Evan Dorkin

Milk & Cheese: Unused "Generic Comic" Notes

This is what a lot of M&C comic springboards looked like. I just wrote brief notes about what would happen or what they would say, there was usually no drawing required. If there's a visual joke involved, then I'd do a very fast sketch of it to jog my memory or lock down a detail. There wasn't much of a process for M&C, I had an idea, made some notes, and worked up the pages. Sometimes I didn't have time to make notes, as in the case of many Deadline two-pagers, where the deadline was...

Store Signing Flyer: Bedrock City Comics (Houston, TX 1992)

I haven't posted a signing flyer in a while. I was in Texas for the Houston Comics Fest, a small convention that had a bunch of Dark Horse-affiliated creators as guests. I was there basically to promote Predator: Big Game (which I had penciled, I've written about this out-of-left-field gig before and will again, I'm sure -- it's still the best-selling comic I ever worked on and will ever work on). Bob Schreck being at Dark Horse (at the time) was also key to my doing a few cons that year (th...

A Page From The Dork Notebook

This is how I write down most of my Dork/M&C-type ideas. Not much drawing ever goes into it, if any, mostly dialogue or directions, paced out into panels. If there's a visual gag, then I'll sketch it.

These are Fun Strip ideas, mostly. The only one I used is at the bottom, about making D&D stats for monsters based on cartooning mishaps.

It's funny to see the joke about nerds making a violent Winnie-The-Pooh thing actually came to pass. Actually, not really all that funn...

Rejected Joke #4

Another one I may have posted already. Or posted to my LiveJournal many years ago. I don't remember. I do remember that this is an actual pitched-and-rejected cartoon. I sent this to Nickelodeon Magazine and got a nice rejection note from comics editor Chris Duffy, basically saying he really liked it but it wasn't right for Nick Mag's readers. The threatening nature of the gag was a little too tough, even if completely cartoonish. I may have also pitched it to MAD< which probably rejected ...

Rejected Joke #3

I may have posted this one before. Memory fails, like most jokes.

To be honest, I would have used this one in Dork if it didn't go on hiatus for a few decades. Dork #11 was all single panel and four-panel gags, an entire issue of super-bad business decisions, and I wasn't paid up-front for my SLG work. That's why my books dried up and I eventually left SLG. If I left ten years earlier and jumped to Dark Horse, I might have squeezed a few more humor comics out. Anyway, now I can post sh...

Rejected Joke #2

Prelim sketch for a four-panel gag strip that I didn't pursue any further. I must have been aiming this at MAD, because it isn't laid out along the lines of a Fun Strip -- it's a full four panels rather than three panels and an opening title panel.. Sometimes the Fun template doesn't work for a joke, I can either condense it or expand it. These days if it doesn't fit in a Fun template I sit on it, because I haven't been able to do one-pagers. Anyway, this isn't awful, but it seems flat, it d...

Rejected Joke #1

I spent some time this week going through an old notebook filled with potential jokes for Dork, looking for a Fun Strip springboard to draw for the Patreon. I mostly found jokes I already used. I also found some loose sketches of stuff to possibly pitch to MAD (some may be old enough to have been aimed at Nickelodeon Magazine). This batch might have been material I never sent to anyone, because they were too weak and needed to be punched up. Obviously I never punched them up.

I kind o...

(Page Sold) Northwest Comix Collective Club Page 6

The Northwest Comix Collective story was done to fill out Dork #6, which an Eltingville Club issue reprinting the first two installments from Instant Piano (#1 and #3). material from Instant Piano. I also did a new two-page Eltingville comic about Josh called "Captain's Log", which was made up of diary entries regarding his attempts at collecting fast food toys and eating enough Kraft Macaroni and Cheese to get box tops to send away for Batman Animated toys (or something like that, I'm going ...

(Page Sold) Eltingville Club #2 Page 5

Scanning some pages that recently sold. This scan is of the raw inks for page 5 from the last Eltingville story. You can see traces of blue pencil underneath some of the inked lines, and the edges of a pasted-down lettering patch in panel ten. There's also Pentel pen correction ink visible, if you look at panel 4, Jerry's shoulder beside the bottom lettering balloon is all whited-out. There's many touches of white ink over Bill's face in panels 5 and 6, and on him and Jerry in the final panel...

Horror We, How's By You? More Movies I've Watched.

I don't know why, but this afternoon while doing some long-neglected yard work, I thought I'd sit down and type some thoughts about some of the movies I've watched recently (or fairly recently, in some cases). Sometimes I like to process my thoughts about them because it allows me to think about story and decision-making without screwing up one of my own scripts (I'm brain-deep in thinking about Beasts of Burden lately and really want to clear the drawing board so I can finally get back to wr...

Tear Them Apart Podcast Ep 21: Pontypool (2008)

It's been a while since Paul Yellovich and I recorded a new episode of the tear Them Apart horror movie podcast, and this one is a deep dive into Pontypool, a Canadian zombie film that is unlike any other zombie film out there. Or zombie-adjacent film out there, for those that like to parse those sorts of things. For me, if it looks like a zombie, walks like a zombie, and eats like a zombie, I'm good using the term as shorthand, if nothing else. Even the filmmakers slip up occasionally during...

New Fun Strip: Return Of The Broken Robot

Testing out my new steroid-injected arm. And some new Tombows.

It isn't cleaned up and I'm really tired so hopefully there aren't any bad typos or smeared ink lines I'm not seeing. These strips can get blown up real big online, they're drawn fairly small, each panel is approximately 3" x 2 1/2" and I sometimes blanch seeing them enlarged so much.

I've got another Fun Strip gridded out I hope to get done soon, but I'm finishing up a cartoon for the new Tear Them Apart episode tha...

Coming Soon: Tear Them Apart Podcast Ep #21

A few days away. I'm still working on the episode cartoon.

 Video teaser by Paul Yellovich. The skull to my pumpkinhead.

Unseen Art: Harrow Demon Sketch by Jill Thompson

I just found this image on my computer while looking for something else in one of the various Beasts of Burden files. It's Jill Thompson's first sketch for the Harrow Demon from "What The Cat Dragged In", the story where we learn about Dymphna's second attempt to kill our canine heroes and how it backfired (much like her first attempt, when she brought several dead road kill dogs back to life and the zombie pooches immediately chased her). This sketch wasn't included in the back matter of t...

Update 5-23-24

I'm sorry I haven't been very active this month, and that things have been kind of fallow since April. There's been a few things going on that have affected my work, mainly issues with my arm and hand that have kept me from getting a lot of things done.

On Saturday I finally got my steroid shot (cervical epidural steroid injection C-7/T1, which sounds much more of a big deal. But it was just a few shots and I went home). Fingers crossed it will ease the pain in my arm and drawing hand...

Nick Mag: The Comic Book 3D Cover

I was going through the magazine tearsheets and realized I hadn't posted the 3D cover we did for The Comic Book section of Nickelodeon Magazine. I thought I'd look for the original art and post that as well, so, here you go.

I wanted to make sure the cover had some depth to it for the 3D process, and chose a downward-looking bird's-eye angle. I probably shouldn't have chosen a city below the figures, but I thought it would make for a cool effect. I probably should have pitched the scene...

Minor Threats: Barfly #2 Variant Cover Solicited

Ships August 14th, 2024. Wheee!

Lines by me, colors by Sarah Dyer. All the important stuff is by the nifty folks listed on the cover. Looking forward to getting the comps and reading the series.

Solicitation info can be found here: https://www.darkhorse.com/Comics/3015-172/From-the-World-of-Minor-Threats-Barfly-2-Evan-Dorkin-Variant-Cov...

Raw Inks

Upcoming variant cover. I stretched this one out a bit. Har har!

I'm happy with it. It's definitely influenced by my "Experiment" drawings from this site, but obviously slicker. I don't have the courage to draw that loosely for print, at least not yet. The small details were tough, my hands been shaky. I used some Microns of various points to handle some of the stretch lines, I usually like to do everything with the Tombows but even the fine point one can show off wobbliness if my hand ...

Mad Magazine: Bands Reunited - Def Leppard Drummer Rick Allen's Left Arm

I was going through some Mad comps to include in book and art sale packages and stumbled across this one-page strip in MAD #13 (June 2020). This is one of the more recent "zombie" issues, the current iteration of the magazine that's made up mostly of reprints of older material. This issue's theme collects music-related material, the oldest piece dating back to 1955.

This particular strip originally ran in MAD 443, published in July, 2004. It's the only comic I wrote and illustrated for ...

Horror We, How's By You? Movies I've Watched.

I'm bored and I didn't know what to post about. I was looking at the list of movies I've watched since March, 20th and something struck me: I watch a lot of miserable crap. And I've always meant to do some short reviews outside of the Tear Them Apart Podcast. So, here's my thoughts on a batch of movies I watched online, mostly on Tubi, Plex, Youtube and Amazon Prime. Meaning you should be able to find most if not all of these things if you so choose to indulge. There's more than this on my li...

Nutsy Monkey (Nickelodeon Magazine, March 2001)

How the two-page comic looked in print. Colors by Sarah Dyer.

Bottom runner strips by James Kochalka.

Other contributors to The Comic Book section in that issue include Sam Henderson, Terry Laban and Johnny Ryan.

Update 4/13/2024

Sarah finished the colors on a new variant cover for another Dark Horse series. One's been solicited (Operation Sunshine), another is for an announced project (I previewed the cover here a little ways back), and this one will be solicited...I'm not sure when. Everything is done so far in advance now, I'm still used to the days when you finished a cover for solicitation a couple of weeks before it was going in the catalogs.

So we're caught up on those and I'm hoping to start on a cover ...

Secret Milk & Cheese Commission

A while ago I was commissioned by Dark Horse Comics to do a drawing commemorating manga editor Carl Horn's twenty years with the company. It was weird because it was a commission, but also "work". Not a private thing but invoiced and paid like doing a cover. Had to do some finagling because the paperwork was work-for-hire but I wasn't going to sign even a pinup with M&C as work-for-hire. It was fixed easily enough to get around the legal red tape.

I forgot they had asked for a "lit...

Experiment #121

Where my head's been.

TV Guidance Counselor Episode 630: Evan Dorkin

I was interviewed several weeks ago by Ken Reid for his TV Guidance Counselor podcast, ostensibly about my animation work, but we went all over the place, as to be expected when my brain and mouth are involved. Which was agreed upon beforehand.

Here's the episode description, with two annotations added:

"This week Ken welcomes artist, writer and comic book legend (I didn't write that part) Evan Dorkin to the show.

Ken and Evan discuss living the dream, low bars, be...

Experiment #120

How it feels.

WIP Spy Vs Spy Vs M&C Commission

One of three on the board. Three left to go after that.

Experiment #119

Found in the pile of unfinished drawings, almost finished.

Maybe it called to me.

Welcome To Eltingville: Movie Theater Sequence Designs

Some of the characters that are briefly seen in the pilot were going to have recurring roles in the proposed series. The two ushers that kick the Eltingville Club out for trying to sneak into another movie are named Mitch and Randall. Both are seniors at the high school the Eltingville Club members attend. They would have been the lead jock bullies who picked on them in school, and gave them a hard time at the theater.

Below in order: My penciled designs, studio clean-ups, color version...

Index Card Drawings For Sale

UPDATE: Both card sets have been SOLD. Thanks very much!

Up for sale are two 3" x 5" index card drawings, the kind you might have seen on my Instagram. I can't do lottery sales on Patreon (they're not allowed) so these will be first stumbled upon, first sold.

If you'd like the $45 Milk & Cheese set (price card drawings are included in each set) or the $30 Winky the Pirate Cat set please e-mail me at evandorkin@gmail.com. Please but M&C art or Winky ...