Evan Dorkin

WIP

Stands for Work in Progress and Water Is Pouring*.

Sometimes I have trouble drawing my own characters, which absolutely drives me nuts. I've drawn Bill Dickey hundreds of times. SO why am I unable to nail down his face and head for this cover? I've erased enough attempts that I took him off the board and worked on tracing paper, so I can make all the mistakes without adding a gray mess to the cover. I only have Pete settled and hopefully I'll have Bill on there (or at least sketched in...

Milk & Cheese Archive: Notes For An Unproduced Goth Comic

I'm depressed and amazed at how much time I spent making notes for potential Milk & Cheeses comics back in the 90s and whatever we call that hazy decade that was 2000-2010. The files I have on these things are about two inches thick. I guess the files add some to that, but still. I crapped out on making Milk & Cheese #Hate due to burnout and working on World's Funnest and then the Eltingville pilot. I never got back to them regularly other than briefly for the House of Fun sections I ...

Life's Great Rewards 5-31-94

An old page from Dork. About stuff.

I still enjoy or admire most of these things, some thirty years on, at least in theory. I don't have a whiffle ball or a Dapper Dan magnetic drawing set anymore, or a drinking bird. But they're nifty bits of ephemera. I think I still have a Devo energy dome in a box somewhere. Most of my bowling shirts went the way of most clothes, but I have one or two left in the closet, not including the SLG Milk & Cheese bowling shirt. And we still have litt...

Fun Strip Archive: The Phantom And The Crisis In The Skull Cave

The original art is missing the word "They" in panel three, second sentence. It was fixed for publication.

The strip was printed in color, which helps sell the gag a bit. Because those shorts are something. Although the outer underwear wasn't always colored in yellow, to be fair. But the joke works less well if you don't go with the yellow and black trunks. The Phantom is basically wearing a traffic sign over his fun bits. Not exactly useful for sneaking through the jungle.

Fun Strip Archive: Author Photos To Avoid

A public service announcement.

Fun Strip Archive: Office Hi-Jinx (1)

There really is no point to office Hi-Jinx. Sometimes it's okay to just make four panels of nonsense and not worry about whether anyone enjoys it other than yourself. That's not a passive-aggressive maneuver, I worry about 95% of these strips going over. The 5% are the ones like this, where the point is to have no real point and just draw funny-looking characters and dumb stuff. In a fairly clean line style. It's almost like a fake comic strip. That's Office Hi-Jinx!

Fun Strip Archive: And To Think, I Did It All Without Cartooning School

Another meta Fun Strip featuring some of my characters in a "behind the scenes" bit.

I really did make a hundred dollars that day. I did a mock-celebration dance in the studio as if I won the lottery, and that bit of performative idiocy led to the strip.

It was fun drawing the characters hanging out together. I like this one.

Fun Strip Archive: Phil The Disco Skinhead Gets Fired

Phil the Disco Skinhead was always a limited character, a one-joke bit that I managed to spin out a few times more than originally conceived (much like most of my concepts that were meant to be one-shots). At a certain point I realized that that I didn't want to use him anymore -- satirizing white supremacists isn't the same as using them for a backdrop for a gag about a skinhead who likes black music. "Disco Skinhead" was enough for a cheap laugh back in the day, but Phil's conflicted feelin...

Fun Strip Archive: I Gotta Stop Hanging Out With Victor Von Frankenstein

This fucking guy. He's got a point, but he really needs to shut up about it. I stopped taking his calls a long time ago.

Fun Strip Archive: Sometimes...I Get To Thinking

Old art is new if you haven't seen it before.

Feeling better but not well. Not thinking of slicing my hand off, thankfully. What a weird thing to think. It was true for the time, though. An intrusive thought it took me a while to shake, although I haven't had a bagel in some time. Hopefully posting this won't bring it back.

I really ought to name that bird creature considering it's been in several Fun Strips. Nothing comes to mind. It's still "bird creature" for the time being. 2024-08-22 20:38:33 +0000 UTC View Post

Sick Days

hey. Just a quick pop-in update. I've been doin a lot of sleeping and coughing since Saturday night, came down with some kind of summer bug. Likely caught something from a nephew who was coughing up a storm at his brother's birthday dinner Saturday. It's not Covid, for which I'm grateful, I can't afford to lose that many days. But between the cold and my meds I've been sleeping the days away and eating very little. Starting to feel a bit more human today. I'll try to be back on the beam with ...

Floating Heads

Rooting through the files to try to find something, pulled a few things to scan/post.

These are some character heads used for the endpapers of the DORK hardcover. You can see the faint pencil marks from two or three failed attempts at the Devil Puppet and the unnamed bird creature that pops up a few times in the Fun Strips (and is on the spine art).

I had to think to recall who some of these goofs are. From the Fun Strips there's one of the Gray Aliens, the boss from Office Hi-Jin...

WIP

Nosing this along as much as possible.

Penciling tight because my hand wavers a bit when I ink. Frustrating. Tight pencils can kill some of the liveliness on the page, especially since my inks tend to stiffen things up some. But it's what I'm used to and what I have to do if I want the finished art to be decent. I'm still never used to how much snappier and interesting the rough sketches are as opposed to the finished piece.

Look how dirty I'm working on that page. A lot of penci...

FYI: Two New Welcome to Eltingville Art Auctions

I have two more production art auctions up on eBay, these are the production model drawings for "Sir Pete" DiNunzio and Josh "Axel Skullpunisher" Levy. Both come with a companion drawing, Josh's axe and Pete's frozen body after Lord Atrocity blasted him with a freeze spell.

You can find the auctions here:

Team Pete: https://www.ebay.com/itm/256601624214

Team Josh: 2024-08-12 22:12:43 +0000 UTC View Post

Welcome to Eltingville Production Art On eBay.

Need to try to sell some stuff as I've been having a lot of trouble working and so it goes. Not a plea for help, honest, just letting folks know there's an auction up now for one of the rmeaning Welcome to Eltingville production sketches I still have. I wish I knew that there'd be more interest in the pilot, because I sold scores of these off in bundles fairly cheap. How would anyone know/ exactly.

I don't know how to price these nowadays so, as I've done before, I'll see what happens w...

Experiment #124

Bad week.

Out Now: Operation Sunshine: Already Dead #4 Variant Cover

Our variant cover for OPERATION SUNSHINE: ALREADY DEAD #4 shipped to comic shops today (Wednesday). I was at the dentist and forgot to post about it earlier, so I'm playing catch up.

Lines by me, colors by Sarah Dyer.

https://www.darkhorse.com/Comics/3013-488/Operation-Sunshine-Already-Dead-4-Evan-Dorkin-Variant-Cover

The BARFLY varia...

Welcome to Eltingville: D&D "Sir Pete"

The clean up drawing by Eric Keyes based on my design.

I gave Pete a good chunk of dialog in the D&D sequence because I figured his accent would sound funny while spouting terrible "thee" and "thou" stuff. I played with the idea of Pete, Bill and Josh using put-on role-playing voices for their D&D characters, but I since the pilot and the characters were unknowns to the audience, introducing them with two sets of voices could be confusing, even on the reveal that the opening is ...

Welcome to Eltingville: D&D Monster Cut Scene

Only one scripted and boarded scene was cut from the Welcome to Eltingville pilot. It's a bit of business from the opening D&D sequence where Bill, Josh and Pete's characters face the villainous Lord Atrocity. Atrocity first unleashes a magical arrow attack to wipe out their goblin minions, and then uses a freeze spell to kill Pete and immobilize Bill and Josh.

In the original script, instead of a freeze spell, Lord Atrocity conjured up a monster. I thought it would be a nice visua...

Welcome to Eltingville: Josh/Axel Skullpunisher D&D Designs

Continuing with some of the original production art from the Welcome to Eltingville pilot.

Up top is the clean up version of "Axel Skullpunisher", Josh's D&D character (by Eric Keyes, over my sketch). Next up is an early rough for Axel/Josh, which I cleaned up for the sketch that was posted previously. The last image is a final prop drawing of Axel's axe. All the props had to be drawn.

The props were the weirdest part of the design job for me. Backgrounds were the hardest, ch...

Welcome to Eltingville: D&D Opening Designs

Scanning more of the remaining pilot production art I have for the Adult Swim pilot.

Most of the original production art was sold time ago, but I believe I have copies of my designs somewhere (I hope), and possibly the clean-up designs (which, if I understand correctly, was done by an artist named Eric Keyes at the Cartoon Network -- this information is probably on the pilot's credits, I recently came across his name credited online and have to double-check. It might be on IMDB, I fo...

Beasts of Burden Orders Have Started Going Out

The first six book orders are in the mail and I've e-mailed tracking numbers to the recipients. I'll be working on signing, sketching and packing up the next batch of orders to get those out asap.

Thanks to everyone who ordered books. Almost everything sold, I appreciate it very much.

Pictured above: Dark Horse/Beasts of Burden editor Daniel Chabon's beloved Shiba, Zell. I used to ask Daniel to send me Zell whenever I e-mailed him, and he would say no for some reason, and th...