Ho12 Monthly #2 emerges!

Holy Shit, it's actually out!

That's right folks, after a nearly summer-long series of "discussions" with the powers that be, House of Twelve Monthly #2 is actually available for your viewing pleasure. You can get the new issue two ways. You can get the e-book for your iPhone/iPod touch/iPad through the app, Comics (by Comixology, Inc), it's sort of an itunes for comic books. Once in the app, click on browse, and type House of Twelve into the search bar. Or you can now purchase the title through Comixology's new web based comic reader (Direct link here). Issue number two is over 70 digital 'pages' and costs a measly $1.99.

Ho12 Monthly#2 is an amalgam of two separate issues, combined to make one super-sized, super-awesome, super-nerdy extravaganza containing stories by Kate Lacour, Fred Noland, David Paleo, Cheese Hasselberger and Dave McKenna. Adventures a-plenty in this massive installment; explore the hidden lives of licensed properties to a look into a wondrous world beneath your feet.

Now go out and buy this goddamn thing, and remember to rate it!

Cheese

Oh, here are some samples...

From Dave McKenna's Creeple

From kate Lacour's McThology

From Fred Noland's Big Green

From David Paleo's I Haunted My Mother's Womb:

From Cheese's Richard Sharver and the Hollow Earth:

Ho12Monthly#2 Cover Production

For the cover of Ho12Monthly#1 I posted a little "How I Did This" series of pics and descriptions and people liked it so I figured I do it again for the second issue's cover.

When we first did the book I had a different cover in mind, I even finished one (as seen in this previous post) but as things progressed and I saw more contributors stories it became evident the book needed a nicer cover (the old one got cut down and is now the issues back cover).

For inspiration I looked to Dave McKenna's story which featured a Pterodactyl and Fred Noland's story which has a decidedly environmental theme. With the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I figured a mash-up of these ideas would make a funny, yet poignant mix.

I started out with some doodles I did in Dave McKenna's sketchbook while manning the table at an indie comic show in New Haven, CT.

Then we went to Louie's Lunchbox and got cheeseburgers.

We enjoyed them very much.

Afterwards, I did a larger sketch in my own book, took a snapshot of it with my iphone and laid down some color ideas.

That same day, Kevin Colden and I were talking about the program Manga Studio and how much he liked it. I found it on sale at Amazon for $2o (I had $20 in credit from pre-ordering Red Dead Redemption, making it essentially free) so I picked it up. It arrived few days later so i plugged in the Wacom and started playing around with it. I first did a sketch of the cover on it, then cleaned up that in a blue line layer.

Manga Studio has some pretty great inking tools in it, I gotta admit, I'm pretty smitten with it.

Not knowing how to use the color system in MS, I imported the inked sketch into photoshop as layers and colored the bitch.

That came out swell, but I still needed to do the background. I started looking up some photo reference for the ocean, clouds and oil rigs.

I chose this ocean pic from someone's wallpaper site.

This shot from above the clouds from some random girl's photostream (I then flipped it upside down)...

and was freaking astounded to find actual photos of an oil rig exploding. The guy had a whole set of these, from a little smoke to full blow BLAMMO!

I guess that happens more often then anyone would like to tell you. Crazy!

Anywho, I combined them in photoshop and turned the tolerance way up, getting a rough idea of what I wanted.

I then sent it over to Manga Studio and made a blue line layer out of it.

I used that as a guide and inked the background straight over it.

That came out pretty sweet!

I had been playing with the color tools in Manga Studio a bit by then and tried my hand at coloring it there, getting some pretty good results, especially on the top half. One thing I couldn't figure out was on the ink layer the program treats white areas as a opaque, creating large parts of the bottom half I couldn't color correctly. Phooey!

Suffice to say, it was back into photoshop where I was able to finish the coloring, add a gradation to the rig explosion and some shading to the cloud layer. Sadly I didn't think to keep copies of any of this, sorry folks.

After a few finishing touches I merged the fore and backgrounds, dropped in the Ho12 Logo and bing-bang-boom, ladies and gents, we have a cover.

It maybe took four hours start to finish for the foreground image, about three hours to research and draw the background, another two to figure out the color for the BG and maybe another hour to combine it all and call McKenna and get his opinion. So we're looking at about 10 hours total from doodle to finished piece. I'm sure I could have cut that by two hours if I had a better understanding of Manga Studio, I still don't know what half the buttons and do-dads actually do. Oh, and Smith Micro (makers of MS) what the fuck? No eyedropper? Shiiiiiiit. I hear there's a plug in that has it, I gotta look that up, taking crib-notes on an RGB slider scale over what colors I'm using is a suckas game.

The whole book should be available in a few weeks via Comixology's Comics app for the iDevice of your choice. It's packed with great stuff from David Paleo, Kate Lacour, Fred Noland, Dave McKenna and myself. These things just get better and better looking as we go along. I'm really proud of this one, I hope you all like it as much as I do.

So, what's the story on Ho12monthly#2???

Hey, that's a good question. Here's the deal. After about 2 months of back and forth with the powers that be, we've finally gotten the go ahead for issue #2! The book will be a supersized spectacular featuring new work from five great artists: Kate Lacour, Dave McKenna, David Paleo, Fred Noland and myself. You can expect it in about 2-3 weeks via Comixology's Comics app (would have been sooner, but I've been bed-ridden with the flu all week).

Here's a peek at the cover, I'll do a whole post on this next week...

Ho12 Monthly #2 coming this week!!!

Ho12Monthly#2 cover by Cheese

Here we go again, House of Twelve Monthly #2 will be out on Comixology's Comics app Thursday! This month's issue features art from Kate Lacour, Victor "Bald Eagles" Cayro and yours truly, Cheese. Here's some samples...

Kate Lacour investigates the socio-political landscape

of McDonaldland in her Earth-shattering exclusive report, 'McThology.'

I made the mistake of trying to choose a single panel or sequence

of Bald Eagle's story, 'The Mazk!'

That turned out to be futile, so here's a whole page.

These dudes are The Feero, the main baddies in my new ongoing series, 'Richard Sharver and the Hollow Earth.'

All this and more await you in the May issue of House of Twelve Monthly, available Thursday, May 27 for your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad exclusively through Comixology's free comic reading app, Comics.

Ho12 Monthly #2 coming soon.

Sorry folks, but my aforementioned vacation threw a wooden shoe into my comic making schedule so I'm a little behind on House of Twelve Monthly #2. My bad, please accept my sincere apologies. Give me a week or so and we'll be back on track.

Issue 2 features new work from K. Thor Jensen, Kate Lacour, Victor 'Bald Eagles' Cayro and of course, Cheese. Here's a peek from my story, Richard Sharver and The Hollow Earth!

It's been a while since I've worked in color, I gotta admit, I'm having a blast coloring this stuff. I am a wacom addict.

Whew!

Team 12 Shogun and all-around sweet dude, Cheese, poses with a fan in Kobe, Japan.

It's been a busy couple of weeks around Chateau le Twelve, I got engaged while on vacation in Japan, House of Twelve Monthly was released on April 1st and got at least one decent review so far (link), House of Twelve #5: Touching Children's Stories came in second for anthology of the year on ComicCritique.com (Miss and Frank are also mentioned in other parts of the 'best of' list, check out the whole thing), on top of all that we went to MoCCA and there's the delayed April Ho12 Comic Jam this week! I fucking wiped just thinking about it!

So, the jam: Same Cheese time, Same Cheese Channel — Come on out and see the free range cartooning! Bring your pencils!

The Ho12 Comic Jam

April 15th, 2010 - 7 pm

Jack Demsey's Pub

36 West 33rd St.

NYC

The cover

I was pretty stuck with a cover idea for the first Ho12 cover. The first book has comics from four of my favorite cartoonists and I wanted to create something that had at least something to do with one of the strips. I really liked Darryl Ayo's story about folks with x-ray vision a lot, so I started mulling that one over.

Dave McKenna, Amy (my better half) and I were at Maxwell's in Hoboken seeing a show by Brian Musikoff's old band, Friends, Romans, Countrymen when I was struck like a bolt from the blue. I typed up a note on my phone, screaming out much like Spock in 'The Devil in the Dark.'

Xray eyes!

white and color on black!

chakra lines!

energy waves!

The next day I came up with this doodle.

Sort of an "Alex Grey meets Ayo" sorta thing. I thought it was kinda neat, so I moved on to the next phase: actually drawing the fucker.

A few days later I drew out each layer separately while watching Hill Street Blues on Hulu — that show holds up like a motherfucker.

I should point out that these are obviously not scans, but iPhone pictures. Y'see, I started conceptualizing the cover while I was at the office and they were the best I had. I'll scan the art for the final. They cleaned up just fine for my needs. Anyways...

So, I colored the layers and thinking about how I wanted to present them. After monkeying around with it for a while I came up with this:

"So far, so good," I thought, but a little jumbled. It was kinda hard to see what the fuck was going on, so I ran through a variety of configurations.

I'm a few hours away from a final design, and I still have to scan the art and replace these iphone pic stand-ins, and add in some 'energy lines' (time to break out the Spirograh!), but I figure by sometime tomorrow we should be good to go.

Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival

http://www.comicsandgraphicsfest.com/

Come out this Saturday to the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival and stop by the Ho12 table to see some stuff from the up coming Comixology iPhone project and pick up the latest issue of House of Twelve, Touching Children's Stories for all the weird kids in your life. The show runs from 11-7 and we'll have an excellent selection of rotating guests through out the day, Miss Lasko-Gross, Sam Henderson, Jenny Gonzalez, AYO and special guest Adam Suerte will be running around being all kinds of sacrilegious and shit.

Jam moved up!

Hello friends, 

Seems I didn't realize that the next Jam (May 2009) was scheduled to be the night before the Toronto comic art festival in — you guessed it — Toronto.  We are headlining the event (and by 'headlining' I mean, we'll be hidden in the back) so it might make it tough to do the whole get drunk, draw comics thing.  So as a special event I am moving the jam UP a week!  It'll be held on April 30, 2009.  Lucky you! You get 2 jams in one month, you fucking lucky bastards!  More details later as I think them up.  

Cheese

Follow meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Hooolee! Everyone is talking about the March Ho12 Comic Jam! From sports super-star SHAQ to Pickle_Dick66 (secretly FRANK MILLER!)! Isn't it about time you came on out to one?

The Ho12 Comic Jam
Jack Demsey's Pub
36 West 33rd St., in the basement
7 p.m. to 11ish

--------------------

So yes, I've gone and joined Twitter. Now you can follow not only the goings on of Team 12 here on the blog, or on the Facebook page, but now you can follow the day to day — no, minute to minute — goings on of ME! Good'ole wonderful ME!!! What could be better then that!?! Nothing, I say.

The New Math

So if you roll through some of the old posts here you'll find some nice drawings I did for an art show in LA last summer entitled MATH. Mostly it's a bunch of D&D drawings, so lots of monsters and swords and sorcerers type stuff. I had a lot of fun doing it, and decided to do up a few more drawings and publish them into a stand alone book. So here are some doodles of the new stuff that I need to finish up. The expected release date for the book is the Toronto Comic and Art Festival at the beginning in May.

That there is me (from High School) they are looking at in that last picture. It's pretty sweet!

The Cons of 2009

Miss, Cheese and Kevin at Tcaf 2007

With exception to the NYCC, (which isn't cool enough to be San Diego*, and too high-end to be about actually interesting comics) I love me some comic-con action.  I really get a thrill piling Team 12 into a van and driving out in the wilds of the great adventure that is North America. 

This year we have a metric ton of material coming out, so much so in fact that there should be a new book or debut at every one!  Lucky you, the Ho12 consumer! Here are the shows and crew members you can expect to see this season...

Tcaf

The Toronto Comic Art Festival

May 9-10, 2009

Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge St. 

Toronto, Canada

Every other year we treat ourselves to this wonderful show, crossing borders to sell dick and fart comics is the most honest thrill an artist can feel. I feel I am helping America by contributing to down-paying the national trade deficit.  

Attendees: 

Cheese, Miss Lasko-Gross, Kevin Colden, Brian Musikoff, Dave McKenna

New Stuff: 

• Miss is debuting her latest opus A Mess of Everything at Tcaf!  Come on out and get your filthy hands on one of the first copies off the presses!  AMoE is the sequel to her 2007 graphic novel Escape from Special, both are available from Fantagraphics, and from Miss herself at the con. 

• Brian Musikoff will have copies of the latest in his Mauled! series, Mauled! #4: Mauled by Machines, which I would explain, but it kinda explains itself. 

• Kevin will have copies of his Xeric Award winning Fishtown graphic novel that has been burning up the review charts.

• And I'll have copies of House of Twelve Goes to War! (#4), a collection of autobiographical stories of our intrepid cartoonists in the heat of battle!  All amazingly true, right down to the last detail!  Honest to god!  

MoCCA

The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival

June 6-7, 2009

The 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington and 25th street

New York, NY

This one's the no-brainer, it's our hometown show.  This year at a new location I talked up a few months back, the 69th Regiment Armory, the show needed a new venue and they found the perfect on here. 

Attendees: 

Cheese, Dave McKenna, Miss Lasko-Gross, Kevin Colden, Kate Allen, Jenny Gonzalez, and more.

New Stuff: 

• I'll be debuting my first solo art book, MATH, some of which I posted right here on this very blog not too long ago.  The final version has several new pieces and more fun notes from Dave's high school calculus notebook.  

• Miss' sequal to Escape from Special, A Mess of Everything will also be available in mass quantities.  

• Kevin's Fishtown will be right there, on the table for all to gaze upon.

SPX

The Small Press Expo

September 26-27, 2009

The Marriot Bethesda North Hotel & Conference Center

Bethesda, MD (Actually, I think it's Rockville)

My favorite show, we kill at this gig every year. This is where the big Ho12 guns come out and play.  This year you have three new releases as well as the always popular Strike Team Dodecca Sales Experience managing the table. 

Attendees:

Cheese, Miss Lasko-Gross, Kevin Colden, Dave McKenna, Kate Allen and a special guest, Pete Townsend (no relation).

New Stuff:

• House of Twelve #5: Touching Children Stories - Ho12 is proud to announce the latest in it's always popular, cutting edge anthology series with this awesome collection of all-ages stories meant to tickle the funny bone of both adult and child alike. 

• Dave McKenna's long awaited adult comic debut, Monstaland will finally see the light of day.  Dave has take his two favorite things in life, porn and giant monster movies and combined them into one of the most amazing adult comics you'll see this decade. 

• The second issue of Kate Allen's fabulous Milk-Teeth will make it's first showing at SPX 2009! The first issue of M-T was a grand-slam, out-of-the-ball-park smash, selling every copy we had with us. 

Add to this Miss's A Mess of Everything and Kevin's Fishtown and whatever other junk we can fit on the table and Ho12 is looking to murder each and every one of you with our amazing line up of great comics. 

So keep your peepers peeled for the 2009 line up coming from Ho12 Industries and it's affiliated partners. 

* On a side note, I was having a drink or nine with buddy Chris P. the other night and he mentioned that at the last San Diego comic con there was a huge booth, one of the mega booths, a booth usualy reserved for an entire big time movie company, for the TV show 'The Office.'  Y'know, I get it, but FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOOOUUUU, Mr. or Mrs. The Office. Go have OfficeCon 2009 somewhere.  Y'assholes. 

Of Jams and Men

Upstairs at Jack Demsey's at the Ho12 Comic Jam, 2/5/09

So last week's Ho12 Comic Jam was another rousing success. If we keep having nights like these I am going to have to actually start putting thought into this, which after 7 years seems silly. I gotta hand it to the old facebook, I just signed up for it 2 months ago and it's already been responsible for rustlin' back several long lost contributors and bringing in three new guys. Seems my little recruitment plan has worked, let's hope it keeps up.

We are still having issues with getting the basement reserved every month, I really need to talk to Vinne, the manager of Demsey's, about that, I know in the past the relocation to the upstairs has caused at least one person to miss the event, I really don't want that to happen again.

Kevin and Miss seem to have rocked out at the NYCC this past weekend, good on them. Check out Kevin's blog listed on the bottom right of this page. It's twitery.

Seems all our convention appearances are coming together all at once, I will have post later this week going over it all.

Off to kill zombies with friends.

Cheese

January Jam Post-Op report

Man, there are times when the jams just get swept away in their own awesomeness, last night was one of those nights. The January 09 jam was one of my favorite jams in years. Not that I don't usually have a good time, but last night the room was jam packed with great talents and good friends. The jams we made were funny too, I talked McKenna into scanning some of them, hopefully that will happen soon and I will get it all posted in due time.

One of my favorite parts of the evening was when Miss asked for her check.



Don't let anyone tell you comics are a dudes only medium, see she's labeled even!

I only wonder what mine said, after the 8 (at least) beers I had, I don't remember looking.

Next Jam is Feb. 5, 7 pm at Demsey's more details to come as they are available.

January Jam

Some people might think, "Hey, it's the first thursday of the month, it's time for the comic jam!" They'd be wrong this month. Because the first Thursday lands on New Years Day, we're pushing it off a week to offer our drunk members a chance to consider alcohol a viable option again. So look for our fat assed selves on Thursday, January 8th. Same drunk time (7pm), same drunk station (Demsey's Pub).

Anti-Social Networking

So after long being denied for having the name 'Cheese' I finally got around to joining the social networking nightmare that is Facebook. There is now a Ho12 group there, join up and rock out. Book release dates, deadlines, jams and parties will all be cross posted here and there.

Click here to become socially networked to the House of Twelve.

Spain Rodriguez

Here's a neat little vid I snatched from Heidi over at The Beat, a 2 minute rant about counter-culture from noted undergound scenester Spain Rodriguez. He also talks about his book, CHE: A Graphic Biography. Check it out to the big dog.

MoCCA Moves!

According to Ace MacDonald over at Publishers Weekly's The Beat, the annual MoCCA sow in New York has a new home, the much celebrated 69th Regiment Armory. Swank! I really like the Armory, it's a massive, yet beautiful room with mile-high ceilings and a very chill atmosphere. I am enthused. Look at me being enthused.




In other news, so I come into my office today and find one of my co-workers has received a book for Xmas entitled, Stuff White People Like, based on the website I guess. But I pick it up and open it to any random page and am hit smack in the face with a picture of Ho12 pal and soon to be contributor, Chris "G$" Garrison. Who shared several small apartments with yours truely in the early 90s. Neat!



Ho12 XXX-Mas Party tomorrow night, bitches.