his up and coming properties. a superhero to strike gay fear into the hearts of doers and evil doers alike. a nephew inherits a rich life-long bachelor uncle's fortune, but only if he agrees to take on the mantle of "the incredible cockatoo", the hip possibly gay superhero who's crimefighting career peaked in the late seventies. with a colorful cast of characters, manditory skirmishes with lame super-villians, and the uncle's team of lawyers checking up on jack's "patrol time", this is gonna be funny. i'll try to post a link to some other cockatoo material in the future. until then, feast your eyes on this. i call this the "perch pose."

traveling by train

2006-05-17T23:49:00.000-04:00

here's something i'll be doing more of this weekend for a day trip to new york. traveling in a passive manner is not something that suburbanites relish or even quite understand. i've completely forgotten how to relinquish control over getting from point a to point wherever. suburbia is about maximizing control. whenever i get back into a situation of passive transportation it takes a while for me to figure out what i should be doing since what i SHOULD be doing is getting me there. but that's kind of taken care of. so what now. reading usually at the beginning and then eventually i relax enough to draw my surroundings and the people who populate them. sometimes they're good. sometimes not. but it's always an opportunity i enjoy rediscovering everytime.

you only see pieces of people from behind vinyl seats and between their luggage which is snug up against them (it must be full of gold) and you only see peices of people in one half of a cell phone call or the glances they carefully place on their temporary travelling companions.

remember how not to draw

2006-04-25T01:19:00.000-04:00

so i did exactly what i said i wouldn't do, but everyone knows i would do anyway. seemed like a good idea at the time. here's a sketch of my son, jacob. he's an impish fellow. but what two year old isn't?
oh and check out a relaunch of my illustration and design site. some is the same and some is new. see if you can find which is which.

career path

2005-08-19T09:43:00.000-04:00

okay so i haven't been exactly fastidious with the blogging but i'm trying. i just got a freelance gig with a short turn around time and i'm busting my @ss to meet the deadline.

so here's something funny.

my son, pictured above, used to love to color. seeing his father as a struggling, frustrated artist must have turned his desire for artistic expression aside in order to pursue something far more pragmatic... pen testing. he no longer years for the scribbles of carnation pink and midnight blue, but only to pull every pen, highlighter, and pencil from our pen jars about the house and methodically remove the cap/twist the back/click the clicker and perform a "test scribble" on a blank sheet of paper, after which he promptly places it in a "OK" pile. after each pen has been quality assured then all the pens return to the cup. i am now researching whether bic is hiring for QC positions.

is this early onset OCD?

my first blog : it itches at first

2005-08-04T15:12:00.000-04:00

let's call this "inaug-o-blog"! welcome to my newest attempt at diversion.

i'll have to give credit where credit is due, so thanks to danielle who started her blog a month or so ago and got me thinking. i'll be adding a link from my illustration and design site to this so its all one big snarl of too much information about me. i'll keep this brief. all this is a not only an exercise in entertaining myself but also a way to try to loosen my brain up. i'm normally so paralyzed about doing something creatively that i end up never really completing the circle on a lot of projects that are really worth finishing (or starting for that matter). so, hopefully, this is my mental tai chi. boy am i presumptuous.

ack.

thanks and come again.

jon