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One of my favorite drawing tools is Sakura's Pigma Brush. It's a pen with a flexible brush-like tip that allows for a nice varied line with a high quality fade-resistant ink. The only thing that bothers me is that the tip pretty quickly frays, making the line fuzzy. On the other hand, once the tip becomes frayed you can use it to get a cool dry-brush effect (like you see above - I probably went a little overboard there actually), much easier than you could with an real brush.

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To be honest, I like the idea of blaxploitation movies more than I like most of the actual blaxploitation movies I've seen. After the racial strife of America's civil rights movement, I think it was an awesome idea to do movies for a black audience, with black protagonists, but too often, the black people were portrayed as pimps, drug dealers or monsters (Blacula or Blackenstein, anyone?) - hardly any more empowering than the butlers and mammys of Old Hollywood. Most blaxploitation movies were really low-budget which meant a pretty cool anything-goes, "underground" kind of attitude, but also poor production values and often subpar writing and acting. There are some good ones, like Shaft, but frankly most of them are just trash.
Having said that, I wouldn't mind drawing a blaxploitation graphic novel some day. A good one.

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(click to embiggify)

I guess this deserves an explanation. Looker vs. Solarr?!? These characters are obscure by anyone's standards, so what's going on here?

Back in the 1980s, Marvel and DC Comics both published these encyclopedia-style series about their respective characters, The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and Who's Who in the DC Universe. One day last month, I knew I would have some time to kill after work, so I had this wild idea. Since it was October 13, I brought Marvel Universe #10 (for October) and Who's Who #13 (for the 13th) with me. Without telling them why, I asked two of my friends to pick a number between 1 and 32 (the number of pages in the books, natch). My pal Ida A. picked 17, which was Solarr (Marvel), and my pal Sophia J. picked 28, which was Looker (DC).

The rules I set for myself was that the whole thing had to be done that evening, meaning I had somewhere between 1 to 1 1/2 hours to do it and both characters should be properly identifiable, i.e. neither one should have his/her back to the camera.

Looker was surprisingly fun to draw, and Solarr was unsurprisingly... not. I've held onto this for almost a month now, thinking about whether or not I should spruce this up before posting it online... ink it... fix the somewhat iffy anatomy... draw a background, maybe? But ultimately, it's not worth it. I post it now because I decided to put it behind me. So here it is, warts and all.