Who Dat Ninja?

Things have been busy, but I'm still working on the writing side of my western story and I'm still trying to knock out some pages based on some odds & ends bits of writing I have lying around in the mean time.

I'm working on another 2 page story that came about after reading a post on Digital Webbing that was looking for short stories for an anthology book. All of the stories had to have something to do with ninjas. I thought it would be fun to do something a little more historically based than the usual fantasy based ninja stories. I never heard anything from the guys putting the book together beyond the initial contact, so I shelved the story until now.

Being such a short story, it's pretty straight forward so I wanted to have some fun with the visual style. I love Kurosawa's samurai films and have always admired the sumi brush drawing style of traditional Japanese art so I'm trying to combine the two styles. I'm hoping it'll be a little looser, more expressive and moodier that my usual stuff. We'll see. Here's the first panel:

Keepin' the Ball Rollin'

I took some time over the holidays to go over what I had done on my western comic, both in terms of story and art, and decided to do some major overhauling on the whole thing. That means it'll be a while before I have any pages to post, but since I don't want to lose the habit of turning out pages I'm going through my notebooks and looking for anything I can work up into short pieces.

This first one is an idea I had about 14 years ago when my wife and I were living in a small town in southeast Ohio - not much to set up, just a quick little two pager: