Only Skin - New Tales of the Slow Apocalypse

Graduation, MoCCA and Sundays 2

2008-06-02T12:47:00.007-05:00

It's been kind of crazy around here lately. First, the class of 2008 graduated up at the Center for Cartoon Studies. Alison Bechdel was our commencement speaker. I haven't uploaded photos yet, but Joe has a few here, and I stole the above image of my thesis display from Chuck.

Since then, we've all been making moving arrangements, looking for jobs and putting together Sundays 2, which should be a hell of a book. Check out the updated blog here. Below is the cover, a beautiful screen print drawn by Joe Lambert and pulled by Alex Kim. You really have to see it in person, which I hope you do at MoCCA this weekend. We'll be in the Skylight Ballroom at table S53 - you have to take the elevator, but it's worth the trip. I swear.

Also, I'll have Only Skin 3 with me, as well as the first two issues. Rob Clough over at Sequart.org reviewed OS3 here, in case you forgot about it - he also gave Chuck's Snake Oil a great review, too.

Well, I guess that's it - I'll be hoping to see folks at MoCCA. The coolest event of the show will definitely be the Friday night book release party for pal Sam Gaskin's Fatal Faux Pas, Eamon Espey's Wormdye, Chris Wright's Inkweed and a new issue of Austin English's Windy Corner Magazine at Desert Island Comics in Williamsburg, a new store that's supposed to be awesome. The party will also be the first time Secret Acres comes out to play - they are publishing Sam and Eamon's books.

Ok, come out to MoCCA and table S53 in the Skylight Ballroom.

Only Skin was at Stumptown...

2008-04-30T12:15:00.011-05:00

...unfortunately, I was not. I think the above photo is from the Pony Club booth at Stumptown 2008. On the table you can see comics from me, Chuck, Alex and Joe. Pretty Cool. (note: this photo was mercilessly swiped flickr poster aenigma's extensive photolog of Stumptown, which you can access here.)

You can finally buy a copy of Only Skin 3 online at Secret Acres or Atomic Books on in Jim Hanley's Universe. Microcosm and Quimbys and a few other stores should have it soon.

Also, the ever awesome Whitey at Optical Sloth has a review up of Only Skin 3. Read it here. (scroll down past the reviews of the first two issues to read it.)

Also, congrats to comrade Chuck "McBuck" Forsman for winning the Indie Spinner Rack Scholarship! Will those ISR dudes ever stop being Awesome? No. You can listen to that right here. (they also talk about the new issue of Only Skin briefly after Chuck's acceptance speech.)

ALSO, head on over to the Sundays blog where Jeff Lok has posted a color version of his hilarious "Sam and Dan" comic that will be included in Sundays 2. More info on Sundays 2 to come, but I can tell you that I've seen the screen printed cover Alex and Joe collaborated on and it's amazing. Sundays 2 will be at MoCCA 2008 in about six weeks.

ALSO! I've updated my "friends" and "comics sites" links with the blogs of pal Rich Tommaso, teach Jason Lutes and teach Steve Bissette's newish blog (he actually changed his site a while ago, but I haven't had the chance to update the link).

I forgot to mention, I'll be going to Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC on June 20th-22nd to their Indie Island section. Seriously, check out that Indie Island list: Sammy Harkham, Jaime Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez. Did I mention Jaime Hernandez? That's gonna be awesome. I'll be going with a few other CCS pals.

I'm working on my Sundays 2 strip and writing the next issue of Only Skin at the moment. And getting ready for CCS graduation in a scant 17 days.

NY Comic Con!

2008-04-13T01:57:00.003-05:00

Come on out to NY Comic Con next weekend. Only Skin 3 will be at Jim Hanley's booth.

See you there, hopefully.

Watercolor Goofiness

2008-04-10T00:59:00.000-05:00

That's all.

Only Skin ३ done for real; goes to NY Comic Con

2008-04-02T05:35:00.005-05:00

Only Skin 3 will be debuting at NY Comic Con in a few weeks. It'll be at Jim Hanley's table there. I'm going to try to make it down to visit some friends and see the show.

Copies should also be to Secret Acres within the week and hopefully a few other places.

Only Skin 3

2008-03-26T15:42:00.002-05:00

...is done. ...for now. I may be redrawing the cover though.

Soon-ish

2008-03-23T06:36:00.001-05:00

Inking for Only Skin 3 is complete. All I have to do now is draw and color the cover. I should have copies ready to mail out some time next week. Here are a few sample pages...

Only Skin 3, Lambert Keep It Steady and Welcome to the Dahl House

2008-02-19T15:42:00.003-05:00

Here's some inks from Only Skin 3, I have to clean them up a little still, but I'm posting them for you now. I'm pretty much on track to finish the issue by the end of March.

Also, my main man Joe Lambert just posted on his blog that he's going to be included in Best American Comics 2008. Which is cool own it's own, but even cooler if you realize that comics legend Lynda Barry is editting. Congrats, Joe! That's an exciting first, and it probably won't be his last.

Also in cool (one-time) WRJ cartoonist news, Ken Dahl's book is now available for pre-order on Amazon! You can also order it directly from Microcosm. Now he just has to finish Monsters. Congrats, Gabby.

Indie Spinner Rack Names Only Skin One of the Best of 2007

2008-02-12T00:46:00.000-05:00

Wow. Indie Spinner Rack has named Only Skin one of it's favorite comics of 2007. Mr. Phil had it in his top ten comics of the year. You can listen to the podcast here. It's Episode 108.

Charlito also raved about former CCS Fellow and Red House alum Ken Dahl's contribution to Papercutter 6. That truly is one of Mr. Dahl's finer stories, so if you haven't seen it, pick it up.

Also listed by Mr. Phil was one of my favorite books of the year, Jamie Tanner's The Aviary, which if you haven't read it - check it out.

The ISR boys have been awesome to CCS, including putting together the Awesome Anthology which benefits the school and showcases a few CCS students and they're always an entertaining listen. It's incredibly awesome to be included in their year end list, I'm kind of shocked.

If you're looking to buy issues 1 and 2, Secret Acres and Microcosm should still have copies, as should most of the stores on the sidebar.

The first inked page of Only Skin 3

2008-02-05T18:00:00.000-05:00

The ink is actually still drying, which made scanning tricky. This is page 21 of the book.

New URL and some Only Skin 3 pencils

2008-02-04T23:13:00.000-05:00

Sorry the blog has been absent for a while, I've been having severe busy-ness on several fronts and mostly pencilling Only Skin 3.

Above are a few preview pages from said issue of Only Skin. I'm almost done pencilling the issue, it's a bit longer than the last two - about 44pp of comics in this one compared to 32-ish in the last two. I'm a lot more happy with the drawing in this one so far and hopefully the story will still be interesting and setting up what should be an all out crazy issue 4. I'm going to try to keep the same schedule I did last year at this point - Issue 3 for MoCCA and Issue 4 for SPX, though issue 3 will certainly be available online and in some stores well before MoCCA. Anyhoo.

Also, this blog now has an official URL: www.onlyskincomix.com

Update your browsers, links and such accordingly. Or not, the old address still forwards stuff here.

Also, why is goodreads fever suddenly sweeping the nation?

Also, wow, just saw this but Rob Clough over Sequart just called Only Skin one of his favorite comics of 2007. Holy Moley. Congrats to red house-mate T Edward Bak for making that list, too (he made a bunch of others, too, and just gave an awesome talk up here at ole CCS).

Happy Holidays

2007-12-20T21:11:00.000-05:00

Well, I'll be traveling to see friends and family for the holidays, but I hope to keep working on Only Skin 3.

Also, you can order Only Skin 1 and 2 from Microcosm now, here and here. Those guys are awesome. I got a chance to meet some of the Microcosm team when they came to visit my (sniff) former housemate Gabby Schulz aka Ken Dahl. Microcosm is printing a collection of Gabby's hilarious Gordon Smalls material soon (apparently tentatively titled Ken Dahl's BYPRODUCT), which, in addition to his upcoming Monsters graphic novel, will be required reading. Gabby moved away from WRJ recently to pursue the bright lights and cheap, quality food of New York City and he's greatly missed. If you see him in New York and he's not drawing or complaining, make sure he's okay.

Also! Thanks to Rob Clough at Sequart for his write-up of the many CCS minis he got at MoCCA, including Only Skin and Sundays and a bunch of others. Read it here.

I hope everyone has a happy holiday season.

The rest of the CCS Mid-Term thingies

2007-12-12T16:08:00.000-05:00

Here are my other two posters for the CCS Mid-term exhibit. We had to give a sort of talk about our progress thus far. It was good to see everyone's work all at once.

I'm back to pencilling Only Skin 3 and also doing some ink sketches with a brush. I may post some of the less embarassing ones at some point.

It looks like the blog-off might be dead, but I'm still going to try to post a colored illustration every week or so, just because I need the practice.

CCS Mid-terms and Daily Cross Hatch review...

2007-12-05T10:55:00.000-05:00

Well, the blog-off sort of fell down over the last week, mainly due to Thanksgiving and these mid-term progress reports we have to do on our thesis projects up here in the Great white NORTH. We also got like 10 inches of snow, which seemed like a lot for some reason. Anyway, above is one of the posters I made to show my process and progress on Only Skin so far, etc. There are more, but maybe I'll save those for later...

Also, thanks to the Daily Cross Hatch for reviewing Only Skin 1 and 2 here.

That's all I got for the time being... pencilling is underway on Only Skin 3. I hope to finish by March. It's a longer issue.

Only Skin 2 Review

2007-11-16T10:56:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Whitey at Optical Sloth for his review of Only Skin 2. Read it here. (you have to scroll down past his review of Only Skin 1)

I finished writing and thumbnailing the third issue, got some really good feedback from Steve Bissette and Sarah Stewart-Taylor and I'm going to make a few changes and start pencilling the new issue. Instead of doing one over-sized issue, I'll probably try to have issues 3 and 4 done by the end of the school year.

Also this week, Eleanor Davis and Drew Weing stopped by the school and they were highly entertaining and intelligent guests. And a ton of fun. We all went to see James Sturm give a lecture at Dartmouth last night about his new book.

Below, you can see a sketchbook thing I did because I was inspired by Eleanor Davis' and Joe Lambert's use of color ink in their sketchbooks. My experiment with the ink I got kind of ended up looking like how Joe does some of his sketchbooks, except the drawings aren't as good here. Sorry, Joe. But Joe has always said that drawing in a different color helps your drawing feel not as boring and he was right.

P.S., since I am going to Savannah for the holidays, this will be my blog-off post for the week.

Four Years

2007-11-11T16:40:00.000-05:00

Here's yet another silly blog-off post.

Also, thanks to Steve Saville at Silver Bullet for another nice review, this time of Only Skin 2.

Stole My Man

2007-11-10T19:58:00.000-05:00

Another silly blog-off post.

This week we had a great writing workshop with Lynda Barry which really helped me get out of a writing rut. I rewrote most of the third issue of Only Skin and I'm thumbnailing away. I hope to start drawing it right after Thanksgiving and I'll be submitting to a few anthologies in the meantime.

My apologies

2007-11-06T02:04:00.000-05:00

This is the stuff blog-offs die on, folks. Also, it might be a character in a fun story I might be doing with some friends. I dunno. Don't worry, this is not what's in the forest in Only Skin. Though that'd be kinda funny.

Also, below is a model sheet for Clay. I'm trying to focus a lot on the anatomy of characters right now and keep it much more consistent. Consistency with anatomy is one of my biggest struggles and I'm trying to get better. We'll see what happens. Anyway, it was supposed to be colored last week for the blog-off, but I got that nasty bug that's traveling around WRJ and knocking out cartoonists left and right.

Werewolves are for Halloween

2007-10-26T02:28:00.000-05:00

Here's a new blog-off 07 entry.

Also, thanks to the folks at Silver Bullet for their nice review of Only Skin #1.

I'm still writing Only Skin 3 and have a few other projects in the works at the moment. Sadly, making a werewolf costume for Halloween is not one of them.

Squid are for Losers

2007-10-21T01:02:00.000-05:00

Here's another blog-off-y type image. I'm just sketching a lot right now. Though I did write a fair ammount of Only Skin 3 today in the lovely town of Brattleboro. I also visited the Maxfield Parrish collection at the Cornish Colony Museum. But I did not have my camera with me, so I cannot prove any of this.

BLOG OFF 07

2007-10-18T17:38:00.001-05:00

BLOG OFF 07 is under way, featuring a weekly color illustration from Chuck, Alex and me.

Alex ran down the basic rules in his earlier post, so I won't belabor the subject too much, other than to say that this is a fun competition just to make sure we're all working on fun color illustrations every week. Ideally, we'll all be posting one image a week. If not, there will be hell to pay. I think we also decided that coloring two pages of an existing comic counted as an illustration in BLOG OFF 07, which I think we should shorten to BO7, or bo7, something like that. Anyway. Above is my second entry. Hopefully this process will allow me to get better with coloring and layering things and stuff. I have some experiments I can't wait to try. (In case you missed it, if you care, my first BLOG OFF 07 post was buried at the bottom of this post)

Also, this is random and cool, but my... ahem... friend found this article on Wizard when he was googling "Sean Ford Only Skin." My friend does this sometimes when he's bored. I'm always like, "hey, guy, take a walk outside or something." Anyway, he found this: apparently Chuck and I made Wizard's shortlist of best books at MoCCA...

That's all for today. Still writing Only Skin 3 and trying to think of short story projects to draw in the meantime.

SPX 07 Recap

2007-10-17T10:46:00.000-05:00

Whew. SPX 07, my first trip down to the show, was a blast. The Sundays table did some solid business, Only Skin #2 did pretty well and everyone had a great time, despite being utterly exhausted. I got to meet Gilbert Hernandez, who was extremely nice, got to hang with good friends and make some new ones. It was a great show. Now it's time to get back to work and deal with the post-con blues. Below are some pictures I heartlessly swiped from Joe Lambert's SubSub blog, though the first is swiped from Heidi MacDonald's Beat. Also, you simply MUST check out the Beards of Bethesda video that Alexis and Joe filmed at SPX, which I believe Joe assembled into a hilarious music video. It's amazing, and linked below.

As far as the books of the show, there were some amazing ones. I got some beautiful John Hankiewicz books that are weird and strange and awesome. CF's Powr Mastrs book was probably the closest thing to a buzz book at the show, and his weird, Darger-like drawings are really mesmerizing to look at and the story is hilarious and weird. The Fluke 6 anthology was amazing and beautiful - Joe Lambert and Matt Wiegle have utterly great stories in there - also Drew Weing, the editor, was incredibly nice. The Awesome Anthology kicked butt, containing 4 CCS students' comics, alongside the likes of Josh Cotter, Al Columbia and Renee French. Eamon Espey had a new mini he did with a friend that looked great. Frank Santoro's huge new book from Picture Box looked beautiful. There was so much great stuff there and I'm just starting to dig through it. I'm probably forgetting a ton of stuff. Oh, the Partyka table was beautiful again and between SPX and MoCCA I bought a ton of their beautiful books by Shawn Cheng, Sara-Edward Corbett and Matt Wiegle.

Also, hearty congrats to Minty Lewis, author of PS Comics, who won the Ignatz Award for Best Mini-Comic. I don't know her too well, but the few times I've met her, she's been extremely nice and she has a book coming out from Secret Acres soon that will be great. Read her stuff.

And congrats to Ken Dahl/Gabby Schulz, who was involved in the awesome Paper Cutter #6 book which took home best debut honors at the Ignatz Awards. Despite Gabby's claims, his story in there is awesome.

Also, super hearty congrats go to Colleen Frakes, a good friend and CCS pioneer, who just won a Xeric.

Jess, Me and Alex, preening for Heidi MacDonald.

Alec Longstreth, living up to his reputation as the awesomest dude in comics, was a constant source of energy and amusement, check him out in the Beards of Bethesda video, he's the star.

The Sundays table was well-stocked and well-attended.

Right next door were our pals at One Percent Press: JP, Alexis, Joe, Stephen and James all had great books and a good time.

Alex Kim and Joe Lambert... there's really nothing you can say about them except they're great.

Sadly, I spent most of the night time at SPX falling asleep in strange places, usually while someone was talking to me. Luckily, Joe was there to capture the moment...

Thanks to everyone who came out to SPX. If you didn't get a copy of Only Skin 2 yet and still want one, I Know Joe Kimpel has copies and I just sent a big order of books out to places like the Secret Acres mini-comic store, Million Year Picnic, Atomic Books, Quimbys, Hanleys, Rocketship, Pony Club, Phantom of the Attic and hopefully more soon. I'm going to go write Only Skin 3 now and should have some Blog Off 07 posts coming up, go check out Alex Kim's first entry right now. I may also try to do a few short stories before drawing Only Skin 3, so let me know if there's any anthology type deal of interest out there... Now, go watch Beards of Bethesda.

Only Skin 2 Preview... then I hit the road for SPX

2007-10-11T06:18:00.001-05:00

Here's a preview of Only Skin 2. I made a bunch of copies to take to SPX and send to some stores. This preview is the title page and then the four page silent sequence that starts issue 2. Then there's 32 more pages of comic-y goodness to follow. The book should be available at www.iknowjoekimpel.com right now and hopefully at the stores who ordered issue 1 very shortly afterwards.

and here's the cover again, look for it at table H2 at SPX, along with the Sundays group and some great new minis from Alex Kim, Chuck Forsman and Joe Lambert.

also, after SPX, Chuck, Alex and I are going to do a sort of blog off, where we post colored images once a week. Anyone who fails to post has to buy the other two participants a secret gift. Here's my first colored sketch, buying me a week of slack. Step up, Chuck and Alex!

Only Skin 2 panels

2007-10-08T02:02:00.001-05:00

I'm in the midst of printing Only Skin 2 for SPX. Here are some panels, in sequence, even. I'll post more later...

Getting Ready for SPX

2007-10-02T18:32:00.000-05:00

I just sent Tony solicitation info for Only Skin #2 and got my table assignment for SPX... table H2. Stop by and say hello if you're in the area. I'll try to get some preview pages up before I leave for the con. Here's the solicit info, which sorta hints at the story... but not really.

Also, I just mapped out issue 3 and I think it's going to be like 64pp and debut at APE 08... we'll see though...

Only Skin #2
by Sean Ford
36pp, b&w; color wrap around cover
$5.00

Only Skin issue 2 continues the New Tales of the Slow Apocalypse story
line, picking up where issue 1 left off. In the issue, Paul and
Albert find out new information about the girl who appeared in the
diner at the end of the first issue and are both at a point where they
must make some decisions. Cassie makes a disturbing discovery at the
gas station and heads to town in search of information. Meanwhile her
brother Clay meets one old friend and one new friend. More
disappearances and questions, too!

Issue 2 will debut at SPX 07 and any orders will ship immediately
afterwards. Sean Ford will be at table H2 at SPX.