DMC Hawaii Thumbnail

I'm writing an article for the Honolulu Weekly this time, but somehow I managed to get art involved too.
The story is about Disproportionate Minority Contact in Hawaii's Juvenile Justice System - Native Hawaiians account for 40% of youth involved in the JJS here.
UH Manoa's Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning helped put out a report with suggestions on how to fix this and I put together an article explaining all that.
This image is a thumbnail I did for an image I think I'll use to accompany this article. The editor of the Weekly asked for an image of troubled youth, and since the story is abstract, and not about any one youth in particular, I decided to obscure the face with heavy shadows that should hopefully also add a lot of mood and emotion.
However, it is still a news story, so we don't want the image to color the story too much, since it is fabricated (the image, not the story). We'll have to see what happens. I may have to revise before I can start painting for real.

The Four Elements

Part of my "real, live superheroes" project, this image was created by taking a photo of four friends posed as superheroes representing The Four Elements.
At the Ka Leo Arts Festival, my booth was a "get yourself drawn as a super hero or villain" booth. Thanks in large part to my marketing champion Reece Farinas, I made a lot of money and made a lot of people happy at the same time! Most of the customers took their pencil drawings home with them, but these guys asked me to keep theirs and turn it into a full blown, colored comic cover. So here it is! Hope you like it.

To the left is the original pencil drawing I did at the fair.

As always, right click on an image to open it in a new tab and view it full sized.

The Far Side of Business Bullshit

Since these illustrations were never used by TwentyWhat Magazine (the Obama Romney one was, but these ended up not making the cut for what the editor was looking for) I decided to use my buddy Vince's fake captions and turn these into hilarious statements about our times.  I hope you enjoy them too:

Disney buys Lucasfilm, Death Scars ensue

My cohorts; Josh Harmon and Vince Fitzgerald, and I had already created a timeless Star Wars comic with an excellent joke about Darth Vader's alleged skills with handling children and teenagers with patience and safety. Well, when we heard Disney had bought out Lucasfilm with intent to release an Episode 7 in 2015, we realized that our timeless joke, with a minor tweak, could also become a current event commentary with timely implications. Before I explain what is posted below, let me first clarify this project the three of us are working on. All three of us pitch ideas for comics and the ones we like get put above the ones we think suck. Josh and Vince are the refinement process where those good ideas are transformed into workable comic strips, with some help from me. Then, I start drawing, making sure to send them updates as I do this, so that if anything is wrong, we can catch it early on and not after I've slaved for hours on it. Then, we might make some tweaks in the dialog to better match the facial expressions that came out of my artwork, or throw in a Disney reference in the punchline at the last second to gain relevance. Then it's pretty much done.

Vince is also in charge of making us a website for these comics to live in. The site is moving along, but not faster than say, a Honolulu City maintenance project, and we're still talking about what our comic should be called. I personally am all for "Rocky Dennis Memorial Inner Beauty Pageant Comics" (or RDMIBPC, for short), but we also have several other possibilities like "Angry Itch Comics," "Three Amigos Comics," "Fancy Gentlemen's Tea Party Comics" etc.

For now, since website and name are still nebulous at best, I'm going to post the comics we make here for now, so they don't lose their timelessness, and once the site is up, we'll just stick the comics we finished before the site was ready into the site archives as though they were there all along haha.

So, without further ado, presented here is the first comic collaboration between the illustrious Josh Harmon, the Grand Goof Vince Fitzgerald, and myself, the humble clown with a stylus and a tablet, Will Caron: "Death Scars."  Featured first is the original, timeless version, and after that will be the version with the Lucasfilm referenced punchline. Enjoy.

And here is the Lucasfilm joke version: