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I know it’s almost 9pm here in Austin, Texas, BUT it’s still Wednesday! So here you go – today’s comics include, well, just about everything. Enjoy! Got a Webcomic you want to share? Comment here or tag us on twitter with the hashtag #WebcomicWednesday.

Bucko

• Bucko, Erika Moen and Jeff Parker
• “Poor Rich “Bucko” Richardson just wants to finally get a job and maybe have another opportunity to talk to that one cute girl he met at that party. A chance case of alcohol-fueled diarrhea at his job interview leaves him desperately running for the bathroom where he discovers a brutally murdered body. Now it’s up to Bucko to solve this case! And just maybe get that threesome after all…”

Battlepug

• Battlepug, Mike Norton
• “Battlepug: The Web Comic was born out of desperate scramble to appease iFanboy. They contacted Mike to create a signature t-shirt for a new line of merch. However, Mike had been working exclusively with DC Comics for 4 years and had no original properties that he could reveal to the world yet. He drew the image you see above and had Allen color it. And lo, a BATTLEPUG was born!”

Octopus Pie

• Octopus Pie, Meredith Gran
• “Eve Ning is a grumpy post-college New Yorker who works at an organic grocery store. She can’t imagine the people in her life being any more annoying. Turns out they can and always are.”

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Way back in 2007 (long before the awesome animated reboot G.I. Joe Renegades) Hasbro’s G.I. Joe toy line celebrated their 25th Anniversary with a commemorative line of newly-sculpted figures. Of course, new figures meant new box art which, being the illustrative nerd I am, has really always been my favorite part of the packaging.

Jarreau Wimberly, one of the artist’s hired by Hasbro for that same 25th Anniversary release has had some of his work floating around recently and I just had to share. Wimberly, a freelance illustrator, has also done much work in the sci-fi/fantasy field for properties such as World of Warcraft, A Game of Thrones, and Magic: The Gathering. Although these illustrations lack the iconic “explosion background” that many of the classic box art cards has they still pack that old school, Real American Hero punch.

From Wimberly on DeviantArt:

Scarlett was the first Joe that I painted and the first one that I saw in stores… it was kind of surreal to see one of my paintings on a G.I. Joe Package. I grew up loving G.I. Joe so for me this was really one of the most rewarding jobs I ever worked on.

Fun Fact

Did you know that back in the late 80s there was a tie-in figure planned for Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky character? It’s true! Although negotiations fell through, the figure was eventually redone and released as Big Boa. “Now you know…”

(via YOJOE.com)

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Do you ever find yourself wanting to ride a “White Pony?” Perhaps you feel like you’re “3 Feet High and Rising” or that you’re trapped on “The Dark Side of the Moon.” If so, then today’s Artist Spotlight is playing your song(s).

Created by British artist Aaron Savage, brick the LP is a limited edition art book in which Savage has re-imagined classic album covers illustrated entirely in Legos. Can you guess which albums they’re all from?

“I had seen people recreate other things out of Lego and I wanted to do something similar. Album covers was an easy choice for me because it combined my two interests. A lot of the covers are iconic but a few are from newer or less known genres.”

For even more Lego covers, be sure to visit Savage on Flickr.

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Winnie the Pooh (or, shall we say, Winnie ther Pooh) was a constant in my childhood and in many of my friends’ as well. Everyone knows the stories, everyone knows the song (you’re singing it in your head right now, I just know it), and everyone knows all about the little bear all stuffed with fluff and his friends of the Hundred Acre Wood. Thanks to my parents and the wonderful geekery that they embraced, Star Wars was also a thing of my childhood. Remember the old Star Wars posters you could get from Pizza Hut way back when? I still have those – they were hung on my walls when I was seven. And I’m pretty sure I was the only girl to partake in lightsaber battles with the neighbor boys (I refused to be Leia). Yes, I had a pretty awesome childhood.

That’s why I am absolutely in love with this book and artwork by artist James Hance: Wookie the Chew: The House at Chew Corner. The thought and detail put into these illustrations is apparent at first glance, as is the wonderful attempts at staying true to A.A. Milne’s feel and E.H. Sheppard’s artistic style. I love these. And what’s even better is that if you buy the special print run of “Off to Save the Princess” all the proceeds will be going to help the artist’s seven year old daughter Maddy (and I know we all love helping our fellow artists).

Here are just a few samples of what you can find at the House at Chew Corner.

Check out more from James Hance here:

• Official Website
• Wookie the Chew
• Tumblr Blog
• Facebook
• Twitter

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Hello gang! It’s another fantastic, fabulous, funfetti Five Flickr Friday! Before we dive into highlights of our Fuel Your Illustration Flickr Group, I have a quick announcement to make! I’ve discovered that our old hashtag of #FFF is being overrun by the color white, football statistics, and the interesting-yet-slightly-horrifying #FootFetishFriday and so we are now introducing a new Five Flickr Friday hashtag: #FlickrFuel. If you want us to check out the illustrations you’re submitting to the FYIllo Fuel group, tweet us on Twitter and use #FlickrFuel. You might be included in the next showcase!

Now onto the art!

Daniel Mackie

Deborah Ballinger

Fred Nolan

Paul Bommer

Michael Austin

Enjoy!

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Yeah, yeah, don’t say anything. It’s been way too long since there was a Webcomic Wednesday gracing these pages. Well here you are – with three of my latest faves (and honestly, I don’t know how they haven’t made it on this site before). Love! Got a Webcomic you want to share? Comment here or tag us on twitter with the hashtag #WebcomicWednesday.

On with the comics!

Cat Versus Human

• Cat Versus Human, Yasmine Surovec
• “Yasmine Surovec began sketching her clever and sarcastic Cat Versus Human cartoons as a way to relax and unwind. Soon, her popular blog at catversushuman.blogspot.com began receiving as many as 12,000 hits per day, with a number of posts going viral and appearing on popular Web sites such as The Huffington Post and I Can Has Cheezburger. Now, a selection of 100 Cat Versus Human strips–many never previously published–can be found inside this inaugural collection of Cat Versus Human.”

The Meek

• The Meek, D. Helmer
• “The Meek is a graphic novel about Angora, an inexperienced young girl who has been sent on a quest to save the world. War looms on the horizon, and at its helm is the Emperor of the North and his hellish adviser. The two countries are overwhelmed with as much terror, crime, disease and revolution as they are with those who wish to create peace. Armed with only her instincts and an unexplainable power, she must experience and judge the world—and decide once and for all if it is truly worth saving.”

Hanna is Not a Boy’s Name

• Hanna is Not a Boy’s Name, Tessa Stone
• “it’s basically about a guy who is terrible at his job but tries very very hard. It’s about a guy who tries to figure out (or force his way into) where he belongs. It’s about a guy trying to find himself because at some point he lost sight of where he was, and I think we all do that sometimes.”

Enjoy!

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Have you checked out our Fuel Your Illustration flickr group? Come join us, we’ve got lots of awesome artists sharing their work. Want to be included in the next Five Flickr Friday? Tweet us on twitter with the #FFF hashtag!

Enjoy!

Annemarie Rysz

Sharon Farrow

Chris Thornley

Felix Benito

ImaginaryPeople

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I you were to ask digital artist and illustrator Charis Tsevis it might look a lot like this. The Greece native has been honing his skills since the late 80s, earning multiple degrees in visual design, which goes a long way to explain his combined love of computer graphics and illustrations – two disciplines that the artist has been able to merge beautifully in one of his latest projects.

Be sure to click each image for a better view and visit Tsevis over on Behance for a full description of each piece.

Tsevis explains the series of mosaic portraits quite simply:

I have been asked to create 6 mosaic portraits of 6 IT giants: Grace Hopper, Cynthia Breazeal, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sir Clive Sinclair and Tomohiro Nishikado. For each of them I tried to create a mosaic portrait made up of elements their creations or their ideas.

It’s no secret that I’m a devoted fan of computer history and cyberculture. I have this passion for more than 20 years now. Been studying, collecting old machines, retro gadgets, especially old Apples but also Sinclairs, Amstrads, Bulls, Commodores… I am considering this computer archeology passion one of the more romantic activities I ever had.

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I would like to introduce you all to my absolute new favorite blog: Creature Spot. It’s basically a blog for a bunch of different concept artists to come together and share their sketches and creations and I am in LOVE with it. Amazing work and extremely inspiring to someone who once dreamed of joining Weta Workshop as a concept artist (I have no given up on that dream – someday it will happen!).

A Few Favorites:

Emily Fiegenschuh

LD Austin

Christopher Burdett

Ryan Firchau

Go check them out and much more over at Creature Spot!

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Ever wondered what the crazy-popular Cartoon Network show, Adventure Time, might look like if it had been envisioned by Sin City creator Frank Miller? Me neither… at least until I saw this awesome series of fanart portraits by John Suarez.

The Brooklyn-based Suarez, who specializes in ink illustrations, was pretty modest in how the idea came to him:

It was late one night and I just had an urge to draw Adventure Time, sometimes these things just happen and there nothing you can do about it.

Marceline’s Dad has to be my favorite so far, I really went all out making him crazy scary. There’s not really many characters in the Adventure Time universe I can go all out on without changing their actual base design.

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Minimalism is a hard thing to accomplish for most artist. Sure, we all strive to get that perfect balance between “just enough” and “visual bliss,” but few can help themselves from that “one last tweak” (which quickly turns into one more and then another, and another…). Today’s featured artist, Dale Peart, seems to have worked out a way to nail it. In fact, he’s become so good at it that Turner Classic Movies (TCM) recently commissioned the artist to create a series of posters for any three films of the artist’s choice. His picks? Arguably three of the most eclectic film groupings I’ve seen in recent years… Alien, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and No Country for Old Men.

I decided that each of my films must each link visually, each must link with their idea, but they also must sum up the main message of the film, or what the film is about. Without these, the posters wouldn’t succeed as a representation of the film or as a set.

I spent some time deliberating how to link all these posters together, I did so not only with the idea, but also visually. After analysing all three films, noting down important and iconic moments within each and what was the underlying message behind them all. It became apparent the main theme subject of each, was about something or someone hiding, or chasing.

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Coffee, graphite and water color collide in Portland-based illustrator Zach Johnsen’s latest art series Acid Over Easy. Johnsen, who did a similar series back in 2008 entitled Acid in the Ice Cream, has been featured in exhibitions all over the world and was even a Guest Speaker for Carnagie Mellon’s School of Design Lecture Series in 2009.

“My work is usually pretty layered” said Johnsen in an interview for Excommunicate.

That’s the reason, I love using watercolor – it has such a luminous and transparent quality that gets even more vivid as you lay down more color. Sometimes I’ll start out w/ a wash or splatter on paper [and] then go in and start a sketch I have in mind or have reference for. [From there I] switch over and start adding select colors and washes here and there… work into it w/ pen or ink some more, building out the composition, then back to layering color until it has the desired depth, energy, and color.”

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The Hidden

www.thehiddencomic.com
Despite it’s origins in print, Ryan Morris and Michael Roberts’ The Hidden is also an ongoing webcomic that finds a family (The Gustafsons) and a Wildlife Conservationist (Max Harrison) struggling against a zombie invasion in the rather unique setting of a rural countryside in the 1950s. Ryan Morris’ work here is clearly influenced by the likes of Mike Mignola, though much less refined, and serves to set an appropriate tone for the time period.

Johnny Zombie

www.madgeniuscomics.com
As our second zombie infested pick for this week, Johnny Zombie is a fairly new webcomic by Karl Kesel (Suicide Squad), David Hahn and Grace Allison that began this past Halloween… and it also happens to be a Christmas story (with zombies!). Being a relatively new webcomic its hard to judge the consistency of the artwork and story, but so far Kesel and his team are off to a great start and I’m definitely looking forward to whatever comes next.

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In his 8-Bit Dreams art series, illustrator Campbell Whyte pays homage to some of the greatest games to ever grace a hard-shelled NES cartridge… okay, maybe they’re not all greatest but at least Whyte’s illustrations are. Each one depicts either a signature character or cast from the game that instantly make it easy to guess each piece’s title. Go ahead, try it out. Can you name each game?

Check out even more from Whyte’s 8-Bit Dreams series.

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Opening this past Friday at the iam8bit Gallery in Los Angeles, Licorice Flix is a brand new solo exhibition by mosaic portriat artist Jason Mecier that features a series of edible movie star portraiture using nothing but licorice. Highlights include Cher, Willy Wonka, Harry Potter, Freddy Krueger, Charlie Chaplin, E.T. and Elizabeth Berkley from Showgirls to name just a few.

Mecier, a self taught artist, is well known for his mosaics which are made using found objects like beans, yarn, candy, and so on. You honestly haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen a portrait of Jerry Seinfeld made entirely out of breakfast cereal.

If you live in the LA area, be sure to stop by and check out the show (runs until November 13) – admission is free.