Inktober spotlight: Nelson Daniel feels the force

The ‘Clue’ artist celebrates Inktober by tackling Star Wars and other pop culture drawings.

October is Inktober, an art challenge where artists from all over the world create a different ink drawing every day of the month. While the official Inktober site provides a list of “prompts” to help inspire artists, many of them choose their own themes.

With many comic artists participating this year — you can find a lot of them on Twitter or Tumblr using the #inktober hashtag, and we’ve been posting a bunch on our own Tumblr — we thought we’d spotlight a few of the “can’t miss” ones we’ve seen so far.

Nelson Daniel is the artist of IDW’s Clue, and has also worked on titles like The Cape, Judge Dredd and Dungeons & Dragons. For Inktober, he started out with several Star Wars pieces, but has since turned to other areas of pop culture, with drawings of the Iron Giant, Gorillaz, Thundercats and The Fifth Element. Check out his Tumblr and Twitter feeds to see more.

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Steven T. Seagle addresses nakedness in new essay collection

Seagle and 19 emerging global cartoonists will “take drawn storytelling into the world of the ‘graphic essay'” with a new collection titled ‘Get Naked.’

Image Comics will publish It’s a Bird writer Steven T. Seagle’s Get Naked, a collection of essays featuring illustrations by a host of artists.

“For most of my life I had massive reservations about getting naked,” Seagle said. “But the more I traveled the world, and found myself in uncomfortable situations, the more it became obvious that the American anxiety of ‘I’m not taking my clothes off in front of anyone else unless it’s to have sex with them’ is unique—and not in a good way—to the US. I started looking into the history of nakedness and thinking about why we’re so uncomfortable with bodies in this country—with me as a lens for that. Comedic essays seemed like the right way to chronicle what I realized, and graphic essays felt like a great new kind of visual challenge for challenging subject matter—nakedness—both physical and emotional.”

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Smash Pages Q&A: Andrew White and Madeleine Witt

The editors of ‘Warmer: A Collection of Comics About Climate Change for the Fearful and Hopeful’ discuss putting together the anthology as well their own stories that appear in the collection.

Andrew White and Madeleine Witt are the editors of the new anthology Warmer: A Collection of Comics About Climate Change for the Fearful and Hopeful, which debuted at SPX last month. A collection featuring 16 stories by 19 creators, the project tries to consider the impact of global climate change from different perspectives. It’s about eco-anxiety, and responding to a world changing around us in very fundamental ways.

The anthology features the work of a number of talented cartoonists including L Nichols, Caitlin Skaalrud and Maggie Umber, as well as stories from Witt and White. The project refuses to be hopeless and yet does not traffic in “feel good” platitudes that suggest “everything will be fine.” I spoke with Witt and White about the project and walking that line in this important book.

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