Great day in the morning! The website returns.

The official Teddy and the Yeti website has been absent from the Internets for a fairly inexcusable amount of time, but I'm happy to say that as of last Friday, the site is back up and running with a few small tweaks and upgrades.  At first glance, it doesn't look too drastically different from what came before, but I like to think that things are a little more streamlined this time around, and that I've cut out some of the fat that was there before.

One page I added was an interview page, which compiles the interviews that I've done here on the blog and in the printed comic.  It serves as an archive of sorts, I suppose, and should make the search engines happy.

The store has seen probably the most changes over the previous iteration, hopefully all of them for the better.  Most notably I've added both the trading cards and the crochet Yetis as items to purchase; all of the categories should be easy to navigate.

I've also added a section with webcomics and updated the comic preview section.  Scrolling through these sections, though, tells me that I still have some work to do on the site.  It's not perfect by any means and browsing though these pages will tell you why.  Some pages (like the above "Eye of the Beholder" image) are easy to read, but others are not, and that's something I've got to remedy before I'm happy with it.

Overall, I'm thrilled just to have a damn website back up and running, especially with the Baltimore Comic-Con coming up this weekend.  There are certainly still some bugs with the new design, some of which I've found out for myself already, but there are others I'm sure I'm still missing.  I hope that if you, faithful reader, do decide to check out the new site and find something you don't like or think should be changed, you'll do me the favor of leaving me a comment right here on the blog or e-mail me you thoughts at wagonwheelcomics@gmail.com.

And in case anyone's forgotten (it's been a while, I know...), the address for the main webpage is www.teddyandtheyeti.com.

Ultimate Hero pinup by Ruben Cordero and Todd Swain

Here's more nearly forgotten artwork that I happened upon recently:

It's the Ultimate Hero (and Gary) by Ruben Cordero!  A little while after our "Eye of the Beholder" comic came out in Strip Search, Ruben and I teamed up with co-creator Mike Adams to put a treatment for this character together.  Unfortunately, not too much has happened with these characters in the meantime, though I still have hope that one day the full story might get told.  A short story appeared in the back of Teddy and the Yeti #3, and I've got two more short stories hanging out on my hard drive (one a glorious five-page story by Duane Redhead).  I don't have any immediate plans for them, but they might just show up in a future issue of T&Y.

Below you see the inked version by Todd Swain.  Mike colored it, but we ended up going with a different color scheme in the end, so if this were to be used in some capacity in the future, it'd have to be redone.  Perhaps that's wishful thinking, but perhaps not.

Primordial Soup, uh..."webcomic"? with Mike Harvey, plus "Weird Al" Yankovic's new song!

Several years ago, soon after "Eye of the Beholder" was published in Strip Search, I took stock of my comic book aspirations and realized that beyond writing half-developed scripts I had NO clue as to the process that went on to put a comic together.  Beyond this, I had no idea how I would ever again convince an artist to work with me on one of those half-developed ideas (some things never change, I suppose).  In a (perhaps rare) moment of proactivity, I decided to figure it out by putting a short comic together, and I was helped by my friend Mike Harvey, who just so happened to be one of the only people I knew with a digital camera.

The result is as you see below: despite our low level of sophistication, and despite the fact that we decided to go with extremely clever pseudonyms rather than give our actual names, I think that the two of us put a fun short story together.  It's not earth-shattering or anything like that, but hey, it was fun.

The one constant background was just a close up of a section of my back yard juxtaposed with a shot of the sky (the volcano looking image is just a plant...it's a happy coincidence that it turned out as well as it did).  Mike himself drew the caveman that serves as possibly the best joke of the story.  The dividing cells and the Mr. Bill-esque character were...I don't know, Play-Doh?  My sister helped with creating that little guy, hence the "special thanks" credit.  And the relatively giant godlike hand...is mine.

Mike and I took a short drive to my college's computer lab, which had a number of Macs with editing software loaded on 'em.  We downloaded some generic Blambot fonts and even some template speech balloons, which look better than some of the balloons I make now that I know how to do them myself.

All in all, not bad for something that was cobbled together with little or no experience.  Check it out!

Mike recently painted a Mini-Marvel style rendition of the Yeti that you can see here.

Also, "Weird Al" Yankovic has a new song, "I Perform This Way"!  This has nothing to do with the above post.  I just love Weird Al and this new song means that a new album will be on the way soon.  Al has a blog that he updates every once in a while, and if you want to read about this new song and why it almost didn't get released, you can find that here.  Listen to the song on below.

AND ENJOY IT.

Mr. Massive Saves the Universe!

I rarely write for comics without at least the hope that it'll one day see the light of day in some form or another.  Most of the scripts I write, though, invariably sit virtually on my hard drive for some time while I dream away that those words will one day turn into comics in the truest sense.  The script to the art you see on this page was written, like, a month ago.  I was pretty surprised to see this art in my inbox earlier today - in a good way, of course.

Ever since attending the New York Comic Con, I've had a better appreciation for webcomics and what they can accomplish.  If nothing else, they seem to be a great way to gain attention, and I've seen how that can pay honest-to-goodness dividends in the long run (first hand, at that - the Wagon Wheel Comics booth was directly across the aisle from Dr. McNinja).  It's one of the reasons I wanted to post the "Eye of the Beholder" story on this blog.  So when artist and enigmatic nameholder Artboy_X returned from overseas and wanted to resume working on our co-creation Mr. Massive in some capacity, my thoughts immediately went to webcomics.  Being a comedy/spoof (one that relies on a lot of silly jokes at that), Mr. Massive works pretty well, I think, in short bursts.

What you see in this post is just preliminary work - who knows where this will ultimately go (so, you know, don't get your hopes up just yet) - but I hope you'll agree that it's nice to look at.  The first two pieces of art are not by Artboy_X, and in fact, having just received the art I don't even know the name of the artist who put them together, which, of course, I need to remedy.  But the energy and style strikes me as something fitting for the character and the jokes I ultimately want to tell with and through him.

Naturally, I will keep everyone updated on the progress of this project, whether you want to be kept aware or not.  I will!  It's inevitable.  For now, I hold out hope that someday soon we'll have a Mr. Massive webcomic to promote and another fun writing exercise become a reality.

The image above is by Artboy_X and obviously is the basis for the first panel in the image at the very top of this post.  It's something of a parody of a similar iconic Superman image, hopefully used for obvious effect.

"Eye of the Beholder" webcomic by Jeff McClelland and Ruben D. Cordero, Jr.

Presented in its entirety, here's "Eye of the Beholder" with art by Ruben Cordero.  It's a pain to click on eight different links to read the entire story, so I wanted to post it all at once (plus it's easier to find on the Google).  I previously posted each individual page with commentary, and I used another post to show extra material such as sketches and other art in progress.  If anyone feels inclined to check those out, just click on the links below:

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

page 5

page 6

page 7

page 8

extra material

"Eye of the Beholder" was first published in Strip Search from Dark Horse Entertainment in 2004.

"Eye of the Beholder" webcomic with Ruben Cordero, extra stuff

Now that the "Eye of the Beholder" story is complete, I thought it'd be fun to show off some of the sketches artist Ruben Cordero did in preparation for the actual pages, as well as some pages in various stages of completion.  This is stuff that has just been collecting virtual dust on a DVD-R in my closet and has never been published, electronically or otherwise.

Here we have some initial sketches of the Hansel and Gretel "demons" that added so much color to the story.  This design work ended up being pretty close to what was actually used.

Some sketches of the main protagonist/antagonist (depending on your point of view) with some more demons.  Now that I'm looking at Ruben's signature on this file I see it has the date "02" next to it...man, we were planning this thing for a while.  Comic work is rarely swift.

This was the reference I found for the pot-belly stove we used in the story.  I can't imagine why I still have this picture.  Did Google Images even exist in 2002?

Ruben started every page out by sketching the rough layouts by hand.  Look at all of the perspective lines on this page!  It's the skeleton of what the page ended up being.

Before computer-designed comic book art was popular, Ruben was working on it with what must now seem like an ancient computer.  These digital inks really tightened things up.

An incomplete page.  The close up on the last two panels is intense...and creepy.

You can see that Ruben did quite a few revisions on the first three panels on this page.  The motion lines are interesting to see.  And hey, check out that stove!

Here's a completed page without all of my words to mess things up.  Ruben colored everything digitally - the colors really work well on this page, with the red and green contrasting nicely.

I'll put up one more post on this subject before putting it to rest at least semi-permanently.  Rather than having to search for each individual post, I'll upload all the pages at once and the whole story will be there to read.  Look for it...whenever I toss it up.  Yes!!!

"Eye of the Beholder" webcomic with Ruben Cordero, page 8

Here we are at the end of this particular story.  Yes, it's a sad occasion, but weep not - I write other stuff, too.  Like Teddy and the Yeti.  You should totally buy it.

And speaking of shelling out good money for things with my name attached them, "Eye of the Beholder" is published in the collection Strip Search from Dark Horse Comics.  This book is available at lots of places, like Amazon (click on the links!), Things from Another World, Mile High Comics, Midtown Comics, heck...if you give 'em the ISBN (1593070993), big stores like Barnes and Noble will order it for you!

I'm really lucky to have been a part of this project, and I can't thank talented individuals like editor Adam Gallardo and, of course, artist Ruben Cordero, who is a heck of an artist and a heck of a guy, enough for everything they did to bring this dream to life.  This is the story that convinced me to try to make comics on a semi-regular basis, and I'm thankful for the opportunities it's granted.  May everyone who wants one have their own "Eye of the Beholder".

I'll post some "extra" stuff in a few days - character designs, sketches, pages in progress, etc. - things that haven't been published before.  It should be a fun way to wrap this short story up.

"Eye of the Beholder" webcomic with Ruben Cordero, page 7

Here we are with page seven of "Eye of the Beholder" - one more page to go and the suspense is at its height.  I certainly went with "religious fury" with this story, didn't I?  There's even a "Kraka-DOOM!" sound effect!

Strip Search isn't only my first comic book publication, but also perhaps my best reviewed work to date. A hundred years ago, I wrote about how reviews are tough to come by for me and what I write (for whatever reason), but Strip Search was reviewed by none other than the American Library Association, which, even if you've never heard of it before, sounds pretty official.  I didn't read the review until several years after the book was released (way to keep up on it, Jeff), but I was still taken back when I did.  Here's what the ALA had to say in their publication, "Booklist":

After the plug was pulled on the anthology series Dark Horse Presents, editor Gallardo found himself griping about where emerging artists were going to get their first exposure. So he started up a Web-based version of DHP, and here he presents the cream, according to site visitors, of what he put up on the site monthly, July 2002-June 2003. Pretty obviously, the genre won't run out of artistic talent any time soon. The Brownlee brothers' faux photographic style and Steve Morris' gorgeously manipulated and photographed models may be the most technically adroit stuff on view, but the other contributors' highly varied drawing styles are just as impressive, whether in color or black and white. The story element is frequently rather thin, however, and many may give best story honors to Jeff McClelland and Ruben D. Cordero Jr.'s straightforward inversion of Hansel and Gretel. All the others beg for more development, which makes the collection's point that each of these newcomers could reward a much longer look at his or her work. -- Ray Olson 

Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

 Let me highlight the interesting part of that review, just to make sure no one missed it: "...many may give best story honors to Jeff McClelland and Ruben D. Cordero Jr.'s straightforward inversion of Hansel and Gretel."  Wow.  I have no idea who you are, Ray Olson, but what a nice thing to say.  I'm still not sure what I did to deserve it, but I'll take a compliment where I can get one, without a doubt.

"Eye of the Beholder" webcomic with Ruben Cordero, page 6

Here's page six of "Eye of the Beholder", where truth begins to come to light.  The end is in sight!

Earlier I talked a little bit about some of the other entires in Strip Search, the collection for the stories featured in Dark Horse's online contest - now let's talk about the overall winner:

Stop Light by Jeff Kilpatrick

I think it's easy to see that this artwork is top-notch.  The layout of the entire story was also quite dynamic and interesting.  In addition, the winner of this contest was chosen quite democratically, so Jeff certainly won things fair and square (that's quite the cliche, isn't it?).

When I found out that "Stop Light" had won it all, though, I was surprised for a few reasons.  First of all, I was almost sure that a color strip would win over one that was black and white, regardless of the overall quality.  Secondly, while a number of other stories in the book were pretty condensed, this six-page story is one short sequence with few words to accompany the pictures.  Not to imply that more words equals a better story (there are many, many examples to the contrary), but I thought that one of the more in-depth stories would take the prize.

Please don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to disparage "Stop Light" in the least, and I'm certainly not trying to say that "Eye of the Beholder" should have won the contest.  I do like my entry, of course, but in all honesty I wouldn't call it the best in the book.  This will come as no surprise, but my choice for "best in show" would have been "The Mighty Skullboy Army" by Jacob Chabot, probably followed by the "Haunted Cipher" shorts by Eric Haven (both black and white stories, by the way).  While "Stop Light" was a solid entry and certainly deserved to be in the book, I don't know that it held my interest for long enough for me to rank it up with some of the other, more thought-provoking tales.

In any case, though, Jeff Kilpatrick won the prize and for that I salute him!  It was a year-long contest and he pulled it out.  I wonder what he bought with all that prize money?

That's it for today.  I'll post the penultimate page of "Eye of the Beholder" soon!

"Eye of the Beholder" webcomic with Ruben Cordero, page 5

Merry Christmas, blog-o-sphere!  I hope that everyone has a wonderful day and that, though it's cliche and completely unrealistic, we can one day live in a more peaceful world.  Here's hoping.

I'm posting page five of the "Eye of the Beholder" story today for all to see.  I should have put this page up earlier, and there's really no excuse for the lag, as the story has been complete for, oh, seven years now, but them's the breaks.  I hope we all can enjoy it nonetheless.  Page five is when the crazy stuff starts to happen, like sudden visions of floating old men.  I always thought the bed was a little out-of-place in this scene, but it doesn't take anything away from the story.

As I've mentioned (over and over), this story was printed in Dark Horse's Strip Search collection.  There were 17 other stories included in the book (one split up into four parts), and as is always the case with anthology-type books, the quality was varied.  There were plenty that I thought my and Ruben's story could stand up to, just as there were some that I thought blew our particular tale out of the water.  Below are some of my favorites:

Alcoholism Spaceman by Ben Stenbeck
The title for this story is actually very literal: it features outer space, flying (floating?) sharks, and rampant alcoholism.  To be honest, this entry was a bit short on story, but WOW!  Look at that art!  It's just beautiful.  The colors nearly melt off the page.  Ben has worked on some stories at Dark Horse in recent years, and it's easy to see that he deserves it.

Mighty Skullboy Army by Jacob Chabot
I've mentioned before how much I love the Mighty Skullboy Army, which has a collection of stories out through Dark Horse.  Jacob (Jake?) does humor well - both his writing and art lend itself to it.  Strip Search was how I first became away of the Skullboy Army, and I've since become a big fan.  I can see this concept taking off and making it big one day.

Haunted Cipher by Eric Haven
Strip Search split five different editions of Haunted Cipher throughout the book, and each was a one-page delight.  Some were darker than others, but all were extremely entertaining and usually parodied a different concept - the one pictured above was an obvious sendup of something like Aesop's Fables and was funny, but the one spoofing the old Charles Atlas comic book advertisement and the "girlfriend lie detector" strip were genius.

Insomnia by Nir Paniry
This entry did the most with the least, I thought.  There's only one sentence of text throughout the entire story, but it still comes off as a touching, sweet tale of the value of companionship.  The main character, I think, looks like Art Garfunkel, which has no bearing on what I think of the story.

The Seneschal by Tom Scioli
What, you didn't think Tom Scioli only did Teddy and the Yeti covers, did you?!  Ah hem.  In any case, it's easy to see by the page above Tom's prodigious talent and uncanny Kirby style of artwork.  The Seneschal just exudes energy and creativity.

You, Robot by Nicholas G. Perks
I'm not sure what it is about this story that does it for me - I think it's the simplicity in both art and storytelling.  The artwork reminds me of Jerry Ordway's, which is to say it's got a classic feel to it.  The story has a twist that isn't necessarily unpredictable, but it's different and it deserves some credit for that alone.

Tangerine by Ron J. Wimberly
This story was another that took a minimalist approach when it came to text.  The story was again a bit simple, but it let the reader's imagination fill in most of the blanks, which is sometimes hard to do (for me, anyway).  The artwork was very fluid and seemed to combine both Western and Eastern influences.

That's it for now.  Look for page six early next week!  For real this time!  I think.

"Eye of the Beholder" webcomic with Ruben Cordero, page 4

This story's second "act" begins with page four - we're all caught up to date and now we're working in the present.  The dog cages look more like jail cells, but hey, that's artistic license for you.

Now that I think about it, it's because of this story's publication in Strip Search that I came up with a way to sign my name on comics...that is, a different way than I sign, I don't know, a check or something like that.  The first time I saw a copy of Strip Search was at my local comic shop, Impossible Dreams Comics in Bridgeville, Pa.  The owner of the store ordered a copy for himself (probably because it's all I had talked about for a month) and asked me to sign it.  I wrote my whole 14-letter name, stopped to look at it, and said "I've gotta come up with something better".  What I came up with over the next few days is basically my initials and the date, so whether or not it's "better" is debatable, but at least I have a comic book signature to go with now.

Oh, and by the way, the best comic book signature I've ever seen has to belong to Mark Schultz (of Xenozoic Tales fame).  I'm told he worked on it for quite a while.

"Eye of the Beholder" webcomic with Ruben Cordero, page 3

The moment  I found out that "Eye of the Beholder" had won Dark Horse's monthly contest and would soon be printed in its Strip Search collection, I ran to the phone and called artist Ruben Cordero on the phone at his office at work.  As soon as he picked up on the other end, I yelled "Congratulations, you magnificent bastard!", thinking he had probably been to the website and therefore had heard the good news.  Instead, he didn't even know it was me.  "I'm sorry," he replied, somewhat tersely, "who is this?" I meekly explained the situation and once we were on the same page things went more smoothly.

The prize package from Dark Horse was actually quite nice, even though we had to split it in two.  For my half of the haul, I managed to snag a number of cool things, including a copy of Comics Between the Panels, signed by co-author and Dark Horse editor-in-chief Mike Richardson, the second volume of the beautiful Xenozoic Tales collection and some "Shag Tiki" stationary by Amanda Visell.

Ruben and I also split a $150 gift certificate to the online comic shop Things from Another World, with which I bought one of my first Thing statues - a Bowen full body design that's still one of my favorites (Bowen does great work, let me tell you).

All in all, just another reason I was spoiled by this, my first comic publication.  I hope you enjoy page three - I'll post the next page on Saturday...and probably write stuff in between now and then.  So keep checking back!

"Eye of the Beholder" webcomic with Ruben Cordero, page 2

Here we are with page two of the "Eye of the Beholder" story that ran in Dark Horse's Strip Search anthology.  Here we see the "demons" for the first time - angry little fellows who carry on the Hansel and Gretel metaphor by eating this poor old lady's house.  The colors really stand out on this page, I think - it's something that this piece really had going for it.  Even though this was being put together in 2003, when webcomics were much less prevalent, Ruben had a keen eye for what worked on the screen and how it was different than a printed comic book page.

I mentioned in my last entry that each submission to the Strip Search contest was voted on to see which ones would eventually get printed - that is, readers could choose which ones they liked best each month. I'm sure that nearly everyone did this, and even though it didn't matter in the end, I still have a little twinge of guilt when I think back to the dozens (and dozens) of times I voted for myself.  It went against the democratic nature of the contest, but man!  I saw this as a chance to break in to the industry and I couldn't resist temptation.  I voted for myself every day when I got up, every day before dinner, and every day before I went to bed - multiple times.

Some time after the voting was complete, main editor Adam Gallardo (who later went on to write the title 100 Girls for Arcana Studio) explained that to calculate the winners of each round, only votes from unique I.P. addresses were tallied - meaning that although I probably spent hours of my life clicking "submit" on the Dark Horse website, only one of my votes actually counted.  Part of me feels good that this story did apparently win on merit, and not just my obsession, but another part feels stupid for wasting all that time.

I'll post the next page on Tuesday or Wednesday.  In the mean time, enjoy page two!

"Eye of the Beholder" webcomic with Ruben Cordero, page 1

The first comic work I ever had published came in early 2004.  I had no idea what I was doing (that's not to imply that I do now, either), but I lucked into a great situation.  Dark Horse Comics was sponsoring an online comic contest - creators would submit their stories and an editor would choose the ones he thought were the best to showcase online.  Readers would then vote for their favorite comics of the month and each month's winner would be published in a collection titled Strip Search.  The contest ran, I believe, for an entire year.

This contest absolutely spoiled me with how perfectly everything came together.  I happened to read about the contest one day at a computer in my college's computer lab, and I said to myself, "heck, I'll give it a shot."  I had written a short story for a creative writing class and decided to use that as my subject.  The story was a fairly straightforward inversion of the classic Hansel and Gretal fairy tale, where it was told from the evil stepmother's perspective and took place in modern times.  I went right to a comic book message board (Digital Webbing, I think?), posted a quick message, and met up almost immediately with the extremely talented Ruben Cordero.

And that was pretty much it.  Really.  Ruben drew and lettered the story, we submitted it to Dark Horse, the story was selected and put up for a vote during the final month that entries would be accepted.  "Eye of the Beholder" was voted in and a few months later, Strip Search was published and I had something for sale all over the world (I had someone tell me he saw a copy on sale in Japan, which continues to blow my mind).

At this point I thought publishing comics would be easy, based on the only evidence I had at my disposal.  More aptly, I think I ran into the perfect storm - Dark Horse just happened to have the perfect contest, I just happened to find the perfect artist, and things fell in to place.

I'm generally happy with the result, although hopefully my writing has gotten a little less melodramatic over time.

Dark Horse retained the publishing rights to this story for five years, which means they have since reverted back to Ruben and me.  I thought it would be fun to revisit this story over the next few weeks in the format it was originally intended to be read - as a webcomic.  I'll post the first page today and continue at least twice a week until all eight pages are posted.  Just click on the tumbnail at the top of this entry to read the first page.  I hope you enjoy!