Mascot Art

Last year, my youngest daughter, Brenna, was asked to be part of the leadership for her Middle School’s chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes – and consequently, I was volunteered to come up with a Mascot/T-Shirt design for them. Working with their school’s mascot, the 'Gator, and going with a typical Middle School athletic activity (Track & Field, since everyone has to run laps), I came up with this guy:

Campbell Middle School FCA art



Z Graphic Novels

The project that has consumed most of my time and creative energies for the past six years has reached completion -- the final volumes of the Z Graphic Novels are now available!

It’s been my pleasure to serve as Managing Editor over this line of six 8-volume, manga-sized graphic novels. Adding up to over 7,200 pages material, this is most likely the largest amount of faith-based comic material produced in America under one brand. But as impressive as that may sound, what really counts are the stories themselves. Each series in the line has a unique look and voice, and they are all geared to slightly different audiences, yet each one touches on many crucial aspects of the Christian life such as faith, family, forgiveness and redemption. The creative teams poured their hearts into these books and it really shows through.

Here’s a brief rundown of each series:

Hand of the Morningstar

With dynamic characters and pulse-pounding action, Hand of the Morningstar puts a twist to the concept of the typical super-hero story by tackling the nature of hero worship in today’s media-saturated, relativistic culture.

Kingdoms

A generational saga that traces one family’s account through Israel’s exile into Babylon and their return home. Kingdoms draws upon the rich history of Israel and masterfully places many of the leaders and prophets from the Old Testament in historical context.

Manga Bible

Adapted from the Korean Manhwa series. A little silly at times, but always reverent, The Manga Bible presents the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, in an engaging format for young readers.

Son of Samson

Son of Samson takes a look at one of the most famous Judges of Israel as this fictional “son” of his struggles to grasp with the seeming inconsistencies in Samson’s life. Son of Samson features lively action and art that draws the reader into ancient Israel.

TimeFlyz

Exploring the nature of self-identity and family, TimeFlyz is a high-energy adventure as the TimeFlyz and their human friend, Laurel, try to put a stop to who – or what – is kidnapping history’s leading scientists.

Tomo

Putting new found faith to the test, Tomo presents the story of a young girl and her destiny to bring restoration to a kingdom crippled by deception. With fun characters and a fantastic setting, Tomo appeals to readers of all ages.

These books are available at your more discerning bookstores and online retailers, as well as through my Amazon Store: Bud's Bookshelf.

ArmorQuest Online

Im glad to see that Ben Avery has just placed ArmorQuest online over at WebComics.CC.

ArmorQuest is a fantasy story about a boy named Timothy who decides he wants to join the Knights of the Way to fight off the dragons that threaten the land. WebComics.CC is presenting ArmorQuest in it’s full page glory and in black and white as originally drawn by the incredibly gifted Sherwin Schwartzrock.

Ben, Sherwin and I worked on this story over five years ago and it's always been one of my favorites. It's a story of discovery, determination and faith, and it contains a fantastic mixture of high adventure and spiritual teaching.

In launching ArmorQuest online, the "Sneak Preivew" Prequel pages are being posted every weekday. Starting with “Chapter 1″,  pages will be posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

You can start “Chapter 0″ by clicking here: AQ Genesis: Chapter 0

Action Figures

Last week I mentioned Clash Creative and their production/representation of several properties they’ll be submitting to publishers in the near future, but I didn’t know that they had announced a project I had a hand in developing several years ago.

Some time after our work together on HeroTV and before working on ArmorQuest, Ben Avery and I were batting around a couple of different ideas and one of those was this story about a group of kids that were able to turn into real-life versions of their favorite action figures. We wanted to hit a wide range of genres with this so we honed in on a 40s-era Cliffhanger Action Hero (Nash Raider), a Silver-Age Superhero (The Cowled Owl), a Sword & Sorcery Barbarian character (Grun-Tar), a Futuristic Techno-Ninja (Red Zero), and a Barbie-type character who was also a Master of Disguises and highly skilled in a wide variety of disciplines (Modelin’ Madeline). With the character types and eras in mind, I set myself to designing the characters while Ben fleshed out the concept and drafted a preliminary script. We had our friend Jonathan Koelsch illustrate a couple of pages of art to get a tidy proposal in place.

We moved on to other projects once the preliminary work was completed on the concept, but Ben recently dusted it off and placed it with Clash Creative to give it a fresh set of legs. As a bonus, Clash hired Jonathan Koelsch to complete one of his original pages and to jazz up my designs with colors.

So with Action Figures making it’s debut of sorts, I figured now’s a good time to run these character designs.

Nash Radier and the Cowled Owl

Grun-Tar and Red Zero

Modelin' Madeline

(Sport Madeline, Kung-Fu Madeline, Scuba Madeline, and Tomb Raider Madeline)

The Kids

Action Figures, Nash Raider, Cowled Owl, Grun-Tar, Red Zero and Modelin' Madeline are © & TM 2009 Ben Avery

Art © 2009 Bud Rogers

Colors by Jonathan Koelsch

Back from…?

I’m back to pay attention to my poor little old neglected blog again. It’s been a busy time, but then again, when is it not.

Just to get people up to speed on my projects, almost four years ago I was hired by Zondervan to be Managing Editor of their new line of Graphic Novels. The line consists of six separate series running eight 150-page volumes each – so forty-eight books in all. To date, we’re about 80% through. I’ll be writing about the books here over the next couple of weeks. But if you’re interested in checking them out, you can use my handy Amazon storefront to the right to order a book or two (or three, or …)

But enough about me, there have seen some other people that have been busy too, and I’d like to highlight some of their work:

Crash Land Studio

Some friends of mine (Josh Alves, Jamie Cosley, Tommy Flick and Eric Merced) have banded together to form a virtual studio with a sharp focus on producing all-ages comic entertainment. They’re young, talented and really excited about pushing themselves and their work in this direction. They’ve got a running blog where they challenge each other to sketch-offs and they’re also presenting a couple of ongoing webcomics. Check ‘em out: Crash Land Studio

Clash Creative

Ken Raney has just launched Clash Creative as an outlet for producing high-quality spiritually-based comics and graphic novels. They’ve assembled a pretty interesting and diverse collection of properties to pitch to publishers. Check out their portfolio page: Clash Creative Portfolio

Rabbi Encounters

It looks like Rob Woodrum is bringing his excellent webcomic, Rabbi Encounters, to a close. I’m not very keen on stories that update the Bible or try to stage the events of the Gospel into modern (much less futuristic) settings, but Rob’s careful, sensitive and well conceived presentation of these stories shows that it can be done very effectively. If you haven’t taken the opportunity to check out his wonderful webcomic, do so. You’ll be blessed through it. The story begins here: Rabbi Encounters

WebComics.CC All-Ages Comic Round-Up

My partner in crime, Ben Avery, scours the internet and divides the wheat from the chaff in compiling a list of some of the best, all-ages/family-friendly webcomics out there. He runs his list on Wednesdays and highlights a particular site or strip on Sundays. Check back for regular updates: WebComics.CC

Ace of Diamonds

And speaking of Ben, he is also having a blast with one of his latest projects, re-writing dialog to some old public domain western comics and presenting it to us as Ace of Diamonds. Ben is challenging himself to spin a new narrative over existing art and he’s doing a bang-up job of it. Check it out here: Ace of Diamonds

Excelsior! 'Nuff Said?

My friends at New Creation Now are serializing a comic that’s been quite a while in the making. The comic is titled Ragged Capes and it takes a look at the motivations of several super-hero archetypes and how even their most righteous acts can only be considered dirty rags – or in their terms – ragged capes.

I was asked to write one of the chapters and so I took the opportunity to flesh out one of the characters I’d been playing around with called Excelsior. I formed Excelsior in the Bruce Wayne/Batman or Tony Stark/Iron Man mold -- that is, a very wealthy, intelligent and powerful man who was driven to go that extra step to help people out (well, to help people out in a super-powered suit, that is). In the process, he’s become my Solomon character, someone who has it all but has drifted away in a spiritual sense. Anyway, that’s my background for the character and I tried to work it in as much as I could within the seven pages I had available. Maybe one of these days I'll be able to devote more attention to him, for now however, this story will have to suffice. This story is titled "Breakdowns" and focuses on an encounter between Excelsior, my symbol of order and propriety, and the anarchist, Rave.

Excelsior is (c) 2009 Bud Rogers - art is (c) 2009 Bill Maus

The story was written by yours truly and it was drawn by Bill Maus with colors by Lisa Hutchinson. The first page is up now and new page will become available every week.

Caught in the act

Gary Martin and Sergio Cariello, the creative team on Son of Samson, were gracious enough to include me (the humble editor) in the creator bios at the end of their books. The bonus for this was that Sergio Cariello would be producing a caricature for my presentation. It took me awhile, but I finally got a photo to him and in no time at all, he turned this image around.

One of my favorite things about it is the notes included on some of the rejected tablets (yep, my words coming back to haunt me). Anyway, I hope you all get a kick out of this.

Art (c) 2009 Sergio Cariello

If you haven’t yet, you’ve got to check out the Son of Samson series from Zondervan. It’s a rip-roarin’ action packed series packed with spiritual truth.

WebComics.CC

It’s been quite a while since I last posted here. What with overseeing the production of roughly 2,000 pages of graphic novel content this past year, I haven’t had much time for keeping up with other blogs, much less posting here. But with so much going on, I need this centralized place to discuss my upcoming projects and talk about some of the cool things others are doing.

With that being said, let me highlight our latest endeavor from Community Comics – WebComics.CC

WebComics.CC is pretty much everything the name implies web comics from Community Comics (CC). With WebComics.CC we are providing a hub of sorts for some worthwhile, all ages/family friendly comics material. We are presenting some of our existing material such as HeroTV, ArmorQuest and Chosen Mortals, along with some newly created properties such as Music of the Spheres. We are also partnering with other web comics that share our sensibilities.

WebComics.CC went live late in 2008 and it’s taken a while to build up pages, but by now we have new content going up almost every weekday. So come on over and check it out. With the variety we have, I’m sure you’ll find something to follow along with.

HeroTV: CAPES

The comic that really got me going on this stuff is now online for free over at WOWIO. I had been working on various things for a good ten years prior to HeroTV, but this was my first time wearing the editor’s hat and managing two writers and ten different artists under the framework of a single story clicked for me. This was also the project that gelled things between me, Ben Avery and Sherwin Schwartzrock and led to the formalization of Community Comics as an actual business entity.



HeroTV is a superhero satire/adventure that examines the concept of a hero in today’s media-crazed culture.

Is it by might? Is it by power? What makes a hero?

In HeroTV: CAPES we travel alongside a team of reality-show camera operators as they document the day-to-day activities of Metro City’s superheroes. But events of the day take an interesting, and quite telling, turn when Professor Graviton arrives and holds the entire city hostage.

HeroTV: CAPES features the creative talents of Ben Avery, Darren Brady, Sherwin Schwartzrock, Bud Rogers, Jeremy Zehr, Kneon Transitt, Jesse Hamm, Brian Proctor, Bill Webb, Joey Endres, Eric Jansen, Don Kelly and Jonathan Koelsch.


Originally Published in June 2003 by Community Comics
HeroTV is (c) and TM 2008 Ben Avery

Cool stuff online!

Sorry that I’ve been neglecting my blog lately, but I’ll make amends with that over the next couple of weeks with what’s been keeping my away. For now, however, I want to mention a couple of new projects that have caught my eye.

The Plague Doctor’s Sanctuary

The Plague Doctor is a new story concept that’s being developed by my friend and frequent collaborator Ben Avery and Tim Baron. Ben’s told me a bit of the background for this project and I was instantly hooked.

Here’s an excerpt from Ben’s welcome to The Plague Doctor’s Sanctuary:

This is the home of the Plague Doctor, one of the sole survivors of the world-wide Lotus Plague. Here you will find images, notes, manuscript fragments, and other information about this enigmatic man who changed the course of history for an entire world in the face of absolute devastation. The archaeologists for The Plague Doctor Project are constantly unearthing new artifacts about this man and his world. It must be some sort of elaborate hoax, for these events never happened. And yet, the glimpses into his terrifying world are fascinating. And the evidence seems so authentic . . .

It’s interesting to see how this world is developing and how the story is taking shape.

The Plague Doctor is (c) 2008 Ben Avery artwork is (c) 2008 Tim Baron

Prayer Pups
by Jeffrey Smith

Click on Image or HERE to see a larger version of the comic

Prayer Pups is (c) 2008 Jeffry Smith

According to its website Prayer Pups is an exclusive comic strip aimed at churches and Christian organizations to provide a fun and exciting new way to spread the word of our Lord Jesus Christ. Each episode of the comic strip leads our four-legged friends to a lesson in God’s ways, to a study of Scripture or to a conclusion based on Christian principles. And it’s always done with humor.

I stumbled across this charming and clever strip a few months ago and quickly added it to my daily list of sites to check out. It reminds me of classic Peanuts in tone. The fact that one of the lead characters is a Pug doesn’t hurt either - those little critters are my weakness.