Iggy Pop au Comic Jam de Montréal !

Voici l'événement tel qu'il m'a été décrit pas Richard Gagnon: durant le Comic Jam régulier, comme c'est l'habitude tous les dernier jeudi du mois, les réguliers et irréguliers des Jam se pointent au Bar des Pins et jasent, boivent et sont concentrés sur leurs papiers à dessiner... Il faut savoir que le Bar des Pins est une brasserie des plus banales avec des tables simples (mais très bonne pour dessiner), des TV au murs diffusant généralement des sports populaires comme le soccer et le hockey, et au haut-parleurs, des vieux hits rock entendus milles fois. La place n'est pas hip, mais elle fait sa fonction de façon utile tout en ajoutant un coté un peu kitch et ridicule avec ses vieux monsieurs qui sentent le fond de tonne et qui nous regardent avec curiosité...Richard Gagnon voit entrer un monsieur un peu agé entrer accompagné de deux autres types. Il a des cheveux long blond. Il s'avance un peu comme s'il cherchait quelqu'un. Regarde autour de lui et Richard s'écrie: "Hey, there's Iggy!". Après un petit moment, l'homme se retourne et ils repartent. Rick retourne à feuilleter la section musicale du Montreal Mirror puis après un moment me dit: "c'était bien Iggy Pop. Il est entré et est ressorti ". Et justement le Mirror disait qu'il était à Montréal pour un show et c'était bien lui en photo dans l'article...Rick préviens quelques gens autour qui ont vu le "monsieur" eux aussi, mais seul Kurt Beaulieu l'avait aussi reconnu.
Oui, on a vu Iggy Pop en visite au Comic jam de Montréal ! Et c'était gratuit !

Extrait d'un article de CTV.ca:

lean, sober Iggy Pop still has lust for life
Updated Sat. Aug. 2 2008 10:32 AM ET
The Canadian Press

TORONTO -- Punk pioneer Iggy Pop is legendary for his live shows - a frenetic explosion of energy in which his wiry, half-naked frame shoots across the stage and back again, with an occasional trip to the edge of the stage to berate a lethargic onlooker.

But Pop, now 61, says the unbridled frenzy of his youth has been tamed with sobriety and age. Despite that, the veteran rocker, along with his band the Stooges, heads to Canada this weekend for a couple of shows in Montreal and Toronto with promises he'll offer more than most performers half his years can muster.

Hommages à Stéphane Peru et autres illustrations.

J'ai beau essayer, j'y arrive pas vraiment: j'arrive pas à bloguer. Je suis pas capable de m'asseoir à tous les jours et à donner des nouvelles de ce qui se passe dans ma vie ou dans ma carrière. Une fois de temps en temps, oui, mais jamais assez pour que lire ces "news" donnent une image claire de mon activité puisqu'il manque toujours des bouts...J'arrive pas à trouver que les détails de ma vie privée ont de l'importance si ce n'est relié à mon dessin d'une façon ou d'une autre. Pour ça, je garde généralement ma fiction et mon écriture d'histoires pour transmettre ce que je ressens et mes idées. Peut-être que c'est des façons simplement différentes de voir l'écriture. Il y a des types qui écrivent des blogs et d'autres qui écrivent des fictions...

Mais bon, quand même, je vais essayer de garder mes nouvelles à jour. Voici donc.

***

Au Québec en ce moment, probablement le mois dernier en France et ailleurs, est sorti en kiosque le numéro 18 de Fathom (mai 2008) édité en français par Delcourt. Dans la section des invités vers la fin, j'y ai un dessin de Aspen Matthews dont voici une petite version. J'ai essayé de me ré-approprier le personnage un peu et le résultat, du moins au niveau de la composition, me semble plus proche de Mike Mignola que de Michael Turner, le créateur de Aspen. J'avais le choix et j'aurais aussi pu faire Spawn, mais comme on dit "fais ce que tu connais", j'ai préféré faire une jolie fille plutôt qu'un gros gars hargneux avec des chaînes ! On y aussi retrouve d'autres artistes dont Tiphaine, Geyser (Omnopolis) et Anthony Dugenest (Bayou Girl, Studio Makma).

Ce numéro m'est aussi assez spécial pour une raison assez personnelle mais qui touche aussi plein d'autres personnes. C'est un numéro hommage oû plein d'artistes qui ont connu Stéphane Péru y font un dessin ou un petit texte à sa mémoire. Stéphane est décédé en février dernier a l'âge de 26 ans d'un problème au coeur. De façon totalement subite. Stéphane était coloriste avec nous au Studio 3265 depuis 2 ans et était devenu plus qu'un confrère de travail, un ami. Les photos de mon mariage en septembre 2007 ont pris une touche encore plus spéciale quand je pense que Stéphane y était et son plaisir et son enthousiasme pour cet événement était palpable. En dessous de son blabla de célibataire qui ne veut pas trop s'attacher, je crois qu'il était touché par nos voeux et il nous a montré a quel point il était un grand sensible alors qu'il nous aidait à monter nos bagages à nos chambres...
Thierry Mornet de Delcourt a donc organisé une section hommage auquel j'ai participé en compagnie d'autres de ses amis et confrères en France, ou il a démarré sa carrière avec son frère Olivier. On peut y voir du Patrick Lesparre (Quentin le Seul), Reed Man (Strange, Reptile), Patrick Dumas, Chris Malgrain, Anne Rouvin, Didier Tarquin (Lanfeust de Troy), Louis et Sebastien Lamirand (Tessa).

Panini, qui traduit X-Men en France y est aussi allé d'une page souvenir dans le Astonishing X-Men 35, le tout organisé par Olivier Jalabert des éditions Soleil. Voici mon dessin pour l'occasion. Les autres ayants participés sont Yanick Paquette (Young X-Men), encré par Serge Lapointe (Teen Titan year one) et coloré par Richard Isanove (Wolverine: Origin), Aleksi Briclot et Louis (Tessa, 42).

***

Dans un autre ordre d'idée, j'ai aussi eu une autre illustration dans le numéro anniversaire des 20 ans de Sortez la Chienne, le zine de la ville de Lille publié par Jean-Jacques Tachdjian (dit El Rotringo). Tachdjian a édité ce zine dans les années 80-90 et c'est un retour qu'il fait depuis quelques années. SLC a été depuis ses débuts dans les années '80, un des premiers graphzines underground mélangeant bd, art et graffiti oû tout l'underground mondial a fait une apparition y compris les québécois comme Valium et Siris. Siris est d'ailleur de nouveau de la partie avec une illustration. Alors donc, ne vous surprenez pas si ça n'a visuellement pas grand rapport avec les paragraphes précédents oû je parle de Marvel, Panini, Soleil et Fathom (en cherchant bien y'a un vague lien entre Soleil et SLC puisque Jean Wacquet, directeur chez Soleil a participé à SLC dans les années 80 avant de partir sa propre librairie Dangereuses Visions.)

***

Voila, dans mon prochain post, je pourrai sûrement donner quelques détails sur le projet en gestation chez 400 Coups...

Tripping The Rift

 

Six.
I heard that there was some possibility of a job with something related to Tripping The Rift, the cartoon show on Teletoon, here in Quebec. So, to show the client and also for fun, I did a pin-up of Six, just to show them what I could do with it.
***
For more pin-up and cheesecake art, view my gallery.

The Abominable Charles Christopher and other updates.

I've made some update and improvement to the webcomic page in the last month, trying to find a way to make it look a bit more lively.
One of the thing that were there, then removed because the company went out of business, and then but back in was the chatterbox. You may have noticed it. I hope you like the possibility of commenting on the webcomic. But maybe people will "chatter" a bit more once we get to the new pages of the John Star storyline.

I've also added a new "associate webcomic". It's called The Abominable Charles Christopher. It's written and drawn by Karl Kerchl. Karl is one of the guys I share the 3265 Studio with. While Karl is physically in Montreal working with us, he's mentally unfaithful to us with another group of cartoonists in Toronto. The group is called Transmission X and they do various comic and illustration work for big and small companies while still being masters of their own destinies by doing and posting to the world nine different webcomics. Great work that you should check out.
A bit more about Karl ? From the Transmission X site:

KARL KERSCHL :

Karl has been drawing comics for 14 years. He has worked on Superman, The Flash, Robin and the Teen Titans, among other heroic things, and recently self-published a graphic novella for the band Ragni, which he wrote and drew. He is currently working on an original graphic novel and producing weekly webcomics with his pals in Toronto.He has two very demanding and overweight cats, both of whom are French-Canadian.

While i've never met his cats, I can attest to the fact that french-canadian cats are not all overweight. Mine is not. There.
And about Tranmission X:

Transmission-X is a web-comics anthology created by a collective of illustrators and writers based out of Toronto, Canada. Featuring the work of acclaimed industry veteran Karl Kerschl (Superman, Teen Titans: Year One), Andy Belanger, Michael Cho, Claudia Davila, Scott Hepburn, Brian Mclachlan, Ramon Pérez and Eisner Award nominees Cameron Stewart (The Other SIde, Catwoman, Seaguy) and Arthur Dela Cruz (Kissing Chaos). Transmission-X is updated daily with free, original content.

John Star is now a Facebook Group.

Yes, I'm getting into the facebook thing like everyone else ! I've had a Facebook page since last year, but mostly I use it with my friends and want to keep it personal. But I used the Group function to create a page about John Star. It can help gather readers from the Facebook network and keep them posted about new work being published on the webcomic.
So if you are on Facebook, it's an invitation: come join the group !

***

In the meantime, the Veena webcomic is still in rerun of the "The Expanding Spiral" story. After that, the rerun will be of the John Star storyline. At that point new material never seen anywhere will be posted.
To celebrate that, i'll do a redesign of the page.

Order of The Solar Temple ! For your childrens !

Yes, that's my current job. I'm working on a schoolbook where comics are used to help teenagers to understand hot topics like gangs, religious activities like shamanism or civil rights. In this case the topic is the dangers of cults or "religious" sects. The particular cult they are covering is the OTS, the Order of The Solar Temple, very active in Quebec and other french speaking countries during the 1980s and 90s.
It's a 28 pages story and here is the first finished colored page. I'm doing the pencils and the inks and I have 2 colorists.
More details soon.

A new chatterbox called Shoutbox !

I have added a new "chatterbox" on the Veena webcomic page. The old one was gone because the Chatterbox company that made it, somehow went kaput. I haven't really ressearched the reasons and simply decided to remove it. It made the webpage look defective...
Months have gone by. I was too busy with illustrations and paying comic work, the Veena webcomic went into re-runs. The John Star story left hanging there...
But now, even in re-runs we get closer to the John Star story and i'll have new pages to add in a few months.
So, i'll make a few changes to the network of webpages that I have...(on ComicGenesis, Videotron, ComicSpace, My Space, etc...) and try to recenter things a little bit. I may have to remove the french section for a little while.

So, what am I working on ? The story of the Order of The Solar Temple ! It's a 28 pages story, all in color for a schoolbook in Quebec high schools. As strange as it may seem, they want to use the OTS story as a warning on cults for the Ethic And Religion program.
So, very busy with that for a month yet.

Des tirés à part à l'Expozine - Update

Lors de l'Expozine 2007, qui se tiendra la fin de semaine prochaine, Éric Thériault offrira en exclusivité trois tirés à part en couleurs, numérotés et signés.

L'éditeur de ces pièces est La Grande Ourse, organisateur du festival d'Andenne et éditeur de L'Inédit, le magazine belge spécialisé dans le portefolio de planches et d'illustrations inédites (d'où le nom!).

© BDQuébec.

******

Update:

Expozine a très bien été ! Les ventes ont été bonnes et il y avait plein de gens en visite pour la journée ou j'étais là. J'y ai été samedi mais pas dimanche. A coté de moi, y'avait mon scénariste de la chronique Stats dans Safarir, Kurt Beaulieu qui vendait sa musique concrète sur CD et son nouveau mini-comic; Nicolas Plamondon et son nouveau zine "La mort, cette retardataire" ; Blonk; Francis Hervieux et MensuHell et, bien sur, Sirkowski et ses rats vendant Miss Dynamite.
Tiens, Jack Ruttan a pris plusieures photo qu'il nous montre sur sa page de Flicker. Il y a aussi Veronique qui en a prises quelques unes. Si d'autres gens ont des liens a ajouter ou des commentaires pour Expozine, signalez-les moi.
Jack: Jour 1
Jack: Jour 2
Jack: les rats de Sirkowski.
Veronique: Ici

Reactor Girl #6

Tom Spurgeon talked about an old anthology I contributed to in 1991. Here.

WWW.4x6-ART.COM

Here.

And my art here.

Safarir 225, juillet 2007

Kurt Beaulieu et moi continuons de faire la chronique illustrée des Stats. Depuis 3 mois déja, Kurt m'écrit le scénario et j'illustre à la ligne avec tons de gris. Comme le nom l'indique, c'est une série de gags basés sur les statistiques venant de Léger et Léger, Ipsos et autres irritants des sondages téléphoniques... Malgré mes peurs, l'humour de Kurt passe assez bien la transition à la formule du gag traditionnel de Saf. Et on réussi meme à y faire des références bédé: Sabine, personnage fétiche de Kurt y fait une apparition et on a réussi à glisser Le Père Lacloche (Pete the tramp) dans le role d'un clochard de Montréal. Le personnage de Clarence D. Russell créé en 1932 réussi assez bien la transition ! Faut dire que la pauvreté continue d'etre d'actualité...
La couverture, visible ici, montre bien sûr les Tetes à Claques. Saf s'accroche à leur 15 minutes de gloire, ce qui a tres bien marché la derniere fois qu'ils étaient en couverture.

Betty Page art

The drawing in this post is a special "commission". I was asked to give some art for a charity. I must admit that I did not understand all the details, the original message was in Italian but I did get that they were trying to sell artwork to help fund an african charity, in Tanzania. An italian penpal gave my name and I wound up in the company of Milo Manara, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Gabriel of the eight, Giuseppe of Bernardo, Corrado Mastantuono, Fabrizio Fiorentino and Stefano Raffaele. I'm impressed that Manara is in there...Anyway, since these artists are in the "good girl" style, I decided to use an idea for a future project and explore it a bit in this context. Plus, Betty Page is easily recognisable. So if you want to buy my artwork, you should get in touch with Roberto Riccio here and here.

Chatterbox problems....

If your reading this news from the Veena webcomics page, you can look right next to this news box and you'll see a Chatterbox. Right now it doesn't look like much because it seems that Flooble, the company that manage the code, lost something to make it work...I have no idea how to fix this. I might have to install a new account, or simply to forget about the whole thing. If you think it's useful, just write me !It's kinda bad. I think we lost a lot of messages...among them all those from Michele Laframboise and her boyfriend who posted regularly, and even recently that guy who was a fan of Alphaville and saw Lemmy Caution in the look of one character in this story....

Also, you may have noticed that there is no longer a link to the Forum page. It's because I decided that it wasn't really what I needed. Initially, the forum was shared between 2 webcomics: Veena and The Eight. Since it's writer, Steve Requin, was the main moderator and not me, when he stopped updating his comic in 2005, he stopped maintaining it on a regular basis, ad ware began to post junk and I could not do much about it. These problems lead to disuse of the forum, among other things .It's too bad because it was useful to make people know about each other's webcomics...A form of cross pollination. Maybe I could try to do a similar thing with Miss Dynamite where a lot of my readers link from, or a could maybe open a Comicgenesis forum account ...

Montréal Comic Con - Sunday April 22nd

I always forget to mention those things... I talk about my trip to Toronto but never mention it when it's a convention from home...
I've been invited to the Montréal Comic Con next Sunday. Other guests will include David Finch, Serge Lapointe, Clément Sauvé and Sirkowski.

The details:

Sunday 22nd April
From 10am to 5pm
DIRECTIONS: PALAIS DES CONGRES
By Metro: Take the metro (subway) to the PLACE-D'ARMES station, located under the Palais, and follow the signs.
Walking: The building of the Palais takes the whole block surrounded by Viger Ave. (North), Saint-Antoine Street (South), Saint-Urbain Street (East), and Place Jean-Paul-Riopelle (West), an extension of De Bleury Street.

See you there!

Deja Voodoo !

Somewhere in the late 80's, there was a band called Deja Voodoo. I was a huge fan of their sludgeabilly swamp music. Every time they played in Montreal, I was there. They were Gerard Van Herk and Tony Dewald and played a very stripped down type of rockabilly.They dressed very simply; short hair, suits and bow ties or maybe a plastic spider instead of a tie ? At some point Van Herk decided to publish a comic book with short stories about music. When I heard about it I jumped on the opportunity. That was my first "comic book".
Here's a Youtube where you can hear them play.
They were my favorite band from my arrival in Montreal at 17 up to when they stopped playing in the very early 90s, so that little thing is my tribute to them for the fun they gave me and for publishing me.
Eventually, i'll put a scan of the cover of this comic.They have a MySpace page here.

Attack of the 5' 6" woman !

That's the name of a very short story I did for Femforce #138. That happened unexpectedly: a pen pal from Italy was supposed to have a 2 page story we did published in an Italian magazine. That could not be done, so he sent it to AC Comics for use in Femzine. That's how I got in touch with them, just to get my artist comp copies.

They liked my art, and were in a rush to finish Femforce 138, where the theme is GTS, i.e. Giant Women, a bit like seen in the movie Attack of the 50 foot woman. I proposed my own take on it, a reversal of the theme. They agreed. So the title is Attack of the 5' 6" woman !
I did the plot and the pencils and the final script and the inks are by Mark Heike.
AC Comics are known as one of the 4 companies that started the Direct Sale market . The other being Pacific, First and Eclipse. They are well known for their dedication at reprinting the art of the golden age of comic book.

Update : March 4th
The Femforce message board has a review by Paul here.
An excerpt:
"In the next story, “Attack of the 5'6" Woman,” newcomer to AC, Eric Theriault, with assists by the Heikes, delivers a fun story that plays with the Giant Woman conventions a little bit. It’s well-paced and I liked that the reader knows what’s going on but the protagonist does not. It’s a mix of cheesecake and the old “Land of the Giants” tv series (and, if you’re old enough to remember that I guess I just gave away the surprise).


****

By the way, if you are here because you typed " feet stuck in glue ", maybe you should write me privately...

I'm interviewed on Bedeka.

I'd like to make an invitation to everyone who can read french to read an interview that Eric Lamiot did with me last summer on the Bedeka web site, but has only recently been posted on the site.
I'm pointing it because, em..it's an interview with me, but also because the updates on the news section of that site are pretty irregular these days and maybe nobody see them anymore.
It's here.


Questions cover my coloring on "Quentin le seul" a serie by Patrice Lesparre done for Pif Gadget (Pif is a kid magazine published for France's market), work published by Delcourt and Bamboo translating comic books originally done for the american indy market (Battle Hymn, The Goon, Grounded) and some news on my webcomic Veena, where John Star is now being serialised.

Ciao!

The end of the world !!

While surfing, I found a page on the Montreal Mirror site that had art I did nearly 8 years ago ! That was when 1999 was synonymous with the end of the world, or at least with the Millenium Bug.
It's here.
Once a year, the Montreal Mirror asked editor Rupert Bottenberg to built a whole issue full of cartoons, so that the journalists could take a vacation during the Christmas time. That was a good idea and they should bring it back !
My style was a bit simpler back then...

My Comic Space

By now everyone has a My Space page. I'm not sure what's the use really...I did not care about it very much until I was invited by the OnlineComic administrator (where you can subscribe to get updates about the veena webcomic) to a sort of My Space dedicated to comic creators. I registered, so now I have a ComicSpace page under my name. And, why the hell not, I made one for Veena on My Space.
Here are the adresses.
ComicSpace: Theriault
My Space: Veena

Hopefully, we'll be able to post updates on our pages there that could be a form of broadcast.

Lots of guests art and a brand new Archive section !

On Comicgenesis message board here, I recently made an offer to trade guest art for a link and some good word of mouth in the news section. The only requirement is that it be about Veena or any character or situation from the webcomic.

I was happy with the result. 4 very good artists answered the call and a few more made promises. You may already have noticed that the last 2 weeks of strips were fill-in. The first one was from Roman Wunderlich, artist of B-Movie Comic. He actually did 3 different pieces, all done with a great sense of humour and great colors. This week's piece is called Veena Yaoi but should be called John Star Yaoi, making fun of the friendship of John and Paul-Hitler-Dixon, and at the same time turning on it's head the nastiness of the nazi look.That was one invitation I was making : I want artist with styles that are different from mine. I want to see how they interpret the characters, especially the manga style. That's what I got from G.L. Gillen, the artist of Squid Ninja. But his style is so round and cute that it seem to be from beyond manga and maybe more from old Warner Brother cartoons.
Next week will be the one by Nathan Birch of Zoology. He just did a pose of Veena herself and he really got the attitude right. Even the clothing is perfect down to the panties animal patterns !

I'll be back with more comments from 2 others after that.

******
You may have noticed that I did a few changes on the Veena webcomic page. By popular demand I added an archive page. So you have one now. You might say it's in beta version cause it's full of bugs. But it'll get you where you want. I've done it in a "summary" style cause unless you are doing a daily humour strip, i think the calandar style is pretty useless. It doesn't tell you anything about what you might want to read. So I hope that adding that will help to read more than just the early strips or the most recent ones.