Delightful watercolor piece by @colleencoover, of Periscope Studio, Portland, Oregon.
Colleen Coover pencilled and Steve Lieber inked and watercolored this sketchcard of B. D. Belgique, the long-suffering police officer eternally foiled by BANDETTE. (They’re from the comics series of the same name illustrated by Coover and written by Paul Tobin.)
If you haven’t read Bandette, take a look at the preview here.
The original art for the sketchcard might still be available at Periscope’s Etsy store.
Back in April, Periscope’s Colleen Coover indulged her obsession an with an unlikely one page comic: a one page submission received at the Marvel offices 20 years ago, featuring Wolverine meeting Freddie Mercury. You can read about it here: http://www.colleencoover.net/?p=3071
She drew her own version, and it turned into a meme. There are lots of other artists’ versions of it out there, including a three-pager by our own Jesse Hamm. This one caught the eye of the original artist Rob Marsh, who told the story on his Facebook page.
Mystery: SOLVED!
TFAW.com: What advice can you give aspiring comic book creators?
Coover: I kind of hate the word “aspiring.” What’s that line from Rocky Horror? “Don’t Dream It, Be It.” If you are making comics, you aren’t aspiring to be a creator, you’re doing it.
Los Bros Hernandez—Jaime, Gilbert, and Mario—changed my life in the late 1980s. Their work in Love & Rockets showed me how the aesthetics of the kids’ comics I had grown up on (Archie, Harvey Comics, etc.) could be used to tell sophisticated, adult stories.
The original, self-published issue of Love & Rockets #1 was first sold by mail-order and at San Diego Comicon in 1982, thirty years ago.
I was able to snag an interview with Colleen Coover via instant message today and I learned many things during our brief time together: the benefits of digital publishing, how she got involved with Monkeybrain Comics, and most importantly that her initials are the same as…
Coolest coffee table ever, featuring the art of @ColleenCoover, specifically the introduction to GIRL COMICS.
Oglaf by Trudy Cooper is close to my golden ideal in comics. Fun, sexy, clever, and lovely to look at. It’s sassy and sometimes silly, but always adult.
When I first started making my dirty comic Small Favors in the early 2000s, one comment I heard a lot was “You don’t usually think of a woman making porn comics”, and another was “Oh! This is actually a lot of fun! What a surprise!” A decade later, thanks to women like Trudy Cooper, Erika Moen, Jess Fink and many others, I never hear that first comment, and it’s not a surprise any more!
We live in a world where blood and horror are considered appropriate for general audiences, but flash a nipple, and you’d think from the cries of outrage that Satan had just been handed the keys to the puppy farm. Comics like Oglaf exist to turn that world on its head , and we’re all richer for it.
You know what’s fun? Talking to a comics reporter like Tom Spurgeon, who actually knows who you are, what work you’ve done, and is familiar with all comics generally.
SPURGEON: With the superhero monolith in comics, it seems like everyone that doesn’t draw giant, muscle-bound figures gets lumped in together into their own group, where you may or may not have all that much in common. I know the Hernandez Brothers were an example for you because of how they employed their style, but I wondered about the style itself that you employ. I know that you’ve studied a wide range of cartoonists; is there anyone you see in your work that maybe nobody else does?
COOVER: I learned a lot from Milton Caniff.
SPURGEON: Well, okay. My goodness.
