Might notice that the updates for this blog have been... somewhat nonexistent for a few months now, but I have been working day and night (literally) on a graphic novel project and just haven't had time for updates! Will be putting more info up about this project, titled, "Dirt Vol. 1: Tornado Water" soon, but for now here's some teaser art and a link to our Kickstarter! Thanks to everyone lending some support!

Art is by myself (Michael McMenemy), Colors by Joshua Jensen, Story by John Morello.

Click here to check out the Kickstarter video and more information.


-Kung Fu Mike

Re-post, Kung Fu Mike now on Twitter...

Also put this exact post on the Pale Dragon Blog, but anyway:

Yes, I finally did it. I joined Twitter. I'm not too sure how much I'll use it, but I've been encouraged by people saying that it's a good way to keep people updated on my art and graphic novel efforts. If you're interested, click here. I plan to "Tweet" about all things Pale Dragon, including the presentation on creating graphic novels I'll be giving for the West Boylston Arts Foundation on March 22nd, at 6:30. Should be fun! Hope I don't run out of stuff to talk about! They were nice enough to provide me with the flyer below:

-Kung Fu Mike

Neato sketches for an unfinished Zombie Comic

The following post was written months ago and for some reason left un-published. It's pretty ho-hum if you ask me, but again it's been a while since any posts went up, so here goes:

I assume this girl was supposed to be the lead. I'm sure it was some gruesome tale of survival with some farmer-types facing off against hordes of the undead or some such. Whatever the reason, I tried drawing this young lady driving a tractor. Woah, nice gams!



Of course those gams I'm referring to are the ghost images of leg anatomy you can see through the page. I used to practice that stuff a lot, and I think it did pay off a little in terms of sketching figures without reference.

Anywho, here's another farmer type who's a bit ornery.


"Bite me!" he says!! Get it!? It's funny because there are ZOMBIES!

Anywho, sorry for getting your hopes up, there are no actual Zombies in this post.

Check out this site for a cornucopia of Zombie mayhem. Also, there's a post here at McNemesis.com from my 24 Hour Comic called "I, Zombie" by clicking here.

-Mike

Pale Dragon, Issue 1, Page 01

Finally updated the Pale Dragon website to display pages from the book! I'm planning to release one page (or spread) a week for the next 24 weeks. I decided to invest in a pro version of simple viewer to take care of this, because it made more sense than having to code a new web page every single week. Anyone have a good idea of how to protect the art, rather than just letting full size images float around on the web, or should I just not worry about it? I'm pretty much operating on the belief that if people like this comic enough to steal it and reproduce (share) it with their friends, that's only helping me popularize my character, art and story line. Any thoughts?

Here's the first spread uploaded today. Click on it to check out the ever-evolving site.



-Mike

The Pale Dragon website

Reeeeally quick post just to advertise my new website for the comic project I've mentioned from time to time. The Pale Dragon is available for sale through the "Buy Comics" link! More to follow...

www.PaleDragon.com

-Mike

The Pale Dragon finished cover

The final (I think?) colors for the cover I put up last week. Everything's pretty much set and prepped to go for the entire book, should be seeing some printed issues in another few weeks! Not sure if I'll keep that caption on the left margin... but it fits pretty well and is reference to a line in the actual book. I'm going to have to mull that over. Anyway, thanks go to Jeff, Derek and Adrian, who gave some good feedback the logo you see there, and Jon Sun for helping me with the chop many years ago!



-Mike

Worcester Film Works

I was contacted recently about doing a logo for a local film project called Worcester Film Works. I completely misinterpreted the intention of the organization with the first round of sketches, assuming it was a local film company. The first attempt was pretty funny in a terrible way, I'd done a logo with a guy with a hammer and film reels and spotlights and stars and whatnot... In short, it came out looking like pure communist propaganda. Oops. Maybe I'll post it one day if I'm really desperate, but it's definitely nothing I'm proud of! After that, I did a little research and found out that the actual goal behind WFW is that they'll be SHOWING movies (free to the public) on Worcester Common... not MAKING them! Anywho, I did a bunch of sketches and threw as many movie inspired touches as I could think of. I boiled those down to what I thought were the few most fun ideas in this image:


And then had a little fun throwing it all together in this sketch:


... But then removed a lot of the clutter and just kept the simplified "W" made of film, and sent that off with a bunch of other interpretations in this grouping of logos:


I'd really meant for this to be more of a jumping off point to do some fun designs with, but in the end, they went for the WFW side-by-side letters. Oh well... it's a start!


If you're from Worcester, click the title of this post to check out their schedule for this summer.

I'm looking... forward... to Back To The Future!

-Mike

The Pale Dragon cover inks

Here's a drawing I finished the other day:

It's the inked version of what I intend to use for the cover of an ongoing comic book project, "The Pale Dragon," the first issue of which will be on sale at the end of the month.

-Mike

Blorg!

I don't know what this was all about when I did it... But I sort of like it.
Sorta...

-Mike

Sketchy

Here's a fun samurai design...
And did I steal this layout from a movie poster or something? Someone call me on it. I recognize it's pretty cliché imagery, but still...


Oh, and a free Rooftops Recordings CD to the first person who tells me which movie I happened to be watching when I scribbled out this gem:


???

-Mike

More old sketches

Had some fun looking through old sketchbooks recently. Here are three pen & ink sketches from Vincent's in Worcester. Nothing incredibly special about these images, now that I really think about it. Pure nostalgia. I used to visit the bar on a semi-regular basis and just sit there and draw, and have a meatball sandwich. Good times.

-Mike

Rooftop Recordings on sale now!

Purchase Rooftop Recordings here



You must click "Calculate Shipping" to proceed to checkout. Enjoy!

-Mike

Rooftop Recordings Update

Only a few days left until the Rooftop Recording's Release Party at Nick's Worcester! Getting pretty excited for it already, as people's interest seems to be gaining. Nothing outrageous, but something good seems to be happening. There will be an article about the Rooftops out in the upcoming issue of WoMag, and next month there will be a feature in Pulse Magazine. WCHC 88.1 should have a few tracks in their rotation at this point, and there might even be a radio interview in our future. Just wanted to post some photos of the CD case itself, and assure readers that they WILL be able to buy a CD through this blog if they can't make it to the release party! Come back to McNemesis.com for that page on the morning of Monday, the 25th of October. Anyway, here are some images from the CD case itself:






So again that's Nick's Restaurant & Bar, 124 Millbury St., Worcester, October 24th, at 7pm. The line-up should be pretty impressive, featuring the following performers: Scott Ricciuti, Nicole Langlois, Roger Lavallee, Niki Luparelli, Dan Burke, Todd Rawley, Israel Saldana, Ari Charbonneau, Bryan Bedard and Julius Jones. Still hopeful, but not confirmed are Andy Cummings and Stu Pynn. How could it be a bad night?

-Mike

Rooftop Recordings pt. 2 : Flyers

Here are a few promos I'm working on for the Rooftop Recordings release. Ahh, alliteration... Here ya go:



So far, so good? I thought this one was nice as a digital fake of what appears to be a double-exposure. While it's kind of interesting, I still have issues with it. It somewhat gives the impression that multiple recordings for this project might have been going on at the same time on separate rooftops... which was clearly not the case. That or Dan Burke's gigantic apparition is somehow haunting another musician...


And here are two in color, planning to do them in larger format and posting them up around Worcester. Still not at %100 but I think I like them. At this point I'm beginning to lose perspective and need to take a break! The subtlest of changes start to seem important, and I'm just nudging blocks of text around an image anyway. First one is of Stu:

And then there's this one of Scott and Nicole, not really different in layout:

Keeping info on the project to a minimum for the moment, thinking of adding information to promos as the date gets closer. All photos courtesy of Jonathan K. Sun. That's it for now!

-Mike

Rooftop Recordings pt. 1

A lot of people are probably still unaware of the existence of this project. Not posting any sound files yet, just wanted to show off a couple of behind-the-scenes photos taken during recording and contributed by my good friend, Jon Sun. (click on the title of this post to jump to Jon's flickr page)



This one was ultimately cropped and turned into the disc cover. I like how it almost appears as though you can see the curvature of the earth in it. Seems like it was a combination of a fish eye lens or just the shape of the hill that gave it that effect, Jon?


Well, for some reason Blogger's not cooperating this morning. At all. I plan to do more posts about this subject, soon, so I'll just have to leave it as this for now.

-Mike

Alien sketches

Finally working on the comic I did these preliminary sketches for, things are moving right along for a change and I just wanted to put these up. It was necessary to me that this time around I don't wind up designing background characters while drawing the page. It's easier to just grab a few ideas from a sketchbook and drop them in rather than making myself come up with them on the spot. I suppose these guys have more of a star wars / men-in-black feel than I was going for, and even though the main characters are all human (pretty much) I just wanted to be sure that crowd shots in the book have an otherworldly feel.



You may notice that occasionally my sketches talk to me. Don't be alarmed.


Hey now, weird tentacle-headed-flip-flop-and-sundress-wearing-blob-lady! Settle down!

-Mike

What's this?? Two posts in one day?

Still looking at some design stuff! Here are some logos from my time at Pagio Inc.:

(also that top one is for Image Production Services, Worcester, MA)

It's sort of funny to see how my penchant for comic art forces its way into my design process. Rather than attempting to collage things together, it tends to make more sense to me to just lay them out like panels:



Not very funny. Just sorta.

Worcester Movies Weekly

Well, it's been a while since I posted something on McNemesis... Going through my back-up drive and a few old graphic design projects, I realized how much fun I had working on Worcester Movies, an ill-fated 8-pager put out by Pagio Inc. (publishers of the Pulse Magazine) which, after six or so months, just didn't garner enough advertising sales to support it.








Not sure if that really gives the full effect of it, but there it is! Head writer and driving force behind the project was Rob Newton, whose knack for movie-title puns rivals my own.

Dr. Gonzo's Wild Beaver Rub

Here's another wacky/fun project! "Dr. Gonzo," of Dr. Gonzo's Uncommon Condiments, Worcester, Ma., (click title of this post for a link to his site) contacted me to do a tee-shirt design to celebrate the release of another one of his uncommon condiments. In this case, he'd been developing something called a "Wild Beaver Rub" and wanted some art that might also make sense as a product label. For some reason, I figured he wanted something that straddled the line between tasteful and tawdry, which people wouldn't be ashamed to wear around town. Below are some examples of things I sketched out for him before arriving at what we ultimately used:







As you can see, I wasn't quite sure which one of these would hit the right note for this client. But then again, my process for a project like this is seldom a straight shot. Simple graphic? Cartoon? Detailed pen & ink? What's the printing process involve, how detailed can you get, anyway? I just showed the good doctor everything and let his apparent reaction decide a winner. That, infused with the good sense of humor of my friend, Derek Ring (a talented illustrator also from Worcester), plus Dr. Gonzo's original tagline, "Every wild beaver needs a good rub," We wound up with this for a final:


I think it looks pretty good! Currently working towards (eventually) doing one of the other sketches as a limited edition print, but these tee-shirts are currently available at Dr. Gonzo's Spicy Comestible Emporium, located on Main St., Worcester, not too far from the Armsby Abbey.

Speaking of the Armsby Abbey, and to wrap up this post, here's a promotional illustration I did for them prior to their opening. A drawing selected from their primary round of sketches (pats self on back).


-Kung Fu Mike