Special Holiday Announcement

With the immanent release of House of Twelve #3 via Comixology's Comics app — and because we love you — we here at Team 12 Headquarters have a special holiday gift for everyone, House of Twelve Monthly #1 is available for the low, low cost of absolutely free.

Take this opportunity to check out some of the great comics running in each and every issue if House of Twelve. Issue #1 features stories by award winning cartoonists like Miss Lasko-Gross, Sam Henderson & K. Thor Jensen along with longtime webcomics fan-favorite, Darryl Ayo.

Available right now on the web and on the Comics App for the iDevice of your choice.

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.

News, News, News!

So the clock is counting down for the release of House of Twelve Monthly. Our target date is April 1st, no foolin'. From then on you'll get a monthly dose of Team 12 the first week of the month, just like unemployment checks, as a matter fact, you should spend your stimulus checks on digital Comics from comiXology, specifically (wait for it) House of Twelve Monthly. Call your senators and congressmen and let them know, you want more House of Twelve. Tell them, you're really fucking lazy and you want not only a iPhone to view it on, but you want the book itself paid for and installed on the device when you get it, and so do every other unemployed American.

In other news, the next Ho12 Comic Jam will be Thursday April 15th, 2010. I know, I know, usually we're like clockwork, the first of the month. Well, I'm going outta town for a few weeks and I won't be around, so y'all are going to have to wait. In the mean time, check out the facebook fan page and my rarely used twitter feed to stay up to date with all the Ho12 goings on. As a special gift, here's a little sample from Dave McKenna's story for issue 3 of Ho12Monthly, it's a gassssssss.....

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.

What should we name it?

Somewhere in the world there are a dozen cartoonists working on comics for Ho12's iPhone project with Comixology. With that underway there are several things we need to take care of so we can start on the next phases of the project. One being, what the hell do we call it? So far I've got a few ideas, but none really stick. Any ideas? So far my fave is iHo12, but that's kinda tired.

The Pros and Cons of Brooklyn

I was pretty vocal about my disgust about last year's MoCCA Festival and opined for an alternative. Apparently my cries were heard and two new 'indie' shows haves sprung up in the last few weeks.

First is KingCon, happening in early November. The show is a spin-off off the Brooklyn ZineFest. At first it sounded like a good idea, but the more and more I heard about it the more it soured. The program lists several seemingly unrelated events including a classic video gaming championship, a LOLcat caption contest and several panels revolving around DC and their various properties. That doesn't sound too 'indie,' it also burned my ass that the Zinefest tables were $40 and KingCon tables are $200 and up. I nearly jumped on this show regardless.

Then Ho12 iPhone contributor Sam Henderson clued me in to the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, happening on December 5th. So far this show's guests include Charles Burns, Kim Deitch, Gary Panter and about a half-dozen more solid, alternative cartoonists. The show is being put on by the Brooklyn comics shop Desert Island and publisher PictureBox, so their indie cred is pretty grounded. I don't think they'll be any LOLcat naming contests at that show.

So, for a multitude of reasons I'm going with the BCGF, the paperwork is on its way and looks like we'll be seeing you in December.

Ho12 on the iPhone

Ho12 will be undergoing massive changes. I am proud to announce we have just signed on to create monthly content exclusively for Comixology's new iPhone app, appropriatly called, Comics.

Comics is designed and administrated by Iconology, Inc. outta New York City, who are the same guys who run Comixology.com, a site that integrates the convenience of the web with local comics retailers providing store-specific pull lists and new comic previews. Comics costs $.99 and individual comics vary in price. It allows folks to buy single issues as well as subscribe to their favorite series and comes with over 30 free comics to get you started, some good ones too, Mage, Skyscrapers of the Midwest and The Walking Dead to mention a few.

Comics and is available through the Apple App store and is exclusive to the iPhone and iPod Touch devices (and all generations of each). Click here to check it out.

House of Twelve will start running "Best of" issues in October for free (as well as Ho12#5:Touching Children's Stories for a couple of bucks) and starting in January Team Twelve will begin delivering new and original comics though the Comics App. The book will be 24 pages long and feature a rotating cast of Indie/Alt comics all-stars, including:

Fredo Noland (Black Sheep, Midnight Creep)

Miss Lasko-Gross (Escape From Special, A Mess of Everything)

Sam Henderson (Magic Whistle)

Kate Lacour (Milk Teeth, Ho12)

Jenny Gonzalez (Too Negative, Ho12)

Dave McKenna (Monstaland, Ho12)

Cheese Hasselberger (Ho12 Team Captain)

Kevin Colden (Eisner Nominated Fishtown, I Rule the Night)

Darryl Ayo Brathwaite (Little Garden, Ho12)

Bald Eagles, aka Victor Cayro, aka The Beard (Kramer's Ergot, Typhon, Ho12)

K. Thor Jensen (Red Eye, Black Eye, Ho12)

Some artists will use the space for single issue one shots, others for continuing story-lines. We plan on inventing how stories can be told in this new and exciting mobile world.

www.houseoftwelve.com is currently undergoing a redesign that will include author profiles and samples from everyone. That's going to take me some time to finish though, so in the meantime, the current site will be updated , and point folks to this bloooog (ho12.blogspot.com) and our Facebook page.

Take a deep breath, 'cuz here we gooooooooooo!

(edit - Cleaned up contributor list to mark recent changes.)