Old OC Redraws in progress

I decided to redraw some old OCs I used to use as a cartoonist for the Eastern Echo.  Here are the ones I’ve finished so far:

Little Johnny, principle canine character, house pet.

Bess Milkcowski, DVM, Psychiatry.  Bovine psychiatrist and self proclaimed rumination specialist.

Detail of Bess Milkcowski’s redraw.

Desktop background - "Scruffy Greets the Neighbors"

"Scruffy Greets the Neighbors"

A scruffy mutt comes to call on his bovine neighbors in the field for his usual play date.

A few recent works

"Cow Cuddles"

Formatted to the exact dimensions of my MacBook Pro screen.

(1440 x 900 pixels)

Karsten takes a nap next to a cow.  Created at the suggestion of +Emperor Kraglint (Craig Wilson), an author with whom I have the occasional coffee meeting.

"The Many Faces of Isolda Steinbrecher"

Also formatted to the dimensions of my computer screen.

Feel free to use them both as desktop backgrounds, if it floats your boat to do so.

 "Shared Solitude"

Not formatted to specific dimensions or resolution.

The following are from a year or so ago.

 I was planning to apply for employment at an animation studio, or at least to add them to my portfolio.

 There were going to be a lot more panels...

 ...a lot more of them.

They were for the opening scene of J.R.R. Tolkein's children's story Roverandom.

Udder Cream - Vegan Skin Care Product?

Udder Cream advertises that it contains no milk or bovine products.  So... is it a vegan product?

Probably not, considering the alpha-testers were dairy cattle.

Not that I care much—I'm not a vegan.

Thanksgiving Poster

Designed for a Community Thanksgiving Dinner.

Dairy/Beef and Pork Sell Out Chicken

A little bit of fun with the Annual Manchester Chicken Broil, which usually takes place in the mid- to late-summer.  My latest postcard design for tourists in Manchester.

Update

Sorry I haven't been updating regularly.  I've been busy around the house and with job hunting and such things as these, but I'm still hoping to update twice a week (never less than once).  I've also added my twitter updates so I can tell you how Wolfram is coming along without intruding on the comics.

In the meantime, enjoy this comic, the raw material for my second postcard design:

And feel free to go over old memories of Smile and Wag from the Eastern Echo (in other words, earlier posts from this blog).

Dr. Milkcowski's "Happy Cow" audition video--to violent for the internet!

E. Echo, 16. Sept, 2010

art and story copyright Eric D. Muntz

Well, it's not the best quality, but I don't have the original on my computer yet.  Hopefully it will.

In any case, I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again very soon, but Milkcowski simply is not a "Happy Cow.  Next Tuesday (I hope) I will begin to broadcast the "Tennis Tournament for Man and Beast."  Does Jonathan know enough about tennis to be a worthy opponent to Kate?  Meet Dr. Spot's stunt double!  And who will win?

Ooh.  That sounds really cheesy.

Um...just keep an eye on the blog, okay?

Eric Muntz out.

Summer plot arc, continued into fall...

published Sept. 8, 2010 in the Eastern Echo

art and story copyright Eric D. Muntz 

Jonathan reiterates why Dr. Spot cannot be his tennis partner;

Dr. Spot reveals the identity of her tennis partner of choice.

published  Sept. 13, 2010 in the Eastern Echo

art and story copyright Eric D. Muntz

As I stated in an earlier post, Dr. Milkcowski was sent to California to become California's next "Happy Cow."  (Milkcowski, a "happy cow"... what a laugh!)  Of course, I've digressed from the tennis story, but soon I will return.  Next issue: Jonathan and Little Johnny see Dr. Milkcowski's terrifying audition video on YouTube!

The Missing Pieces

The missing pieces, in no particular order...I just managed to pull them from the Eastern Echo's digital archives:  To see them more clearly, click on them.

This was one of the first for the Fall 2008 semester.

Probably one of the better ones I've ever made.  Lots of sentiment with a healthy helping of sarcasm mixed into it.

A nice reversal.  Underdogs of the world, unite!

This one was the beginning of a weird backstory exposition regarding the reason that Jonathan can understand the speech of all canines.  Maybe I'll publish that here, but later.

There were two versions I made of this one, and I found this one to be funnier.  My editor actually liked the other one, but this was the one I chose to publish.

Brief backstory concerning Eisnar the lolcat's connection to Doctor Spot.  Eisnar is a lot like me in this respect.  Can't talk to save his life, but a great writer.

As a trifling yet adamant fan of manga, I looked in the mirror one day and noticed some slight resemblance I held to the main character of Deathnote, which is a supernatural mystery manga.  It struck me as funny in such a way that I was inspired to make a comic about it, but having Jonathan's reflection talk back to him.

Comics Appreciation Day...it doesn't exist.  I made it up.  I probably should have given the titles of the books in question, namely:

Will Eisner's (yes, in the comic I misspelled "Eisner") Sequential Art.

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and finally, Making Comics.

Can't remember if I ever published this one.  I know I'm still missing part I of it.

This was supposed to be the introduction of Eisnar the Lolcat.  Unfortunately, it got lost in the shuffle, and was published long after Eisnar had already been in the paper several times...

...so long, in fact, that this one, the return of Eisnar the lolcat, was published almost a whole semester prior to the one which was intended to precede it.

Eisnar was actually going to be in this one, but I found him to be distracting, so I Photoshopped him out of it.

First is as published.  Second is retro-fitted with computer font.

Same thing.

A shot at grim humor, met with my editor's hearty approval...then overturned the next issue.

I need to recover some of the other ones from this section.

Little Johnny tries to prevail upon Jonathan for an inheritance.  Little does he know he's an asset, rather than an heir.

Little Johnny's beef with Milkcowski, part II

Eastern Echo, 8. March, 2010

(c) Eric D. Muntz

This post may say, it was published earlier, but I actually got around to posting these on the 17th of June.  Jonathan wasn't originally supposed to work or live on a farm, but it seems to fit better since he sees so much of Milkcowski, so I just went with that.  This would be the reason Jonathan is wearing a plaid supposed-to-be flanel shirt and overalls.

Eastern Echo, 11. March 2010

(c) Eric D. Muntz

This one plays out more like a comedy sketch than a comic strip, which was one thing my editor warned against at a recent meeting, but I didn't notice how much like a sketch it actually was.  I didn't actually get to finish the storyline due to my father's passing.  The rest of the story is that Milkcowski was shipped off to California, where she becomes one of the California Happy Cows.  I'm not sure how I would put that, since the phrase is pretty much, if not exactly, a registered trademark.  Anyway, Spot gets a little bitter, having lost her business parter to a business transaction, but learns to cope when Milkcowski sends her a postcard.  In the Tennis Doubles storyline, I plan to have Dr. Spot bring Dr. Milkcowski back as her Doubles parter in the Man-and-Beast Tennis Doubles Tournament.  Details to follow later on.

The "Gag" as Process:

This is just to show what it sometimes takes to create a comic that (hopefully) most people will enjoy.

So, here we have a rough draft of the joke.

If I'm concerned that the content might be misunderstood, or is too esoteric, I usually send a copy to the rough draft to a friend or two via email and wait for them to come on to chat.

In this case, Sojourner Jake told me that the inclusion of "Christian" in the description of the comic seems to question whether a work of art really can be Christian at all.

Elijah Hendrickson felt that the parenthetical phrase was too much of a wink at the audience (to use a phrase my Drama teacher last semester taught me--those weren't Elijah's exact words) and it fails to do a good job at getting laughs.

I took both suggestions pretty seriously:

copyright 2010 by Eric Muntz

first published 1. Feb 2010

I think I used too little black space in this one.  And I changed Little Johnny's side joke a little.

The Honeymoon

copyright 2010 by Eric Muntz

first published 7. Jan 2010 in the Eastern Echo

Stop one of the honeymoon:

the farm.

Uh-huh, poor planning prevents proper playtime.

copyright 2010 by Eric Muntz

first published 11. Jan 2010 in the Eastern Echo

copyright 2010 by Eric Muntz

first published 14. Jan 2010 in the Eastern Echo

Stop two:

Alaska

in the middle of January.

Where Little Johnny manages to make a fool of himself in front of Rex, a very distant relative...

who, by the way, was inspired in small part by my Alan and Danielle Muntz's (and Samantha's too, of course) husky-Australian shepherd mix.

He's got real personality.

copyright 2010 by Eric Muntz

first published 21. Jan 2010 in the Eastern Echo

copyright 2010 by Eric Muntz

first published 25. Jan 2010 in the Eastern Echo

Stop three:

the Pound

where something wonderful is going to happen (off the record).

Have you ever walked out to your car and wondered where in the heck you put your keys, and you search the buildings you've been in, and you can't figure it out, then you check in one of your more secluded pockets, and you find your keys?

Gosh I hate that!

The Ceremony and the Reception

copyright 2009 by Eric Muntz

first published 3. Dec 2009 in the Eastern Echo

The style will get better soon.  It's easy to see in this one that I went a little overboard on Milkcowski's dewlap wrinkles, and wrinkles elswhere.  I'd been practicing rendering a cow as convincingly as possible.  This one was also drawn in parts and pasted together.  Each character, except for Milkcowski and Little Johnny, was an individual layer in the photoshop document.

copyright 2009 by Eric Muntz

first published 7. Dec 2009 in the Eastern Echo

I used the Photoshop paintbrush to render Luther (German Shepherd, sort of intended to allude to Martin Luther, one of the Protestant Reformation's most famous leadership figures).  If he looks a little out-of-place, that's why.  I was thinking of having Jonathan be bare-chested, but I figured I should go a little less over-the-top than one might expect me to.

If you look in the background of the second panel, you can make out Ewenice, Ramsey, Cream, and Milkcowski (Cream was used a couple times, though sparingly, in "Season 1").

copyright 2009 by Eric Muntz

first published 10. Dec 2009 in the Eastern Echo

My editor told me that the reception could make for some really funny and awkward situations.  So I went for it with Jonathan stumbling over the rather obvious differences between the relationship between himself and Little Johnny and the relationship between the lovely new couple--it's probably one he should have just let slide.

copyright 2009 by Eric Muntz

first published 14. Dec 2009 in the Eastern Echo

Slide shows...always fun, especially if you don't know about your slide organizer's skills with photo-editing software!  I don't know what to say about Little Johnny's appearance.  He probably would have looked just as cute without the diaper and pacifier.  It's only been within the last half-year, by the way, that I've learned to change a diaper.  Small new relatives have recently arrived!

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