After taking a year off, I once again participated in Schlogger's annual "Fuck Yeah" calendar last year and created this illustration featuring some characters from my upcoming JAZAM! comic “Murki's Big Day”.
I just gave an interview (in German) to Comicgate about the illustration and my comic. (including a preview page from the comic and some work in progress scribbles for the illu)
The calendar is out now and can be ordered from Kwimbi.
The guys who make German indie comic fanzine Moga Mobo have been at it for even longer than we have with JAZAM!, and they never seem to run out of ideas on how to keep their zine fresh. I've previously participated in their "Comic Clash" competition, but last year I was asked for the first time to contribute to one of their regular issues. For this one, they asked 100 artist to draw dialogue-free one-page comic versions of the "Greatest Hits" of rock & pop music. I chose to put pictures to Sia's "Chandelier", both because I love the song and because I wanted to add some newer music to the mix.
Here's my comic:
And here's the book:
It's available to buy at the Moga Mobo shop or for free at various conventions, etc.
Just yesterday, Ralph Ruthe released a new animated short on YouTube that features a number of backgrounds painted by me. Check out "Die HNO-WG - Folge 12: Die Séance" on YouTube.
Here are some screenshots with my background art:
I've been a big fan of Downlow'd: The Rise and Fall of Harry Knowles & Aint-It-Cool News, a very interesting investigative podcast about the complicated history of movie news site Ain’t It Cool News, and was thrilled when I was asked to draw their mid-season cover art last April.
It's based on AICN's "Harry" cartoon character and the ending of King Kong:
Roughly a year ago I was hired to draw some fun character designs for a thing that didn’t end up happening. These were supposed to be turned into a real prosthetic make-up/mask for a live-action tv ad, but it sadly never got that far.
The upside? I get to show them to you:
In 2021, I got to color a large section of a new comic/manga by the popular video game youtuber GermanLetsPlay, writer Haiko Hörnig & artist David Füleki. With flat support by Eve Jay.
Have a look at some of my pages and hit me up if you want to buy a signed copy!
Continuing with the catching-up, today I'd like to tell you about "Unveröffentlicht", an exhibition of unfinished German comics that I was part of in late 2021.
At the exhibition, I showed pages from my never-finished, unpublished mystery graphic novel “Die Anstalt”, which I co-wrote with Roman Senkl in 2010. I handed in the first ~25 pages of the book as my bachelor thesis back in the day, but the project was a bit more ambitious than Roman and I were able to handle while also working other jobs, so we eventually abandoned it.
Sadly I could not attend the exhibition, but Moritz Stetter, whose comics were also part of the exhibition, took these very nice photos of my pages at Schloss Oberhausen:
There was also a nice, big catalogue:
A few years ago, Haiko Hörnig & I co-wrote the script for Tonk, a highly stylized martial arts/fantasy show. The 16-minute pilot actually got made (directed by Chon-Dat Nguyen & Alex Kleinrensing) and even played at Cannes, but we haven’t been able to secure funding for a full season yet.
Now it’s finally available for everyone to see on YouTube! Click on the image below to watch:
It's in German, but there are English subtitles.
I haven't posted anything here in a while because I just didn't have much time since the birth of my kid. But now that the little one's spending more time at daycare, I'm going to try to catch up and post some of the stuff I've been working on.
First up, over the past 2 years I was fortunate to be asked to paint some background art for various animated videos by Ralph Ruthe.
The Iron Throne for episode 20 of "Pete":
A bunker and some houses for episode 11 of "Die HNO-WG":
A living room for an animated ad for MagentaTV starring Christian Ulmen & Fahri Yardim:
Backgrounds are mine, all characters are Ralph's.
We're also still working on the theatrical "HNO-WG" feature film!
Popular German geek nostalgia podcast Radio Nukular are starting a new spin-off show called "Radio Nukular Forscht", and I got to illustrate the cover. The poster in the middle is going to be different every time, but the rest will be reused for all episodes.
Here's a look at my first sketch for it:
I've got a cool new job: drawing concept art for Ralph Ruthe's movie based on his animated YouTube series "Die HNO-WG". The movie probably won't be out for a couple of years, but Ralph just shared a teaser trailer and my first piece of concept art:
This was Ralph's rough sketch:
The movie was co-written by Ralph and my "Orion" co-writer Haiko Hörnig.
In 2017, Haiko Hörnig and I wrote a spec pitch for a reboot of the German sci-fi classic "Raumpatrouille Orion". We wrote it just for fun, but it actually got us some interest and a meeting with a producer at Bavaria Fiction. Sadly it never went any further than that because of rights issues and competing projects at the same studio.
But maybe you'll enjoy reading it? I still think it's pretty good!
CLICK HERE for the full pdf (it's in German.)
I designed a cover and logo for it:
And edited some actor photos to preview our cast of characters:
I noticed that I’ve been drawing comic-style self portraits almost every year for quite a while now, so I made this compilation:
Before I drew the 5 episodes of my christmas comics for German wi-fi equipment manufacturer AVM, I had to design the main characters.
AVM had already done a live-action ad with them, but I got to determine how they looked as comic characters. First, we had to find the right style, so I drew three different versions of main hero Fritz Box:
They liked version #2 best, and after some minor adjustments, I drew my versions of Power-Liene and Repeater-Pieter:
I hope I get to draw some more comic adventures with this trio in 2021!