Thanks to the biggest movie of the year, the Star Wars comics are getting a little more attention. Here is our blurb in the latest Wizard magazine.

It's been a good couple of months for the Star Wars comics. People saw how good Doug Wheatley's EP III Adaptation was and picked it up in huge numbers. The comic store I go to said they ordered 40 copies (which is a huge number of tpbs for any comic store to order) and sold out of them in one week. Jan Duursema is leading us all by putting out solid issues of Republic every single month. And I was extremely fortunate to be a part of Obsession.

We're in a market dominated by X-Men, Spider-Man, and Batman comics so it's kind of cool to see that some new people are digging the SW comics.

This one is Page one of Obsession #4. It's probably my favorite page of the book (maybe the series) because it resonates with what will happen in EP III. It's that last time they swordfight as friends (sniffle). Click here.

You can see ( in the close-up) the bandage on Obi-Wan's right hand and tiny wounds healing on Obi-Wan's face. I used to kid with my editor that we were constantly beating up on poor Obi-Wan, always putting him in explosions and having him thrown around. It was amazing that he even survived the Clone Wars. Also, you can see in the last few issues of Obsession I got away from the tiny cross-hatching on the character's faces. Hatching was meant as a way to give the faces lighting and dimension when only using solid black lines. Since we were printing directly from the pencils and skipping inks, I realized I didn't need to do the hatching anymore and just shade there faces in directly. The drawback is that it is way more time consuming and sometimes, your work will not even show up if the colorist paints stongly over it.

You can also there are waaaaay tooooo many cracks and rust spots on the floor and walls---sheesh, what was I thinking? I actually didn't realize that until just now, maybe 6 months after I drew it. Sometimes it's hard to catch your mistakes when you are so close to the work.

... a friend of mine suggested I do an evil Jar Jar. Click here for a larger version.

I attended a book signing at the Vroman's out here in Southern California on Friday night. The art crew from ILM was there signing their Art Of Star Wars book-- Ryan Church, Feng Zhu, Stephan Martiniere, and (one of my art heroes) Iain McCaig was there. Well, I decided to bring my little Jar Jar drawing with me to share with Mr. McCaig and see what he had to say. He was extremely gracious and sincere in his critique and although we spoke very briefly, he helped me a lot and inspired me to do better-- it was just a very cool thing for me to meet him.

Before the signing, the guys answered a bunch of questions from the crowd-- things like their thought process when designing characters, vehicles, and environments for such a huge movie-- how the stress can get to you if you think about it too much. These guys are the "cream of the crop" and at the top of the biggest movie franchise of all time-- it was good to hear that they still get nervous.

This is the cover to Obsession #5(coming out on May 18th, the day before EP III comes out!), again colored by Brad Anderson. Without the logo it gives you a better picture of how much work Brad has put into the background with his swirling smoke and everything in the piece is being lit by her red lightsaber. Also, it might give you an idea of how much space we have to leave for the logo-- the logo for the Star Wars comics is much bigger than in other comic books. Check out a bigger version of it here.

Hey all,

This is a page from Obsession #4-- before colors of course. You get a glimpse of the damage that General Grievous can do, and hopefully we've set him up as a badass before we all see the movie in a couple of weeks. For those who don't know, the x's in the bottom panel (in the silhouette of Grievous' legs) indicate where I want things to be completely black. This is the page where we see the demise of the controversial Master Soon............Baytes. He was described to me as an African American Jedi with greys on the side of his hair like Reed Richards. The rest was for me to come up with. I think I only got to draw him in 4 panels but hopefully he got to look cool before he died. Click here for a bigger version.

Sorry to those who are pissed about the lateness of Obsession #5-- you have every right to be pissed. I can't explain it, when you make a comic book there are a thousand things that can go wrong-- all I can say is I hope you guys like it when it hits the stands in a few weeks.