jasonfranks

 
In which Cain and Dennis investigate the official language of evil--Esperanto.

Click me!

Yours in darkness,

-- JF

This week's strip, part 2 of 'The Hand That Rocks The Cradle', is one again illustrated by our not-so-special guest artist.*

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Cursed are the righteous,

-- JF

* me

www.thesixsmiths.com/wordpress/ 

 
A couple of stories I wrote for the amazing Renan L'Hopsum are now available on the French comics website Manolo Sanctis. If you click over to the site you can read them for free. (The site is in French but the comics are in English).

The first of them is The Devil's Vintner, a suspense story that was published last year in KAGEMONO: TOOTH AND CLAW.

The other piece... the Ron Beadle Triptych, is a series of three as-yet-unpublished comedy shorts based on some of the tall stories told to me by my old mate, the Beadler himself.

Some of Ren's other excellent work is up there, too (some some in English, some not).  

Check 'em out. Like I said, the whole site is free, and I encourage you all to explore it.  Even if you don't speak French (like me), there's tons of really interesting stuff on there.

-- JF

A couple years ago I published issue #2 of Greg Vondruska's ROBOTS ARE PEOPLE, TOO!  anthology:


For those of you with poor memories, or the inability to click your mouse on the link, the book contains stories by Greg, Golden Age artist Fran Matera, Dan Boyd, Lou Copeland, Mace Markham, Gary Culler, Jason Maranto, and my own bad self. 

Greg and I have just been looking at our inventories and it appears that the book is just about sold out. We are now talking about putting together a new volume, a trade collecting material from all three RAP issues (the Blackglass issue was the biggest of the 3) as well as some new stories. 

I'm about to remove book from sale at the Blackglass website, and I won't be selling it at shows anymore--but if you click across to the link above you can read the whole book for free through the preview galleries.

-- JF

 
Make with the klickety-klack:

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-- JF

 
Bruce Mutard came to the Melbourne comics meet on Saturday with completed pencil art for my short autobio story "At Own Risk". 

Hard for me to explain how pleased I am. Bruce is a top-flight Australian comics creator and he is very very stringent about everything he does. I worked my arse off on that script and I can't quite believe that it's real now. The story looks amazing; I'll post a bit of it when the inks are done. 

Also received word that my short story 'Theatre of Conflict' has been accepted into BAD ASS FAERIES 3: IN ALL THEIR GLORY. 'Theatre' is a Quentin Tarantino-style military/Ozploitation/fairytale mashup full of strange monsters, motorbikes, antipodean sorcery and a whole lot of live ammunition. It was a blast to write. More information as it comes; judging by the prior volume I don't think this will actually be available for some time yet. 

I should also have news about my novella 'Pack Rules' fairly soon.

I now have accommodation for San Diego Comicon, although I don't have flights yet and I'm not sure how long I'll be in the US on either side of the show at this point. Stay tuned. 

Hard to believe it's only February. I am going to slay this year.

-- JF

Long time readers may recognize ladies on the Robin Valley team...

http://www.thesixsmiths.com/wordpress/?p=346

-- JF

I have been reading more of those paper things with all the pages. Some of them have pictures and some just have words.

THE DISPOSSESSED by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin is one of my biggest influences on my own work, but I realized last year that I've neglected her two most renowned works. When I was inhaling as much SF and fantasy as I could between the ages of 10 and 16, I had no problem with Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Herbert or Zelazny, but I just wasn't mature enough to appreciate Le Guin's SF work. Not enough swords and rayguns, I guess; the Le Guin stuff I read in those days was written for children, although I feel confident in saying that it's still more mature than the majority of Big Person Fantasy that is published today.

Like THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (to which this book can be seen as a very remote prequel), Le Guin has constructed THE DISPOSSESSED in the same careful way that a scientist designs an experiment. The book is structured in a way that will not only explore her themes, but to try to draw conclusions about them. Not only that, the structure of the book itself actually demonstrates the core of the book: the conflict between the linear and the circular. But that's not something you'll even notice unless you look for it, the book is so beautifully written and populated with such interesting characters. In this book Le Guin explores both politics and physics; a plausibly-functioning society of anarchists as well as the nature of time. No surprise that it won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, and a nomination for the John W Campbell.

CHEWING ON TINFOIL, Joe Ollmann
A collection of short stories written and illustrated by Hoe Ollmann, ranging from the excellent to the competent.Aside from one entertaining divergence into magic realism, these are realist stories int he mode that comics people describe as 'slice-of-life'. Most of them are fictional, rather than than autobiographical, which surprised and pleased me. Ollmann's style is veyr prosey, but he does an excellent writing some very different characters, of different ethnicities, in different North American settings: a punker kid on a strawberry farm, an African-Canadian artist on a trip to hook up with a high school crush, a Jewish man who is 'favoured' with direct attention from the Divine. These stories these are all cleverly told and very well realized. The more autobio stuff (the amount of autobiography varies amongst stories, according to Ollmann's notes in the back) is generally a bit weaker tan the fiction, but it's well worth your time.

CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, Warren Ellis
This novel contains most of what you expect from Warren: tough punky girls, a protagonist who is unhealthy and damaged and yet still manages dish out his share of brutality, a slightly shocked obsession with outrageous sex acts, a fetish for wireless communication devices, and a number of digressive monologues from various degenerate bit players. The twin influences of Hunter S. Thompson and William Gibson hang heavily on this road-trip-with-aeroplanes story, but there's no mistaking it as anything but Ellis' work. While at times I wished Warren had made more than a token effort to make these American characters sound American, there is something hypnotic about the stylized Ellis-patter and I know that I, like many other long-time Ellis readers, employ rhythms myself.

CITY AND THE CITY, China Mieville
It's pretty much impossible to talk about this book without spoilers--although I've tried to keep the spoiling to one major point-- so the rest of this review is under the cut.
( Cut for spoilers )

BLANKETS by Craig Thompson
I finally got around to reading Thompson's massive and massively-acclaimed autobio comics opus. The art is beautiful and the story moves along briskly for all its size, only dragging in one or two places. But I didn't care much for the teen-angst/first love story. A wonderful bit of storytelling but not a wonderful story, Thompson's deftness kept me reading to the end even though I lost interest in what was happening about halfway through. I can see what the hype was about, but it's not my thing.

Next reviewtime: THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN and plenty more.

-- JF

First of a new three parter:

http://www.thesixsmiths.com/wordpress/?p=343

- JF

I am busy proofing MCBLACK in the background here, but I figured it was time to mention this:

Tesseraction Comics  approached me about doing a Blackglass special a year or so ago, and it will probably be out sooner rather than later. It'll be a digest-sized book containing a preview of MCBLACK and reprinting "Teppodama" by me and Mike Athey (first printed in ROCKSTAR PIZZA, 2006) and "Chalx" by me and Brendan Halyday, from the 2008 KAGEMONO book. 

This is the cover art. Pencilled by me, inks by Brendan Halyday (Brendo is going to be colouring it as well):

Some reviews of my most recently published comics project, KAGEMONO, available online:

John Retallick's  Comic Spot radio show (archived as podcasts), available here:

http://thecomicspot.podomatic.com/player/web/2009-12-29T05_31_05-08_00

Jen Breach, writer of the awesome SAWBONES, on the SAWBONES site:

http://sawbonesonline.com/2010/01/kagemono-tooth-and-claw/

Andrei Buters' review in the Sticky Institute newsletter: (You gotta scroll for the review):

http://www.stickyinstitute.com/communicae/for%20nov%202009.pdf

-- JF

Art and lettering are now complete.

-- JF

This one's for all you cricket fans out there.

http://www.thesixsmiths.com/wordpress/?p=340

-- JF

Just received the last page of my graphic novel MCBLACK from Dave Gutierrez, God Among Inkers.

That means the book is done, barring a couple of fixes (3 panels) and some lettering.

I wrote this book in 2005. I did a small amount of art for it that year, but I didn't really start working on the pencils until I was able to get Dave on board until March 2006.  So it's been a long, hard road for both of us.

I will be getting some semblance of a website up soon (I have owned the domain McBlack.com since the DJ who previously had it let it lapse at the end of last year). Further updates to follow. 

-- JF

PS  WOOHOO!

 

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Well, that's it for 2009.

It felt like the four horsemen had taken the sky for a bit there, didn't it?  The GFC, the swine flu, the Middle East, climate change. Famine, Disease, War, Death. Half of my state caught fire and hundreds of people died. America changed presidents. I quit my dream job.

Apocalypse is, apparently, good for me. I traveled, I placed some stories, I made new friends and caught up with some old ones. I didn't achieve everything I wanted to, but I managed to pull off a number of victories. Aside from a lingering sports injury and one bout of the flu I've been healthier and happier this year than I can recall at any time in the past.



( Projects detail below the cut )

Happy New Year!

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-- JF