Pete Moss Comics #1 - Preview Pages

Here's a short preview (with new cover design.) I'm now offering the comic (11 dense magazine size pages) for $1.99 as a PDF (use Paypal button at right and provide your email address in the "notes" section.) OR, you can get it FREE in exchange for a review, letter of comment, or critique that you post to some public comic forum and link to me. Positive or negative reviews accepted. Just send me an email to the address at right, and I will send you the PDF to read and review.

Click to enlarge:

"8-bit" Illustrations

Here's some material UAB Magazine commissioned for an article about local students and faculty who fight computer crime. They wanted to give it the "8-bit" (or maybe even 4-bit) look of old video-games. This one is an early version that strayed too far from the 8-bit concept, so

New Comic: Pete Moss and the Search for the Holy Nib

Part One of Three is finished. Here's the cover:

Pete Moss, an aspiring cartoonist, gets frustrated with his tools and sets out in search of the perfect nib. He tracks down his hero, Pulpo Papierios, at a comic convention and pesters him about his "line quality". Meanwhile, he's pursued by mysterious agents of a foreign power, and Pulpo seems to be mixed up in some sort of cult. It's all very droll.

Some random scenes/previews:

I xeroxed a small batch to give to friends and fellow cartoonists locally. If anyone in the wide world is interested, I suppose just paypal five bucks to rocksgraphic@hotmail.com and I'll mail one out to you. Right now though I'm mainly just showing it to people locally and looking to get some audience feedback that way.

Down Home Southern Fried Caricatures

 Another recent caricature commission from down heah in the Heart of Dixie:

 If you would like a watercolor caricature to frame and give to your friend or loved one on some special occasion, contact me, Tim Rocks, with your initial ideas. Email rocksgraphic@hotmail.com or you can also call 205-251-0763. I'm based in Birmingham, AL but can ship anywhere thanks to an extensive network of roads that lead right up to my shack.

sports sports sports

At least at the moment, I kind of like this one despite some &#%$ ups.

The Time Has Come to Talk of Shrimp Pimps

For a friend of a friend's shrimp import business:

Actually the version I submitted was just two colors, no white highlights. Rather subdued. My pal added bright colors and removed some of my dramatic shadows (based on photo reference, incidentally.) If you're curious, that version is at swimminglastnight.com.

Here's the original sketch I did. I like the vinegar in this lettering, but it was difficult to ink by hand without wavering, so I found a font. Maybe I should have braved it and just left the imperfections.

How Webcrawlers Make the Web Worse

Reading about how to improve small business search rankings reveals the way webcrawler design leads businesses to create so-called "content" that does everyone a disservice --- both their own customers as well as people actually looking for useful information.

I started reading about "search engine optimization", or SEO, partly at the behest of my dad who's trying to improve his sign shop's website, but also to help with promoting the stuff I do. Anyway, SEO tends to be a lot of fairly boring technical little stuff, mainly about all the relentless ways you can squeeze in "keywords" and "keyphrases" into every last pixel of your site, for the benefit of Google's (and others') webcrawlers and "robots". But then it got interesting (or perhaps it only seemed so by comparison) when my RepKoverTM bound guidebook (lays flat for easy reading) started advising me to simulate "content" to draw in the flies --- to get some Content Management Software (CMS) and perhaps hire a copywriter to fob off some faux-info on the hoi polloi (assonant aside: I dream of one day opening a competitor to Hobby Lobby, either catty-corner or across the street, to be called The Hobber Lobber. Additional aside, non-assonant: perhaps these very words are only a content simulacrum, cynically generated to ensnare you in some commercial agenda?)