A New Artopsy from Niko Henrichon
SPECTATORS - Part 58
Did you watch last night’s new Barry yet?
Brian here, and no spoilers, please, since I’m still catching up on these terrific seasons of Succession and Picard. But damn, what a windfall of beautifully written television we’ve all been treated to this year.
While I hope that a possible WGA strike can still be averted, I absolutely voted YES to authorize my union leadership to call a strike, if necessary, after the expiration of our current deal on May 1 (as did 97.85% of my fellow guild members, it was just reported). I worry I’ll be talking about this more over the next few weeks, but for now, I just want to let the Negotiating Committee continue its important work.
As always, I’m lucky and grateful to also have a career in comics, which wouldn’t be possible without loyal readers like you and dedicated collaborators like Niko Henrichon and Fonografiks. Thanks to your support and their hard work, our fully creator-owned graphic novel Spectators reaches its all-important 150th page today, as restless spirits Val and Sam finally discover who set off a nuclear bomb in California…
And we finally circle back to Val’s tragic ending from our story’s beginning.
Next week, we’ll be releasing the latest “digital collection” of Spectators—this one compiling our book’s first 150 pages—and we’ll release it without a paywall, so all readers should be able to download and own those files for free, cool?
Exploding Giraffe continues to grow and thrive thanks entirely to you generous paid subscribers in The Tower, where lurking spectators are welcome to join us anytime:
Speaking of The Tower and our somewhat secret chat threads, last week’s discussion was my favorite yet, as we talked about the most interesting meals we’ve ever eaten.
Jake P. said:
I had hippo in Africa. Absolutely loved it. I kept thinking “Who’s at the top of the food chain now, you murderous beast?”
Creator Amy Chu shared:
I ate ants once. It was in a restaurant in Guangzhou that specialized in nostalgia cuisine, specifically the Cultural Revolution where people starved and ate anything they could find. (Simpler times!) They weren’t bad, actually. A little spicy?
And the most popular answer by far was this one from julesofthought:
Ass.
Delightful.
But only one lucky commenter was randomly selected by our intern Genesis the Exploded Giraffe to win this epic Norway Prize Pack…
…and that was faithful reader Chellinsky, who wrote:
A group of us from Ohio State went to Siberia and had many interesting meals in 2003. Most interesting two were (1) at a small subsistence farm in the middle of nowhere where the family raised everything we ate and (2) the fancy meal where after we finished our guide let us know pretty much everything we had was endangered and likely illegal to eat in the States.
The first meal was my first taste of honey straight from the comb and led me to buy a farm 15 years later. We now keep bees and raise much of the other food we eat. Even if not the most interesting meal, it was the most life-changing I’ve had.
Great response, thanks so much.
Before I turn the controls over to Niko, I wanted to congratulate my pal Robert Kirkman on his hilarious hard-R movie Renfield, which I saw in a packed theater over the weekend, and was jealously pained to have to agree with this rave review from Manohla Dargis over at The New York Times:
Fast, tight and blunt, the movie gets right to the point with a characteristically American mix of therapy-speak and jokey violence, and it largely stays on point. The filmmakers — Robert Kirkman cooked up the story, Ryan Ridley wrote the script and Chris McKay directed — don’t laboriously reintroduce Dracula, exhume his origin story or invent a childhood trauma to somehow explain him. After a century of pop-culture celebrity and box-office success there’s no need: He is what he is, a vampire…
Like Cage’s Dracula, who lights the darkness with great delicacy, a sharply honed, knowing smile and a voice that purrs only to roar, the filmmakers are having fun, not world-building and mythmaking. What a relief!
Cage deserves all the trophies for his go-for-broke performance, which I strongly encourage you to enjoy on the big screen.
And with that, I now leave you in the very capable, paint-stained hands of the great Niko Henrichon…
Ok!
Let’s surf the same wave as my previous Artopsy post and explore a bunch of other creative experiences that are between 15 to 20 years old.
In a similar vein to the science-fiction experimental pages from last Artopsy, I did another small sequence of pages that made no logical sense, but were intended to have fun and play around and experiment with drawing and colors. Those pages are followed by a few illustrations relative to this story.
If I remember correctly, this was done while I was working on Pride of Baghdad. I’m not sure these pages have been shown anywhere before…
[Holy fuck. BKV popping back in just to reiterate what an honor and a constant joy it is to get to collaborate with an artist of Niko’s caliber. So much imagination coupled with such technical mastery. Anyway, you lucky Tower members will get to see another dozen or so exclusive treasures from Niko’s art vault after the break. Everyone else, have an awesome week!]