Missile Launcher

Another Missile Mouse drawing. I'm going to have to start coloring these at some point.

Speeder Ball

A Galactic Security Agent is trained to be expertly proficient in handling all kinds of vehicles. From sophisticated fighter ships to your average commuter speeder there's nothing they can't turn into an efficient pursuit vehicle. However, if given the choice, I don't think Missile Mouse would have picked the Speeder Ball SB5 as a get away vehicle. It's handling is poor, acceleration rivals that of a Gorgonian sand slug, and it's noisy. But when you're in a pinch some things have to suffice.

Double Gun Jump

Thanks again to all of you who ordered the sketchbooks. You should have received them by now. They were fun to sketch in and I hope you like the sketch you got.

I did this drawing tonight to wind down. I was so tired I didn't want to draw it. But once my hand started sketching I couldn't stop and it gave me a little art boost of energy. I love it when I get those.

Bug Monster

Missile Mouse rigged this electrocution staff to work with a standard fusion generator, since he couldn't find any fully charged batteries for the thing. This will amp up it's power by a good 500% turning it from a stun device to a lethal weapon. One powerful enough to take out the bug monsters he keeps running into on this planet.



I drew this while talking on the phone with my friend today. We had a nice conversation ranging from the effectiveness of using flashbacks as a plot device to slavery and the founding fathers. It's always a treat when Kohl calls.

Serpent Monster

Thanks to those of you who ordered the Art Digest. If you like any of the stuff here on my site I'm pretty sure you're going to like the book.

I hadn't drawn a finished inked Missile Mouse in a couple weeks so I took a few moments today to do this drawing just to keep my reflexes sharp. MM climbed to the top of this rock formation to see if he could get his bearings straight on this new planet he discovered. Little did he know that he disturbed a sleeping serpent who made a home in a comfortable crevice atop this precarious perch.



Special thanks goes to my 7th grade English teacher, Ms. Glenn, who taught me the alluring art of alliteration.

Flight Explorer, Missile Mouse, and Language

Over at All Ages Reads they give a nice review for Flight Explorer. However she brought up a good point about the language in my Missile Mouse story and it's appropriateness for the classroom. In Tracy's review she says:

"On the Flight blog, Kazu wrote, “After hearing from many booksellers and librarians that there weren’t very many high quality all-ages comics available for their youngest readers, we decided that a volume of Flight containing only the stories with the youngest readers in mind would be a great solution to the problem.” Hurray! What a fabulous idea!

Um, well, it would have been, with one – actually two – very small exceptions. While the stories in Flight Explorer are imaginative, colorful, well-written, and appeal to not only kids but to everyone, I cannot bring it into my classroom or give it to the school library.

In the story Missile Mouse, the eponymous character says, “Holy crap!” and “Oh crap.” That’s it. The same word, used twice, has cut this book out of many classrooms and libraries in America."

I regret that word is in there. When I wrote and drew Missile Mouse it was originally for FLIGHT 4, a book popular with teenagers, college kids and adults. When Volume 4 got too cumbersome Kazu felt this would be the perfect time to make EXPLORER (an idea a lot of us had been pushing for since the first few volumes of Flight came out) with the stories he felt were best suited for younger audiences. My Missile Mouse story was one of the stories chosen for the book and because I was so focused on other stuff I didn't think to go back through and recheck the content for a kid audience. It wasn't until last week when I ordered the book off Amazon (still haven't received my comps) that a coworker was reading through it and said "Hey there's the word crap in here, you don't mind you kids reading that word?" I couldn't believe it. She passed me the book and there it was, I had totally forgot about it. Then after reading through it again I found the second crap, again totally forgetting it was there too. Had I remembered this I would've changed it to "cripes!" or "trousers!" or something funnier. I'm going to push changing the two craps in the second printing of the book.

Anyway, in the bigger scope of things kids have their whole lives to be adults. Anything I can do to protect their innocence is a net gain for society. Because children who are allowed to be children grow up to be adults who act like adults. That's why as creators for children we should be mindful of what we are creating for them.

Monster Evolution 02

Here's the last batch of sketches for this monster. As you can see for a little while there I toyed with giving him legs, but they just didn't seem to fit with what the monster will be doing in the story. "A" and "B" felt a little too serious, and "F" was a little too obscene. So I settled on "G." It's a more refined version of where I was going with "X" in the previous batch. I would have loved to have spent another week on this guy's design, but I have a schedule to keep in order to finish this story on time.