End of Term

Buuuh. After a hard-ass semester, I'm done. Here's a few of my final projects!

More Drawings

For school,



And for fun.


Oh, and GO TO NEW RELIABLE and buy some swag! There's a great deal on right now!

First Semester Blues

Not much in the way of comics, but here's some stuff I've been doing at school this year - and this is what I've been drawing for fun.

And a goody/oldy from last year - one of my very first drawings using inkwash.

INTERVIEW!

Got a bit up on the Fabler!
Have a peek!

Comix and Stories! British Dinosaurs!

Hey everyone! Two cool things on the horizon!

FIRST! If you're on the west coast of Canada and near Vancouver for the 23rd of August, PLEASE stop by Heritage Hall for "Comix and Stories"! It'll be good, I think - everyone from Kate Beaton to Brandon Graham will be hangin' out there!

SECOND!

Remember that collaboration I've been talking shit about? No?

Well, the fruits of this collaboration (paintings being made by myself and Nemo Ramjet) will be on display at the University of Surrey as part of the British Science Festival! THAT'S RIGHT!

Here's the blurb from the program:

What if dinosaurs hadn't died out but evolved into an intelligent species? Artists C. M. Koseman & Simon Roy imagine how such creatures and their worlds might have looked. This startling and playful exhibition and children’s workshop makes us question our unspoken assumptions underlying previous images of dinosaurs and our own notions of what it means to be human.

Pretty cool, eh? (It'll be open from the beginning of the festival until the tenth of september). So if you're in the UK or in Vancouver at all over the next little while, either come get a book signed or go admire some feathery dinosaurs.

Signing!

Yesterday, I was on CFAX 1070 (an AM radio station in Victoria) with Gareth Gaudin of Legends comics, talking about comics, the comic industry, watchmen, and stuff like that. You should really check out Legends this coming saturday - I'll be doing a signing there. 

C'mon down!

Fun with the bird-men!

These are three dinosauroid illustrations I've just been doing for fun. They might end up being part of a set of pieces, each showing a different stage of technological development. 

They've been a lot of fun so far...

PRESS!

Also, stegodons aside, over the past little while I've been doing some interviews with Victoria's finest. A local author and comic-book lover by the name of Troy Wilson has been incredible in helping me get some local press. I did an interview with ShawTV (which will be playing tonight at six o'clock) and on the seventeenth, I did an interview on CBC One in Victoria. Once I can, I'll set up links to 'em... 

The wee proboscideans of Flores...

Ah, the flores stegodon. How confusing those paleontologists have been. 
In the first national geographic article, the dwarf stegodon described as being contemporaneous with H floresiensis was stegodon sondaari. The problem was that this water-buffalo sized stegodon went extinct some 900,000 odd years ago. It was replaced by s. Florensis, a "medium to large" sized proboscidean - a size, I assume, to be close to that of your average asian elephant. Hundreds of thousands of years on Flores, however, did dwarf the stegodons, and the proboscidean that did live alongside h. Floresiensis was s. Florensis Insularis, a stegodon which, according to the one paper I could only read the abstract of, was 30% smaller then the ancestral s florensis, based off of the size of the juvenile molars found in the same layer as H floresiensis.

With all this shit in mind, this is my new dwarf stegodon - which, visually, I think is more dramatic a juxtaposition to have with h floresiensis. What do you think? 

Vancouver was fun!

A little something Ed made for the launch... which was great. I got to meet and drink beer with all types of wicked folks - all of whom I'd like to thank for a great time.

MAN ALIVE!

MAY HAS BEEN INTENSE!

I got back from TCAF (the Toronto Comics Art Festival) last week, which was abso-fucking-lutely great. The whole place was just tingly with positive vibes, and I got to drink a lot of beer with Ed and the indubitable Jason Turner. I had a great time there - then got to have a blast in winnipeg with  some friends who I went to Ukraina with. And if the good times weren't rolling enough, I got to do a radio interview with Robin at Inkstuds THIS VERY DAY! CHECK IT OUT!

I KNOW!

IT'S RIGHT HERE!

OH - AND GUESS WHAT! I'LL BE IN VANCOUVER FOR THE LAUNCH, TOO!

Fresh and Delicious

Hot off of the presses!

PRESS, PRESS, and MORE PRESS

There's now an interview I did a few weeks ago with Shaun Manning up on Comicbookresources.com. It's got a whole bunch of preview pages and interesting personal tidbits!

Swing on over and look it up!

"Jan's Atomic Heart" Review at Eyeoncomics!

The awesome Don MacPherson, resident critic at eyeoncomics.com, did an in-depth and very favourable review for JAH - 10/10!

Here's an excerpt:

Simon Roy brings a Euro-comics look to bear on this project, which makes sense given that it’s set in Frankfurt. His style here is easily comparable to that of Guy (B.P.R.D.) Davis, and the gruff, grizzled look of some of the characters also reminded me of similar characters in Paul Grist’s Kane and Jack Staff. The story presents a visual challenge in that the robotic facade of the main character isn’t the most emotive of visages, but Roy demonstrates his skills by conveying the appropriate feelings through the character’s body language. There’s a nice variety in his repertoire of storytelling techniques. He offers some convincing cityscapes and backgrounds, but there are other times when he isolates the characters in fields of white to emphasize a moment or to enhance a particular mood.

I'm feeling understandably good about this...

An... interview?

"SNEAK PEEK: THE BEATING OF JAN'S ATOMIC HEART 

An interview and 6-page .pdf preview of the upcoming sci-fi mystery, Jan's Atomic Heart. Fans of Blade Runner and I, Robot are in for a treat. Take a look inside the thought process of Simon Roy, who thinks robots may do more than just clean our house in the future."

I know, eh? Check it out!

(plus here's a dinosaur)

ART PARTY!

Alright folks! I've been drawing a lot lately... check it out.

First up, its DINOSAUR CAVE ART WITH NEMO RAMJET! 

Next up, adventures with the world's smallest hominids!

More later.

Sketch/Script

One of the sketch/script pages that preceded the second scene of "Jan's Atomic Heart". 

A picture for the inner covers of the book. I dunno how I feel about it. I think I kind of mucked up the lower right in the wreckage there.

RAISE THAT ROOF!

For the motherland!

A t-shirt graphic for the UVic russian club - a lot of fun to do.

Jan's Atomic Heart

AWW YEAH BOYS! Peep it:

POST UP ON THE PUBLISHER'S SITE FOR MY COMIC!

oh, and if y'got facebook, invite yourself to this.

Evolution of an idea...

So, late last August, I had just moved to Calgary. I had gone to Drumheller with my family that same month, home to the Royal Tyrell Museum, the pre-eminent Paleontological museum in western Canada, as far as I know. Now, most of my friends had gone to Drumheller at some point in their childhood - for whatever reason, I hadn't. Our family had a bunch of other great trips, but never to Drumheller. So when I went there, deeply suppressed feelings of paleo-wonder swept over me. I had never exorcised those prehistoric demons from my little-boy subconscious, and they began to nag at me. In early september, playing around with pen and ink, it started. I began to draw lizard-men, vaguely dinosaurian in appearance. Oh, how innocent it was. I hadn't even thought of evolutionary history or encephalization quotients yet...

Then I ran into Darren Naish and Nemo Ramjet in my journeys for a better dinosauroid. The full experience can be found at this post here, but needless to say, the seed was planted. I began to try to put together a more realistic intelligent therapod dinosaur. These following images are two of the very first corvid-like dinosauroids I drew.


The body plan was slowly changed and refined, but I simply ran out of steam. It was looking like the end result would just be a hooded crow with a deinonychosaurid tail and sereima's feet - not quite what I had been looking for. It all came to a head in december, where I flushed my system of dinosaurian thoughts with the construction of a feathered, three dimensional troodontid sculpture. I thought it was over.




But it wasn't. At the beginning of February, it all started again. After a week or two fiddling around with evolutionary history, I found a beast that I could be proud of. After a bit of chatting with the illustrious Nemo Ramjet (whose site is down right now, but when it resurrects itself, it's REALLY worth a look), I decided to dive in head-first (conceptually), and start working on developing a culture.

The results can be seen here, at my deviantart account. So here's the question:


WHAT in the FUCK am I going to do with this world once I've created it?

A comic, maybe?

Super-Seal in USA and Puerto Rico - All rights reserved

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The front of the wrap-around cover for "Jan's Atomic Heart", formerly "Morning Coffee with Jan and Anders". The text will be different, but this is basically it.

ROCK (the fuck) ON!

The Themesong...?

Oh yeah...

Oh, and here's the various rough covers for the comic. For marketing purposes, the name's been changed back to it's initial title - Jan's Atomic Heart. The top design will be the one you'll see on shelves, though. It'll be in trade size, too, instead of a small indie-style book.


Rock on.

AWWW YEAH! KNAP THAT FLINT!

I had the uncomfortable realization that having such limited tools of manipulation on my speculative animal would make a bit of a boring material culture. So, in the interest of trying to still pretend that I'm being scientific, the dinosauroid has forelimbs of increased but still limited dexterity. Evolutionarily, the dinosauroid's ancestors would need to be at least partially arboreal - maybe scavengers of the forest floor, nesting and occasionally hunting in the lower levels of the forest canopy. There is a species of dromaeosaur on the fossil record (named hilariously enough "bambiraptor") who did have an opposable thumb, of a sort. Now, of course, there is no real way to know a fossil animal's ecology - but they figure that bambiraptor was probably an arboreal hunter, using it's opposable fingers to snatch up fat insects and little tree-dwelling mammals. It's nice to have an actual case of dinosaurs with dextrous forepaws - it makes what I'm doing a little less of a stretch.

In terms of visual culture, I'm starting with this design - a war mask/helmet/fighting beak - suggested by the illustrious Nemo Ramjet. I'm heavily cribbing from Meso-american cultures with this one, using obsidian blades set into the fighting edges of the mask, much like an aztec sword or spear. I'll start doing more development of dinosaurian material culture - clothes, architecture, etc - soon enough.

The previous direction I was going I like, but was quite materially uninteresting. Without more dextrous hands, I would have been stuck with a dinosaur whose only technology was this:

...which I still think is sweet. I just wanted to have more (and crazier) shit to draw, which takes this from a scientific approach to a more fantastic one.

Is that so selfish?

They're BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!

Honestly, I'd though that I had this problem licked. But apparently, I don't. 

This picture is another try at the dinosauroid. This picture is of two adults, one with throat pouch full. 

One of the big problems I was having with the dinosauroid was the evolutionary line. Because we came from arboreal ancestors, it was hard to think outside of those evolutionary restrictions. Still riffing on Darren Naish's ground-hornbills as models for post-cretaceous maniraptorans, I was caught with the paradox of a creature who would have very capable forelimbs - from the arboreal lifestyle - but yet, used the bill as the main manipulator. The two didn't fully go together. An arboreal creature would most likely have very capable hands, with a comparatively underdeveloped oral manipulator.

But thinking of non-primate intelligence helped a lot when trying to build this creature. Hyenas have monkey-level intelligence and social complexity, yet they never had to come down from the trees to attain it (not to mention elephants). So the dinosauroid didn't need to be arboreal, or ape-like at all, to be intelligent. And in terms of beak as primary manipulator, forepaws don't necessarily equal hands. For full-time bipedal mammals, like the kangaroos, the forepaws are great for digging and smacking other kangaroos, but they're not dextrous. (Thusly, this dinosauroid is tentatively placed in a strictly terrestrial evolutionary line of beaked troodontids, this line breaking from the previously illustrated herbivorous line sometime in the eocene and developing into a highly social family of terrestrial omnivores - this troodontid being one of the most intelligent of this family.)

So for the dinosauroid, the forelimbs are great for combat and grasping prey, but perhaps rather terrible for flint-knapping and the like. They are stuck with the versatile but still self-limited beak as the main tool. This creates an interesting problem for me as an artist, though - if they can’t devise human-esque tools, like spears and hand axes, etc, what visual signifiers of intelligence can you draw them with? Elaborate basket traps?? 

Termite sticks?