Nnewts

Earthworm Jim creator DOUG TENNAPEL is publishing his Webcomic RATFIST, a vigilante-in-tights that satirizes comics, politics, philosophy, and even TENNAPEL himself! Featuring a forward written by MST3K/RiffTraxx’s MICHAEL J. NELSON, and pinups by RYAN OTTLEY, SCOTT KURTZ, CHRISTOPHER HASTINGS and ETHAN NICOLLE!
Image Comics – Ratfist Tradeback

Buy Ratfist at Amazon.com!

Buy Ratfist at Amazon.co.uk!

Digital Download at comiXology!

This fan art reminds me of what it must FEEL like to be Ricky. Good stuff to think about. I love it when a single image tells the story.

When I was a kid I loved to watch Disney shorts. If you’re going to go back to when I was 4 years old you have to go back to 1970. Yeah, I was alive back then, and I’m even considered pretty young! But back then we didn’t have an internet where I could just Google “Mickey Mouse cartoons” and get hundreds of clips at my fingertips. We had to wait.

I remembered my 7 year old buddy was having a birthday party and his father had rented a 16mm film projector and the Disney short of the Three Little Pigs. I had only seen stills of the cartoon from art books in the library and I was desperately hoping I would be invited to his party. I didn’t get invited, so when I saw all of the kids at his house playing I sat across the street on the sidewalk hoping they would have sympathy on me. No such luck.

When the kids went inside, I walked up to the driveway where I could hear the chatter eventually quiet down and they turned out the lights. Then I snuck into their house through the kitchen and peeked around the corner into the living room where I saw the flickering image dance across the screen. I saw the last two minutes of the Three Little Pigs and memorized every frame as it passed through my mind.

I thought I wanted to be a Disney animator when I grew up, and I’ve done enough animation to have nothing but worshipful admiration for that craft, but I realized I didn’t want to draw to animate. I didn’t just want to document a little mouse pulling the boat whistle on SteamBoat Willie… I wanted Mickey, Pluto, Bugs Bunny and Mighty Mouse to be REAL.

Mickey didn’t exist just to pull the whistle string on a boat, he lived because fate needed him to rescue Minnie Mouse from Pete. It took me 35 years to figure out that the life I wanted to draw wasn’t just existence but the story and context of humanity. I wanted to draw the WHY.

I love it when a single image tells the story.

A lot of you loved Eric Merced’s Ratfist pinup art yesterday… So here’s the video of him inking it!

Ratfist Video

Eric Merced: Ratfist!

We’ve been falling way behind in posting your fan art, please be patient. We run our entire operation on a hamster in a wheel. What did you expect, a rat?

I’m being interviewed for a big documentary on comic books so I can’t ink my penciled Ratfist pages. That’s right, I can’t do my comic because I have to talk about comics! And let’s face it, everyone talks a little too much about making comics and not enough time actually making them.

…and on that note, BACK TO WORK!

The best advice I can give to avoid these obnoxious bodily breakdowns is to adjust the work surface to change things up a little each week and to take frequent breaks.

That’s it. 13 years of doing graphic novels and those are my only tools to avoid a sore neck. I’m doomed!

Some of my readers see Ratfist as a good guy and assume I’m the ultimate rat fan. Then they see a cat as a bad guy and assume I’m a cat hater. These are all interesting observations which are like many interesting observations, completely false.

We rescued the real Mr. Black from a shelter back in the late 90s, it was before we had kids so we treated him like “our baby.” Then we had a real baby, and Mr. Black became just an animal again. I really hate the idea that there is no distinction between humans and animals. That belief never ends up helping animals but man’s history has shown that it ends up hurting humans. If you can reduce a human being to the definition of “just an animal” soon a chain goes around his neck or he can be exterminated like rats.

Mr. Black was the greatest cat in the world. He was sweet, gentle, and we cried when the coyotes eviscerated him around the corner. My kids ask me if Mr. Black will be in heaven. I answer, “I have no reason to think he will be. But I sure hope so.

I hope you’ll indulge me with a little cross-pollination here on the Ratfist blog, but I was recently interviewed at the Emerald City Comicon and we talked about my next graphic novel through Scholastic Graphix imprint called BAD ISLAND. My segment starts at 23:23 and we talk about RATFIST too!

Listen on the BONEBAT show!

BoneBat Sixty Three – Devouring Planets

Some may not understand how I got my Japanese brushes after all. In 1998 I was given the opportunity to port our Neverhood video game for a Japanese audience. I had just met with a software company called Riverhillsoft who visited America and were impressed that I was using a Japanese brush and sumi ink. They looked over my drawings and liked the koi and praying mantids I depicted.

Fast forward a few weeks and I was taking my first adventurous trip to Japan. I obviously can’t explain all of those amazing stories here, but I started a friendship with a Japanese business partner and we’re still good friends today. His name is Mr. Watanabe, and he is perhaps the nicest man I’ve ever met. I could tell that he wasn’t sure how to take me in, we Americans are seen as loud, simple, large in personality and laid back. At 6’8″ I stuck out in Japan like I was Blue in Creature Tech. But Mr. Watanabe was studying me, he started buying me art supplies like little erasers, ink pens, journals and hand made papers. He could tell that I was interested in their anime, in their culture, their religion and he began to show me things that helped me grasp Japan in a way that even most American travelers don’t have the opportunity to see.

I sat in the gardens and graveyards of Japanese communities and I sat on rocks and listened. Intricate plant laden paths led to small, humble, but beautiful ponds became my subject matter for a series of inks that showed me the beauty and power of sumi ink and brush. I didn’t pencil my work first, which is their tradition, you gotta feel it and hammer it down.

But my joy in the details of Japan told the story of hidden pain by a people who were stuck on an island, and entire country with limited space, so that instead of going for an American land grab, they go for making small spaces beautiful. Most of their streets have graveyards that are either 2,000 years old, or 65 years old. The architecture, or lack there of document nuclear bomb drops and the complete leveling of Tokyo in WW2. Their artwork depicts giant waves, which even Van Gogh studied, but few know that those waves document previous tsunamis that hit Japan and devastated their coast.

On days like today my thoughts and prayers go to my friends and partners in Japan. My use of the Japanese brush takes a noble tradition and bends it under my dorky, Western, loud American style. My prayers go out to the people of Japan.

I’m not a big shill for anyone, I don’t get paid by Manga Studio to promote their software, I just use it and stand by it. Here’s an opportunity for a webinar I’m doing where you can buy the software at a low price and get a demo from me live:

Learn to Create Comics Like A Pro – A Webinar with Doug TenNapel

No pressure, but some of if you’re interested, get on it since there are limited slots available.

…and now, back to my bamboo brush!