Mark Marianelli

Perfect Combo!

2012-02-13T21:16:00.000-08:00

Nothing beats a classic!

Perfect!
~ Mark

Chessboard Radio

2012-02-12T20:52:00.000-08:00

Through my good friend Kevin, I got in touch with a guy who's starting a website called Chessboard Radio, an online radio that allows independent musicians an opportunity to upload their songs and be on the air. All songs get airtime, but the number of times they're played depends on listeners' approval ratings. I was asked to create a series of banners for specific music genres using anthropomorphized chess pieces as musicians within that style of music. The genres we agreed upon were Rock, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Pop and Electronica. Here's what I designed:

In addition to these banners, I also created individual chess pieces to be used throughout the site. They're modeled after basic music listeners... My personal favorite is the boombox rook.

While the illustration side of things was fun, I also got to dabble in my other love, flash animation. Smiley Face.

Here's a promotional video I created for the website (for some reason, it reminds me of a late night talk show intro):

So there you have it. Chessboard Radio. While the site is still in development, they have a lot of content live, including a tutorial and registration. Be sure to check them out. Follow Chessboard Radio on Twitter and on be sure to like them on Facebook.

Make Your Move!
~ Mark

Melissa

2012-02-11T15:31:00.000-08:00

I lost one of the most important people in my life Friday.

In 2001, I began my college career. I say career, but anyone who knows me knows that it was just 5 years of goofing off. I didn't know a single person going into UMass Lowell and years of being a dork in Middle/High school had ripped away at any sense of self-esteem I had in me. Needless to say, it was a terrifying time in my life. I remember thinking that I'd need to hook up with some kind of collegiate ministry of some kind, growing up in the church meant that the majority of my social skills were brought out in youth group environments, they tended to be the most accepting.

To clarify, however, I don't see myself as the awkward Christian guy who walks around with his Bible and says annoying things like, "Man, the Lord really spoke to me today" or uses words like "Fellowship". That wasn't me then, that isn't me now. However that same faith is the single most important factor in my life and the only grounds from which I get my strength or truly define myself. I say this because it plays a role later.

I walked out of my dorm room after wondering what groups were at the school, and wouldn't you know, right across the hall there was a flyer taped to the wall for a group called "Abundant Life Christian Fellowship"… Yes, it used the word Fellowship, but I was willing to overlook that. They met on Thursdays and I believe this was a Wed. So I was pretty excited to not have to wait too long to make an appearance and check it out.

Thursday night came, and I walked across the street to Fox Hall where the group met and proceeded to the 6th floor. (at least I think that's what floor it was, doesn't matter really). Upon entering I was immediately cornered by two heavier set guys, Brandon and Earl. Low on confidence, I squeaked out, "Is… Is this the Christian group?", Brandon replied with his arms stretched as if to offer me the world, "This is Abundant Life". I admit, it was a little quirky, but I liked that he distinguished it from being 'just some Christian get-together'. People were pretty quick to greet me, something I look for in any gathering, not cliquey, etc… I had enough of cliques in High School and was pretty much done with that nonsense. The leader of that group was Melissa Chelaris. I remember the first time I met her, she came running over to me to introduce herself. She was the giddiest human being I had ever met, I was a little taken back by it, to be honest.

The night progressed and all went well. We introduced ourselves, had snacks, mingled and the night was over. I went back to my dorm room rather satisfied and looked forward to the following Thursday.

Then next Thursday came. I walked across the street, a little more confident then the last week and again, took the elevator up to the 6th (6th, right? meh, it was 10 years ago) floor and walked into the room. The set up had completely changed. Chairs all around, arranged in a fashion similar to a Sunday Morning church service, people mingling who had now broken off into mini-cliques, and a projector set up. Feeling out of my comfort zone again, I rushed to the nearest person I could identify from the previous week and said hi. It went well, but it wasn't the same, as only a few Q&A's in to the conversation, somebody else interrupted to talk and I was quietly removed from the conversation. I remember just sitting down by myself, fearful that I was about to experience High School allover again. You could say I shut down, but what was really going on was mass amounts of judgement and bitterness running through my brain and I needed to focus my efforts on being pissed.

The group ended and I walked out feeling unseen/unwanted, deciding I was done with that group and wouldn't go back. The thing was, I went into college hoping to reinvent myself, as most unpopular kids do, and Abundant Life was my chance to prove to myself that I had more to offer, that there was something about me that people liked and genuinely wanted to get to know. So when I was butted out of a conversation and then basically ignored afterwards, it was defeat in my head. I assumed there really wasn't anything about me that was memorable or desirable. Seriously, I thought like a teenage girl.

Now, my perception of days and weeks is a little fuzzy at this point, but in the following days, I either received a phone call, or an email or an Instant Message (remember those??) from Melissa, the head of the group. I was ready to brush it off as and obligatory "Thanks for coming to our group!", but that's not at all what it was. Melissa was going to see the movie "O" that night with two other girls from the group and asked me if I wanted to join them.

Let me take a second and explain why this caught my attention. There's a few reasons, the first being that somebody remembered my name, the second being that somebody wanted to do something with me and the third thing being that that something wasn't "come to prayer group!" or "do some Christian volunteer thing next week!"… It was to see a movie that would make my old Pastor shiver. This woman, who was head of a Christian organization invited me to do something… Normal. As friend and not a student, or 'disciple' if you will.

That night was a good time. I still remember thinking, "I just watched a 10 minute long, borderline-rapey, sex scene with my campus minister and wasn't obligated to leave the theater and pretend to be offended!" There's three things about this night which have changed my life tremendously: 1.) I got to get to know three people who would come to be three of my closest friends in life. 2.) My self-esteem took a new direction, and I came to be very comfortable (and even a little proud) in who I am. 3.) My entire perception of Christianity and faith changed. Suddenly being a Christian wasn't about singing old hymns in a building full of old people and the socially inept, nor was it about following a list of things you can't do, like having a drink or seeing a movie that ISN'T rated-G. It wasn't about how often you read your bible or who knew more scripture verses. Most importantly, it wasn't about judgement and condemnation. It was something deeper, something more genuine and something just a little more honest. I could write a whole post on that alone, but let's just sum it up with it's more about relationships and love than it is about rules and judgements. That's another post for another time…

Needless to say, I came back to that group the following Thursday. I came back every single Thursday for the next 4 years unless I was too sick to do otherwise. 12 people from that group are now some of the closest friends I'll ever have, three of them were groomsmen in my wedding. My first drink was with that group and they even inspired a comic book series which helped develop whatever skills I have as an artist. Basically, the person I am now was molded from my experiences and hardships with Abundant Life. That's all thanks to Melissa.

In the years to come, my relationship with Melissa became like that of a brother and sister. She became family to me. She was the first person to include me, the first person to befriend me, and the first person to see past the shyness and awkwardness of a boy with no self-esteem. She never once judged me when I came to her with my stupid problems, or when I whined to her about drama between me and others in the group. She prayed with me, she talked with me and she listened to me. Melissa ALWAYS had time for me, no matter how busy she was.

For a campus minister, she had a good sense of humor. I used to sneak on her computer in her office and change the backgrounds to things like this. She was a good sport… She got me back the following week when she changed my cell phone's language to Spanish. Took me over an hour to change it back… Thank God for bilingual friends! While I'm sure my antics got annoying from time to time, she never made me feel stupid or ever put me down, and I KNOW she forced a laugh here and there when I told a bad joke. It's the kind of person she was. Encouraging. She made you feel good about yourself.

And she was thoughtful. She used to send out newsletters and updates, the snail-mail equivalent to forwards… I hate forwards and certainly had no problem expressing to her that would throw away any mail that wasn't personal. Jokingly of course, but dead serious. The following week I got a letter in the mail from Melissa. I opened it. It was one of her newsletters, but at the top she wrote a little message to me in pen so that it could be personal and I would read the newsletter. It made me smile, and I remember calling her and laughing about it on the phone. Then I threw the newsletter out without reading it. I wish I had saved it, but you never think you'll need to keep little things like that.

You think your friends are immortal. Like, when you say goodbye, they go into some kind of chamber in your mind where they're preserved until your next encounter. My last goodbye to Melissa was last August. After she moved to Virginia, she'd come up once in a great while and I'd meet up with her and grab a coffee, or a group of us would get dinner. She came up last summer and the old Abundant Life crew grabbed dinner together. It was a nice night, but nothing special. It was a regular goodbye, we said our usual:

"Move your butt back to New England!"

"Psh! Why don't YOU move to Virginia!"

"Well, Virginia's boring!"

"K, I love you, bye!"

"Bye!"

I'm not even so sure I remember telling her I love her. And that's the part that hurts the most. I mean, I know we can't end all our talks with everyone we love with, "You're so incredible and here's a list of everything I love about you!", but maybe we should say I love you more.

I say this because I found out last November that Melissa got diagnosed with stomach cancer. I had a feeling I wouldn't see her again, but I thought I'd have time to at least hear her voice on the phone and tell her how important she was to me. I called her immediately after hearing the news, but between treatments, stress and probably a million other people who's lives she touched calling her, I never got through. I sent her a message on Facebook and ended it with "Love ya"… But I didn't want to freak her out with something sentimental and grim. I almost wish I had. She wrote me back with this:

thanks!

as for how i'm doing. i am definitely feeling better then when i was first diagnosed, but it's a long hard road. keep praying. i know that God can heal me and having others pray with me is a powerful thing.

love you, m

This was the last I ever heard from her. I never even wrote back. As it turns out, it wasn't a long road at all. She passed away yesterday. I thought I had more time… But you never know how much time you really have. Few people ever get the chance to say, "I love you. This is why I love you, and this is what you mean to me." If you are saying this, then chances are you're at the side of a hospital bed. In a way, maybe I should be glad I never said those words… I don't think I could stand the thought of seeing her in whatever condition she was in. My last memory of her is a happy one. She was as I always knew her. She was happy, she was smiling and she was truly alive. Because of this, deep down beneath all the hurt, there's the faintest, tinniest smile. I suppose that smile is the last gift she ever gave me.

Because she salvaged what little faith I had then, I believe in God and I believe in a Heaven. So I know she's there, exactly as we all knew her. Sometimes I think God was jealous that we were hogging her and decided he wanted her back. I can't blame Him for that… But it doesn't mean I'm not pissed off at Him for it. This may be the understatement of the year, but I miss her so damn much.

I spoke to three very close friends yesterday whom I haven't spoken with in a long time. As I listened to the voice coming over the phone, I thought… This moment. This conversation. This friendship. Neither would be happening right now were it not for Melissa. It was her group and it was her act of kindness to me that made these friendships happen. I looked over at a scripture verse I had written down for my wife, sticking to the mirror… The book that verse came from would have been meaningless to me were it not for Melissa. I thought about my wife. I thought about the man she fell in love with three years ago. That man is the end result of the friendships and experiences and confidence that came about from his days at Abundant Life. I owe Melissa for that as well.

I put my glass down, said my goodbyes to the person on the other end of the phone (and you better believe I told hat person I loved them), and I closed my eyes, grateful. I may never hear her voice again, but I'll see a piece of her in every aspect of my life. She was just that important to me. I also know that my story is no more unique or special than the hundreds of other people whose lives I know she touched and changed. I'm one of a thousand people whom God blessed through that woman's life. Maybe her job here was finished and God brought her home. Maybe her job isn't finished and her death will speak to thousands of others... Maybe I'll just have to ask her that when I get to Heaven.

So long, friend. I'll see you again someday.

~ Mark

Spida Venom!

2012-02-05T20:53:00.000-08:00

My wife is watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians. All I could think was that I wanted Spiderman to save me, or Venom to... well... eat the Kardashians. So I drew a picture of Spiderman and Venom. Looks like Venom is up to his whacky antics again!

Spiderman, spiderman,
~ Mark

If only...

2012-02-01T23:31:00.001-08:00

Super Mario Brothers 3: Mash Up

2012-01-25T19:55:00.000-08:00

To go against the grain, I was never a huge fan of the Super Smash Brothers games. Not for any reason hailing from a higher horse, but because I simply suck at it... Hard. I can't, however, NOT love the cross-overs going on there. Which is why I think Mario 3 deserves a much needed Mash-Up.

Here's two ideas to get the ball rollin', rollin', rollin', rollin' WHAT!

Eetsa' Meeee!
~ Mark

Son'Uva ACTUAL DEVELOPMENT!!

2012-01-16T00:17:00.000-08:00

Yeah Son'Uva!

It's like an old arch enemy, constantly coming back to mess with my brain. I had all but given up hope of ever getting this game finished due mostly to the fact that my knowledge of any real coding is slim to nothing... Well, at least something about me is slim these days. However, I don't like to think of myself as a quitter and by giving up hope of ever getting this game done, that's pretty much the definition of a quitter. So this weekend, I buckled down and spend hours plotting out the actual logic for allowing a user to control a character using their keyboard. Now, before all you real coders start calling me a n00b, keep in mind that I, well... Am totally a n00b. So don't judge me! The tricky part wasn't so much telling the character to throw a punch when the user clicks "Z", the tricky part was telling the game what to do when the user clicks "Z" at the same time as "UP" and "RIGHT". There's literally an infinite number of multiple keystroke scenarios and every single one nearly popped a brain vessel when I sat down and thought it through. Such a pain!

Yeah, that didn't make a lot of sense (to you OR to me) so I suppose you should just play around with what I was able to pump out this weekend and let your brain numb itself for a few moments. Have fun controlling the dark, mysterious MAITH:

Click it up:

Z, X, C, V, B,
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Missile Toes!

2012-01-05T23:01:00.000-08:00

My wife told me I should draw this... Then I drew it... Then she got grossed out by it.

Fire ONE... Little Piggie!
~ Mark

Code Red Velvet

2012-01-04T22:00:00.000-08:00

The news is pretty much common knowledge at this point, but last week the TSA confiscated a woman's cupcake on the grounds that the frosting was a "safety hazard"... I probably don't need to elaborate much on this, all you have to do is type in "TSA CUPCAKE" on Google and you'll get a billion articles.

My good friend Kevin over at Wolfmantis is friends with the owner of the suicide bombing pastry, Rebecca Hains, and worked with her and a local band to create a little jingle about the cupcake in question titled "Code Red Velvet". Seeing a good opportunity to have a collaboration between Wolfmantis and Six AM Comics, Kevin asked me to create an animation for said jingle... Naturally, I jumped right on board.

The following is the result:

This was the most fun I've had in a while. The animation/jingle was meant to mimic old Sesame Street animations from back in the day. Only we combined that with terrorism and an old game called "Scorched Earth" (iShoot if you have it on an iPhone). Anyway, hope you enjoyed!

Code Red Velvet!
~ Mark

Motion Comics

2012-01-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

I do love me some animatin'! Only thing is, I'm an incredibly lazy human being, and the thought of pursuing any kind of professional animation like Loony Toons or Ren & Stimpy makes me feel lethargic. Luckily for me, there's a whole sub-genre of animation devoted to animating comics, Motion Comics if you will. The first time I had ever heard of this technique was with the series "Broken Saints" back in 2003. Since then, you see this sort of thing done all over iTunes, and it's pretty amazing people didn't do this more back in the day (or maybe they did and I just didn't may attention... because I'm lazy).

Anyway, I figured I'd dabble in this a little by animating two of my favorite Scholars comics from back in my earlier days of illustration. The first was about how Stan seemingly breezed through his educational career by cheating*:

*If you go to sixamcomics and type in the Konami Code, it'll bring you to this video.

The second video is a tale of the greatest "guy moment" ever witnessed in the history of men:

So yeah, there you have it. Watch em', love em', pay me money.

Seriously, pay me.
~ Mark

Wolfmantis

2011-12-29T13:46:00.000-08:00

It's rare that I dabble in logo design, but I suppose anyone who casually calls himself a "Graphic Designer" should have one or two in his portfolio... Which brings me to WOLFMANTIS, a marketing/production company run by fellow SixAMer, Kevin. I played around with a lot of ideas for this one, most of them involved drawing a giant Praying Mantis howling at the moon.... They weren't all that professional looking, however. So I went with a typographical approach which used color and lettering tricks to bust out the following:

And there you have it! The WolfMantis logo!

Yay for me!
~ Mark

Brian Wins! Christmas 11'

2011-12-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

As with every year, I am commissioned by my brother to create a piece of artwork for his Christmas gift... This year, given my recent marriage, he commissioned a husband and wife collaborative art piece for his Christmas gift.

My wife was the brains behind this one and she came up with the brilliant idea to appeal to what we refer to as my brother's "Middle Child Syndrome". The result was a poem written in children's book form about my brother "Winning" at pretty much everything... Below is evidence that marriage can indeed create something beautiful other than children:

In case you haven't figure it out, the characters are mainly my family. Mom, Dad, Brother Matthew, Brother Brian, myself (Brother Mark), my sister-in-law and that last girl would be my lovely wife... swooning over my brother's behind. That was her idea. This makes me nervous.

Brian wins!
~ Mark

Record this!

2011-12-21T11:52:00.000-08:00

Aside from Six AM, there have been a handful of other projects that I've been cranking out...

The biggest of these was for a coworker's wedding. I was asked to create table numbers for her reception... Generally, these kinds of things aren't that exciting, but their idea was too awesome to pass up... They wanted the numbers on actual records, designed to look retro... Here was the end result:

I love me some wedding!
~ Mark

It's been a while... Blame Six AM.

2011-12-19T12:38:00.000-08:00

If you were to skim through this blog over the years, you'd find that there are random lengthy periods of time where I go without posting. Generally it comes from laziness, or a stressful day job, or marriage (that sounds like I've done it more than once), or simply discovering a new game on my iPhone (I'm talking about you, Jetpack Joyride!). This time, however, it comes from doing TOO MUCH work... Something my parents probably thought they'd never hear me... type.

As I mentioned in some earlier posts, my main creative outlet, Six AM Comics, got a kickstart back in August when we started making caricatures of our fans (I say fans, but really I mean my friends) on Facebook. It was a process we like to call "Getting AM-inated" or "Virtual Puberty". This process was incredibly tedious and I'm personally delighted that it's winded down some. I illustrated over 60 of our followers and we inducted them into the East Valley University Class of 11'. East Valley being the fictional New Hampshire hometown where our website's main characters reside. This was done to allow our viewers to feel as though they are a part of the universe we're creating, not just observers. Our goal has always been to establish a sense of community within the site. Thanks to sites like Facebook and Twitter, we can finally accomplish this. We even went as far as to give the University it's own website, complete with undergrad and graduate applications.

But really, the AMination process only took up most of August and September which digressed into weekly competitions with only one victor getting an avatar on Fridays. Which brings me to the next filler of my time over the past few months... The weekly competitions. While they started out simple enough, Kevin would go on Facebook and ask a general question like, "What fictional class would you like to take at EVU?" and we'd proceed to pick the best response... This eventually turned into the creation of actual games our viewers could play online... Created by yours truly using Flash.

If you're familiar with this blog, then you're well aware of a game I've been working on for the past 2 years called "Son'Uva"... While this game still hasn't seem the light of day given its complexity (complex for someone like me who has little to no coding knowledge), I was able to design and create 4 simple flash games which kept our viewers entertained for all but 5 minutes at a time. The first of these was called "Tweet. Aim. Fire." and it was a clone of Duck Hunt where our site's main characters were shooting twitter birds in a field. I also included the easter egg of being able to shoot fellow Six AMer, Dan (known as KAL on the site) out of a nearby tree... If you're interested in playing this game click the screenshot below:

Due to this game's positive response, we quickly put our brains together and cranked out a new game: "Your Clothes. Give Them To Me." It was an incredibly simple game where you had to match the different pieces of various Arnold Schwarzenegger outfits. The faster you made a match the more points you got. In addition, the more obscure the Arnie reference, you were awarded extra points. As we did with the previous game, the person who received the highest score and posted a screenshot of their victory would be AMinated. The idea for this game came from an illustration I made a while back called "The Many Faces of Arnold Schwarzenegger". You can play game by clicking the following screenshot:

Given the simplicity of this previous game, I got "sequelitus" and wanted to bigger. Michael Bay Forever! Around this time, me and my coworkers (my day job) had been playing Rock Paper Scissors like fiends, we had imaginary WWF-style belts and everything. We should have been in some kind of professional league... Which gave me the idea for this gem... PRO ROCK PAPER SCISSORS! At this point, this game is technically still in production, but I had finished enough work on it to release a demo. Like those old Shareware PC games you used to be able to buy at Walmart. For a game based solely on randomness, you'd swear you were using real strategy. That illusion created a pretty darn good time if I do say so myself. The demo version allows you to play as Jason (my cartoon counterpart on Six AM) in one round against a beefed up version of my childhood dog, Leo the Schnauzer. Around this time, I had downloaded "Fruity Loops" for my iPhone and began making my own midi-style music for this game... T'was glorious. Click below and play it!

After the completion of the demo, I got a little burnt out on making flash games and took a break for a while, focusing on other content for the site. i.e. Comics, blogs, etc... That was until I began watching videos on youtube of old Tiger Electronics games. I loved those old games, you can even read about it in one of my old posts. I love the simplicity of those games and thought, "It must not be that hard to make one"... I was terribly wrong, but I wouldn't let that stop me. I spent a few weeks (the other games took days at most) cranking out graphics and throwing up code here and there until I created the following game, based off of a Graphic Novel I'm working on which is based off a student film I helped a friend out with a few years back called "Damascus". Much like the games of Tiger, this game has little to do with the actual plot of the thing it's based off of, but it carries with it a brand. And that's all that matters, right? Click. Play. Love.

But games don't necessarily end with Flash. We created a number of other ways for our viewers to interact with us and be entertained. When I wasn't creating video games, I was making Highlights-style puzzles. The first of these was the following:

At least six differences... But there were more, mainly because I'm not talented enough to draw the exact same things twice. Winky Face. Six AMer, Kevin (known as Stan on the site) came up with Horror Movie Hangman, where he used famous horror film phrases combined with my own illustrations to create a fun game on Facebook for our fans:

What else, what else... Oh! The website's homepage header changes every month to let our viewers know we give a dern. The following are the headers I illustrated for the site:

There's a lot more headers on the site, but you'll just have to go there to see them. Anyway, there's a number of other illustrative work I've been doing for Six AM. We rebooted "Scholars", designed "Desktops" and also created a number of promotional images for other websites who have helped support us since our start. So needless to say, it's been a busy few months and I don't see it letting up until we're rich, famous, and phoning this stuff in!

So yeah, that's what's been up.
~ Mark

X-Men Doodle

2011-11-28T22:28:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted in ages... It was time to draw the X-Men.

Uncanny!
~ Mark

Me... Wrestling a Bear.

2011-09-13T22:55:00.000-07:00

Oh, Google... You know me too well.

2011-09-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

Sonuva! More Defeated Animations

2011-09-12T11:14:00.000-07:00

I swear, this game will be finished someday!! Realizing that I have yet again gone on a Son'Uva hiatus, I busted out the Wacom this weekend and did some quick work on my precious. Despite being nothing all that interested, I have completed a handful more defeated animations for three of the fighters: Son'Uva, Nark and Gazael. By "defeated", I'm referring to that glorious Mortal Kombat moment where the announcer yells out, "FINISH HIM!"... Rather than making the fighters look all wobbly like in the MK games, I've just made them look like they just got the crap kicked out them... Which is kind of what happens, right?

Anyway, click the image below for a look-see.

At least something's getting finished...
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

BigNate84

2011-09-06T08:20:00.000-07:00

A buddy of mine who goes by the name BigNate84 has begun a series of web videos called "How To"... Which are probably the most informative and helpful videos out there if you're looking to learn all kinds of random yet incredibly useful tricks of the trade.

He asked me to work on a logo and cartoon depiction of his How To persona, so I complied and here is the end result...

So majestic,
~ Mark

The Sharpshooters

2011-08-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

A coworker of mine indulges in the delights of Fantasy Football... Honestly, it's not my cup-o-tea, but I happen to be a huge fan of "The League", so I gots nothin' but love for the non-sport. In any case, I was commissioned to make a logo for his team, "The Sharpshooters" and naturally, I accepted.

Why the "Sharpshooters"? Two words... Bret. Hart. Anyone who knows me, knows I am an avid lover of 80's/early 90's WWF... That's right, W. W. F. Not WWE and not that stupid Panda organization that nobody cares about... I'm talkin' old school World Wrestling Federation, gosh dangit! ... But that's a tangent for another day. Bret Hart's signature move is the Sharpshooter... A devastating submission hold that few men ever escape.

So in honor of his royal Hartness, I designed the following logo for... The Sharpshooters!

The best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be,
~ Mark

East Valley University Class of 11'

2011-08-17T07:03:00.000-07:00

So as I mentioned in a recent post, Six AM Comics has been Six Am-ing the first 40 people to "like" the page. I gave a taste of some of the cartoon avatars, but now you can see all of them in completion! Only took me 2 weeks to do it... And my wrist is killing me. Click the image below to see the first class of East Valley University!

If you'd like to see each character individually or if you'd like a chance to go through virtual puberty yourself, go on over to our Facebook Page and "Like" us. Every week we'll be giving opportunities to get your own cartoon avatar. And be on the lookout this September for the relaunch of our website.

Aight, go on, git!
~ Mark

Dreams...

2011-08-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

Had the weirdest dream last night. It started out fairly normal… And by normal, I mean normal by odd dream standards.

I'm at work and for some reason the whole office decides, "We're gonna work from Mark's home today.", which in the dream I'm like, "Awesome!", till' I realize that my wife and I (in the dream) are living with my parents… While my entire office is at my folks, I forget that I have company and take my laptop into the bathroom (which is something I typically do… Yeah, next time you're reading my blog I want you to think, "Was Mark bottomless when he wrote this?". Anyway, so I'm on my way to the bathroom and I completely get into a 'home' comfort level and leave the door wide open. I'm on my laptop, taking a dump, typing away, work people ALL OVER my parent's house. While I'm on my laptop, I go to "smodcast.com", a podcast featuring Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier which I usually listen to while I'm drawing or doing whatever. I notice that this particular Smodcast is happening LIVE. Excitedly, I pick up my phone and call in (this is not something you can do on Smodcast in real life, but it would be awesome if you could).

So I call in and Kevin Smith and Scott answer. Immediately we're all talking LIVE on smodcast and they ask me, "If you could drive any car in the world, what would you drive?" to which I answer, "I'd ride around in a Death Star with a bumper sticker that reads "Support Our Troopers" with a Storm Trooper Helmet drawn on it.

I get a reaction of laughter and Kevin Smith goes, "Okay, Mark, we're going to do a little role-playing, you ready? I'm going to be Luke Skywalker landing on the Swamp Planet of Degoba, you're going to be Yoda, cool?" I'm like, "Heck yes, let's do this!"

… The conversation ends up going something like this:

Kevin: "Yoda! I've come to learn about the force!"

Me: "Hey."

Kevin: "That's… That's not really a Yoda voice, Mark…"

Mark: "What, just because I'm old, shriveled and green I have to talk like a frickin' senile old man with a stroke?"

Kevin: "Well, I…"

Mark: "Let me tell you something, Luke, I'm 300 years old, you think I never picked up a frickin' Dictionary and learned to speak something a little better than broken pig-latin? Here, I'll throw you a bone. Kiss my little green force-bits you must. How's that for some classic Yoda talk! You see that hut over there?"

Kevin: "Yeah man, it's nice…"

Mark: "Screw you, no it's not, it's frickin' HUT. But I'm rockin' High-Speed Internet Wi-Fi in there, son! You think I never googled, "Learn to Speak English I Must"? What've you got on that crappy little X-Wing there? 3G?"

Kevin: "Well…"

Mark: "CHK-CHK!"

Kevin: "Did you just pull out a shotgun??"

Mark: "You bet your desert-dwellin' ars I did. Let me tell you something, THIS is the weapon of a Jedi."

Kevin: "But Obi-Wan told me a lightsaber is the weapon of a Jedi-"

Mark: "Eff Obi-Wan! He still listens to Vinyl records because to him they 'sound better'… Those things came out 'a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away', they sound like crap. We've got High Quality MP3's with surround sound now. Let me tell you something, I shoot at you with this shotgun, you bust out your crappy little lightsaber, you'r gonna block maybe 5 of my spray of bullets, about 50 more of those are blastin' through your grill. Do you know why I use a shotgun and not a laser? Because every time I shoot a laser at a Sith Lord, he deflects it with his lightsaber and that sh* ricochets back at me and blows a hole right through my crappy plastic storm-trooper armor. A lightsabers simply going to MELT bullets, i.e., I don't die by my own gun. You know what I like to do?

Kevin: "… I don't know that I want to…"

Mark: "I like to carry TWO shotguns. I aim one at a Dark Lord's head, the other at his balls and fire both a the same time… 9 times outta' 10 they block the balls. Guess they're not THAT stupid. Psh! Lightsabers. Let me tell you how generic those things are… I'll bet you're still using a Samsung Impression."

Kevin: "It's a Palm Pre…"

Mark: "You see this? It's an iPhone 500. This thing has a 99 cent APP for lightsabers, civilized weapon. More like 'house-trained'. See this? iForce APP, I touch this screen, I can make your pants fall off. If there were some friggin' women on this stupid planet I'd have a field day. Make sure you thank your stupid Dad, Vader for that.

Kevin: "Vader's my father??"

Mark: "Psh, I'm your Daddy, bee-yotch." *Fires shotgun in the air* "Yoda, son! Wha-whaaat!"

Pretty elaborate for a dream, right? Yeah, I know… I actually made a point to write that down THE SECOND I woke up so I wouldn't forget it. From here, I get off the phone with Smodcast LIVE and notice all my coworkers are looking at me oddly and I realize I've just been sitting on the toilet taking a dump for the past hour having a Star Wars conversation with a Kevin Smith hotline with the door open in front of my entire workplace… And I feel slightly embarrassed.

The dream now cuts to me walking around my parent's old neighborhood when I look into the horizon and see a gang of bikers coming straight for me with chains, knives and other weapons. I freak the HECK out and book it home. I run inside my parents' house just as the bikes are pulling up to my lawn and lock the doors. I then run up to the kitchen where my mom is and I pull out a knife to protect us. Just then there's a knock on the door. I look out the window and it's the entire biker gang on the lawn. They look up at me through the window and proceed to take off their biker gear to reveal… Get this… KFC uniforms and go, "You've been duped by the KFC surprise coupon giveaway!! So I walk outside and they give me a coupon for $1 off a large soda at KFC and drive off.

It's now that I look across the street and see that Kevin Smith, his wife Jennifer and Scott Mosier are buying a house… So I run over there to say hi. Kevin instantly recognizes me (which is weird because we'd only talked on the phone at this point) and is like, "Hey man! Look, don't tell the realtor who I am, this is a college frat house and you can only buy it if you're a student. But my wife loves it so I'm telling them I'm still in school, okay?"… So I agree and ask him if he wants my KFC coupon, to which he goes, "Heck yeah, I could use a soda"… I then walk out the front door of the house when Kevin's wife Jennifer comes out and goes, "Um… Take care." And pats me on the back awkwardly… I then notice Scott Mosier walking around the driveway of the house and go, "Hey, do you know me?"… He turns around, looks at me and goes, "Yeah, you're on my radar."

… Then I wake up.

…

Wow,
~ Mark

Six AM... What's been up!

2011-08-09T10:09:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged in a couple of days... This is truly saddening and WRONG!

I haven't exactly been in a creative lapse, however, and there is fruit to show for my labors. Me and the fella's at Six AM Comics have been working on a massive reboot of the website which we'll be reveling in September... We're going at this site with a new vision and a more productive process. Our marketing mastermind, Kevin, has been hard at work developing advertisements and viral campaigns to bring a new life to Six AM.

We've launched a Facebook group and have been updating our Twitter account daily to get people as excited about the relaunch as we are. The first 40 members of the page are being given their own cartoon avatars... Once we reach 100, we'll be unlocking something new for people to check out.... Below are a few of the avatars we've created...

So give us some support and "Like" us over at Facebook and be on the lookout for the re-launching of the website in September!

Pinch yourself, it's Six AM.
~ Mark

My Delovely Sleepy Wife

2011-08-03T21:41:00.000-07:00

Typically, most mornings I'm up before my wife... My favorite part of said morning is the moment when I hear a high-pitched grunt come from the bedroom followed by the sounds of a creaky bed as sheets are thrown this way and that... No, there's not someone in the bedroom with my wife, those sounds are the terrifying yet incredibly adorable actions of a very groggy woman. Once the sounds subside, I hear some very heavy footsteps moving in the direction of the kitchen, where I'm usually checking my email or working on an illustration. I generally don't look up when I hear these footsteps, but ultimately they stop and I feel a chilling stare coming from the other side of the kitchen. I look up and I see the prettiest zombie you'll ever know. My cranky woman. Hair allover the place, sleeping wrinkles on the side of her face and eyebrows lowered in the fashion of an upset child.

I light up and immediately say (in the most annoying lovey-dovey voice you'll ever tolerate) "Good morning babies!"... Her response? I'm still trying to decipher it, but it sounds something like this: "BuzhuZzz"... Not sure if she's a giant bee or a back massager with a dying battery. From here she stumbles around the kitchen, barely maintaining balance, and attempts to make herself some cereal while pausing every now and then to give me a dirty look.

Then she finds the cat.

Our cat, Baxter, is a tortured soul of a feline. We get our kicks out of making him very upset... Rachael more than I. She will usually try and pick the cat up, but she's so tired she can't balance between snuggle, squeeze and crush. Then the cat gets mad and bites her. I then approach this woman who provides me so much morning entertainment and do the same thing to her that she does to the cat.

Then she bites me.

I love my marriage:)
~ Mark

P.S. - She is going to kill me for this illustration.

Video Game Tribute #19 - Commander Keen

2011-08-02T21:03:00.000-07:00

There was a time when side-scrollers were king and PC reigned supreme over consoles such as SNES, Genesis and Turbo Graphics 16. Ironically, not many side-scrollers thrived in the PC kingdom. Titles such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario World were still the masters of their trade... Fortunately there was a company known as "id Software" which was on the up and up and they were determined to bring Side-Scrollers to the seductive ways of MS DOS. Their crowning achievement? Commander Keen.

Now was Commander Keen the greatest thing since the World Wide Web? Of course not. And odds are, most people don't remember this game (because unlike myself, most kids around that time had a Super Nintendo and were rocking Super Mario World while I was stuck with Mind Sweeper). But for the PC-gamers of the time, this game satisfied the basic side-scroller needs: Easy controls, challenging yet simple gameplay, cartoony graphics and a storyline just vague enough to keep you from questioning its validity... What was this storyline you ask? Well I'll tell you... It stars Billy Blaze, a boy-genius who has built a spaceship. When his parents go to sleep at night he hops in his spaceship, throws on a football helmet and becomes COMMANDER KEEN. Keen uses a pogo-stick to jump higher than normal (which I find odd considering the kid built a freaking spaceship... He can't make rocket boots??) as well as an Alien Ray Gun in earlier episodes of the game. Later episodes he gets a little more kid-friendly and uses a "Stunner" which knocks his enemies unconscious... He is a kid after all, this ain't Wolfenstein 3D! Interesting note however, Commander Keen is apparently the grandson of B.J. Blazkowicz, the protagonist of the Wolfenstein games.

What I can't seem to stop thinking, though, is that Billy Blaze (Keen) might be a little crazy in the head... Typically with plots like this, it turns out the kid is daydreaming or playing make-believe. To further this concept, there's an episode of the Commander Keen series titled "Keen Dreams" where Keen is sent to bed for not eating hid Veggies and ends up dreaming that he's trapped in some kind of vegetable kingdom where he has to use "flower power" (Copyright Infringement? Anyone? Mario?) to defeat his enemies and get home, blah, blah, the kid's a whack job! Why was this adventure in his head and not the others? Was this somehow less believable than a kid with a 314 IQ building spaceships and fighting aliens?? My theory? He wears that helmet because he suffers from mild retardation. As a matter of fact, I'd say everybody needs to go to Borders before they all close down and buy a copy of "I AM THE CHEESE" by Robert Cormier. Read that book and just TRY and tell me that Commander Keen isn't in some insane asylum riding a bicycle in circles and blasting aliens in his head.

He is the Keen,
~ Mark

Video Game Tribute #18 - Rise of the Triad

2011-08-01T23:45:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've conTRIBUTEd to the video game world I love so much... This time I've taken one of the more obscure titles from the First Person Shooter boom of the mid-90's. In actuality, I'm not entirely sure that era of gaming existed, but I seem to remember there being A LOT of DOOM/Wolfenstein clones coming out around that time. Heretic, Goldeneye, Quake, Blake Stone, Duke Nukem, etc... But one particular game sticks out in my mind: Rise of the Triad.

I still remember the day I bought this game. I was at Walmart with my mom. Now, this was 1995 and computer gaming was a much more exciting genre than console gaming. When you went to a gaming department, it was typically split up into two sections for PC games: Full and Shareware. Basically you had the nicely packaged, highly expensive games and then you had the demo versions of those games for far cheaper. I personally enjoyed these more, especially because they took up less space on my computer hard-drive... Which was typically low due to the high amounts of MS Paintbrush files I was constantly creating (ah, the young graphic designer that I was). In any case, there I was, glancing at the games when I saw the shareware package of a game titled Rise of the Triad... I remember the woman on the cover. She wore a tight leather outfit, unzipped just low enough to peak an adolescent's interest, but just conservative enough to slip under the radar of a mother trying to frantically get her shopping finished. Naturally this inclined me to pick up the case and take a look at the screenshots... Keep in mind, I LOVED First Person Shooters. I had played through DOOM and Wolfenstein about 100 times at this point and I was aching for some fresh carnage. Not only did it fill the FPS void, it was also shareware-cheap, so dearest mumzy was sure to buy it for me!

Now, not to say this game was any more playable than the others... In retrospect, the controls were difficult and the graphics were nothing new... But what made this game memorable for me was the initiation of the GIB. I'm still unclear what the letters stand for (or if it's an acronym for anything specific), but in a nutshell, gibs are digitalized people fragments... I.e. guts that go flying in every direction when you obliterate your opponent with a bazooka. At this point, I had seen blood in video games... Mortal Kombat, Doom, etc... But oh man, I still remember the first time a bad guy in this game got crushed under a moving platform... I was at a distance and I could see the little red pixels go spattering in all directions, but milliseconds later a FREAKING EYEBALL practically landed in my character's lap! I had never seen gore like that in an FPS. The enemies typically bled out and died in a red puddle... But now they were literally exploding all over the map! It was pure insanity! Eyeballs, limbs, guts, there was no body part which was safe... It was digital carnage. I must have played that first level a thousand times (after all, it was shareware, you only got like, 3 levels tops) and still wasn't tired of seeing people's retinas smashing against my screen.

Given today's generation of video games, this sort of thing probably doesn't sound that impressive or shocking... But this was a time when the ESRB was just forming, gaming was a lot more innocent... Heck, Duke Nukem 3D hadn't even been developed yet. So imagine going from playing Commander Keen a year earlier to having a corpse literally explode in your face... Not to mention that 3D environment made you feel like you were actually the one making people stew with your rocket launcher... Instant. Desensitization. And just to make the game a little more disturbing, the final level (of the registered full version, which I didn't play for at least another 3 or 4 years) had you running through secret passages and destroying baby fetus clones of the final boss... Who, by the way, becomes a giant floating head which, to this day, still wakes me up in a cold sweat from haunting my dreams.

So if you can get a hold on a classic that may or may not run on your fancy new PC, I'd suggest hunting this one down. It's worth the trip down the blood-stained roads of memory lane.

Ludicrous Gibs!
~ Mark

Redo!

2011-08-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

A few months back I drew what ever kid thought of growing up when they heard the term "Sabertooth Tiger"... I didn't have a lot of free time this weekend to make anything all that original, so I re-did this drawing in a simpler fashion... So yeah. Take that.

Maybe I'll make a tshirt for this one,
~ Mark

Six AM Comic #6

2011-07-28T20:39:00.000-07:00

Deep in the treacherous jungle of the Derry, NH power-line fields lies... ADVENTURE!!

Press on!
~ Mark

SIM Bing

2011-07-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

Is it just me, or does using Bing Maps Bird's Eye View make you feel like you're playing a REALLY boring game of Sim City?

Just a thought,
~ Mark

Angelic Interpretation Part II

2011-07-26T22:59:00.000-07:00

A long while back I posted a sketch I made interpreting my thought process about Angels and their appearances. This was another sketch from that same series which I finally was able to dig up and re-colorize. It's a Seraphim... An Angel with 6 wings. One pair to fly with and two pairs to cover their face and feet in the presence of God.

Again, my thought process regarding Angelic beings has been that they look absolutely NOTHING like anything we've imagined or illustrated over the years. A being which exists outside of our reality can't possibly resemble anything we can comprehend, so I tried to break myself from the norm of how we think we see things... It was a really fun experiment... Below is what I came up with:

It seems whenever my imagination runs wild, the images I create lean more on the disturbing side of the illustrative spectrum... I imagine you'd scream too if you were in the presence of God... No? Yes?

My eyes!
~ Mark

iLife?

2011-07-26T01:22:00.000-07:00

... Sometimes I wonder where my head is at this late at night... Here's what I think of whenever Apple mentions iLife...

Nano!
~ Mark

Six AM Comic #5

2011-07-25T15:54:00.000-07:00

I didn't get a chance to post this earlier today, but here it is for all you evening folk!

This comic plays on my improvisational skills when we were younger... I.e., I had no improvisational skills, I just threw punches a la Michael Scott always pulling out a fake gun during his improv class...

Improv!
~ Mark

Six AM "the comic" ... A redo.

2011-07-22T00:03:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I posted a comic about the naming of Refrigerator Man... Well, we at Six AM felt it needed some additional panels to make it more clear to the reader what's going on... The following is the updated comic. Hope you enjoy!

Half Robot,

~ Mark

Six AM "the comic" ... #4

2011-07-20T23:18:00.000-07:00

More Six AM Comics! Finally living up to the website's name...

This comic was written by Dan... And it's golden. Really this is a combination of a couple of our sad attempts to make an epic film at 2 in the morning while my parents were sleeping... Bad quality cameras, low volume... And of course, stupid costumes that we would never wear in public during daylight.

Hope you enjoy!

Demon Hunters care not!
~ Mark

Six AM "the comic" ... #3

2011-07-20T05:49:00.000-07:00

Always busy... Busy, busy, busy... This little ditty came from Kevin yesterday. Now, in reality, Dan and Kevin never tied me down and dropped a giant spider on me, but the toy thing was definitely a theme in the majority of our videos... Toys coming to life, battling each other, battling us... Man vs Machine I believe is the theme, correct?

Truth be told, if this had ever REALLY happened, Six AM would have never become a reality... Because as soon as I recovered from my spider wounds (preferably radioactive wounds which enable men to stick to walls and attract red-heads) I would have sworn these two schmoes off for life. I. HATE. SPIDERS.

...

Not to mention I would have pee'd myself on camera. How shameful.

I also have to admit that the second panel in this comic looked WAY cooler at one point, with slight sepia tones, film grains and more on-screen iconography... But I saved over it with panel three at about 2 in the morning and was too tired and/or peeved to go back and make it that awesome again. That being said, if you're reading this, ADOBE, make it so I can revert to a previous save point! GOOD. LORD.

Okay, hope you enjoy. Visit http://www.6amcomics.com for more about these comics and what we be alls about up in this piece!

Just go wid'it,
~ Mark

Six AM "the comic" #1

2011-07-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

To keep with the "Six AM" kick I've been on, here's a comic which Dan and Kevin are working hard on writing/concepting. It's basically a comic about the three of us and our experiences as we created the infamous Six AM Comics... The following is the first of hopefully many. Enjoy!

Clicky...

Whatchu'thank?
~ Mark

Zombie Quotes

2011-07-17T19:54:00.000-07:00

In recent light of all the Refrigerator Man work that's been going on, Kevin and I were brainstorming about one particular character who has a role in the potential comic... This character comes in many forms, but the core of his essence is the Undead... He's a Zombie. Or her? The nature of the zombie lead us to think about various catch zombie catch-phrases depending on a zombie's situation... Here's a few to kick start the discussion!

Brains for hire,
~ Mark

Homeless Zombie

- "Spare some brains?"
- "Noms for the poor? nom, nom, nom..."
- "Cardboard sign: 'No family to eat'."
- "Another sign: 'Won't eat for work'."

80's Zombie

- "Where's the brains??"

- "Bite you"

- "People-Juice, People-Juice, People-Juice!"

- "Da Brain, boss, Da Brain!"

Game-Show Host Zombie

- "Let's eat our next contestant."

- "Big Brains, no Whammies!"

- "I'd like to bite a vowel!"

- "Are you hearty as a fifth grader?

Adventure Has No Expiration Date

2011-07-14T21:57:00.000-07:00

Cryptic Love Part III

2011-07-14T20:26:00.000-07:00

Here's a little more Cryptic Love for ya'... These are starting to get incredibly hard to find... I did a "View Friendship" with like, 30 of my friends and the list read something like this:

March 10th, 2009 - Happy Birfday' cracka!

March 10th, 2010 - HEY! It's your birthday! Eat more cake you fat horse!

March 10th, 2011 - Have fun celebrating the day your mother laid eyes on the fruits of her... Labor?

As you can see, my loyalty on the social network knows no bounds...

Anyway, here's what I was able to scrap up. These are odd. Also, AIDs seems to come up a lot in my history, this is like, the third time it's come up... Yikes.

-commence-

- <--- is smiling at you because it's mating season.

- I guess a little pedophilia never hurt anyone...

- You're kidding me. There's an entire DAY devoted to that awful color??

- Live quartz.......i know, I'm pretty sick at photo stuff

- Yeah, I was watching you think about me...

- Be brave my friend... don't make love to any strange typewriters...

- That wasn't a webcam at all!

- Dead Huskies… On steroids.

- I'm artistic.....in a Strawberry Shortcake type of way :(

- A Nun accidentally backs her car over a clown holding a baby seal in one hand and glass jar of penicillin for his dying crippled son in the other..............saddest face.....

- Hilary's stubble is great for backs and paint stripping!

- LOL! Eat what? A heaping bowl of your AIDS??

- Yotch reminds me of crotch.

- Gee man, you're really good at spotting phallus. You should switch careers.

- You got a pee pee in yo mouf!

- Our 2 peanut-butter-loving butts?

- Ha, you mean her Tuesday spanking...

- It's like super rug burn.

- Does this mean that I have to call you Pappy?

- It is if you have a winky!!

- Looks like he's spreading his Christmas spirit all over those parking garage walls...

-end-

The Chronicles of Refrigerator Man... teaser?

2011-07-12T19:21:00.000-07:00

Seriously... This is happening!

Sooner or later,
~ Mark

So... Bored...

2011-07-12T08:14:00.001-07:00

SIX AM COMICS

2011-07-11T23:17:00.000-07:00

The year is 1993. I'm sitting in 5th grade math class and my mind is wandering a mile a minute. Next to me is my good friend, Chris. We've been buddies since the first grade and both shared an equal lack of interest in mathematics. On the other side of the desk arrangements is a boy named Kevin, who looks almost as though he's paying attention to the garble of numbers getting slapped on the projector's transparencies by Ms. Remmick. I think that's how you spelled her name. You'd think I'd remember the name of the teacher who gave me my first "D" on a report card… But then, I never cared much for useless details like spelling… Probably why I got the "D" in the first place. But what does spelling have to do with Math anyway? Can anyone really spell arithmetic of the top of their head? I'm distracted again… Just like I was that day in class. Which is why I didn't pay attention to the problems on the board, which is why I was utterly screwed in t-minus 5 minutes when she would assign a pop quiz which would ultimately begin my downward spiral into academic mediocrity.

Chris and I are more interested in the cartoons I'm doodling in my notebook than we are anything else in the classroom. I imagine that's what caught Kevin's interest that day… But really, it was 18 years ago and like I said earlier, details bore me. Kevin has glasses. I do to, so I guess that means we share an equal bond. Thing is, I assume that his glasses combined with the fact he's supposedly paying attention in class equals a smart kid. Chris and I have the same thought process obviously because we both immediately form a friendly status with Kevin as the quizzes are being passed out. Do we care what kind of kid Kevin is? Not really, he's smart and he's nice, so odds are we'll be able to sneak some answers off of the sucker. The quizzes come around and we begin to furiously copy every number he jots down on his paper. We are so getting "A's" today. As it turns out, Kevin wasn't paying attention to Ms. Whatshername, he's daydreaming like a fiend. His eyes were as much following the numbers on the wall as they were experiencing Rapid Eye Movement. We all fail the quiz and I begin my journey to UMass-Lowell.

Thing is, that day I wasn't mad at Kevin for screwing us over… I was happy to discover that this nerdy kid in class was on the same wavelength as me… While my buddy Chris was a good guy, when it came to recess, he was all about football, and all I really wanted to do was pretend I was a werewolf. Wouldn't you know Kevin wanted to be a werewolf too and looked to me as a tutor in the ways of wolf-dom. That brotherhood of the wolf evolved into a wonderful friendship. See, when I cheated off of Kevin in class, I was aiming to get a couple of correct answers on a subject I was destined to fail at my entire life, and in turn I got something far more valuable than a one-time good grade… I gained a very important friendship which would last a lifetime. Time progressed from 5th grade and before you knew it, we were going on adventures in the woods, having sleepovers with scary movies and diet caffeine-free coca-cola, and most important of all, we were drawing pictures together in the backyard listening to KISS 108 FM (Mr. Boombastic was our song of choice when it came on).

Why was this most important? I'll tell you why. As we drew our silly pictures and went on our silly adventures in the woods, we evolved a rapidly budding creativity in our brains. A creativity which would mold our careers… Mold our lives. Being creative is hard when you're on your own. It helps to have a friend who allows you to expand on your own thoughts, who shares similar interests and lets you explore that part of your brain.

Middle School soon came… And boy were we the epitome of dorkiness. Unpopular, unfashionable, uncool. Which I'm grateful for to this day. While most kids were off ruining their lives in the name of popularity, we were just being ourselves. Joking around, drawing pictures and being kids. We soon met a whole group of people who were similarly outcasted from popularity. Funny thing is, at lunch time, we had the largest table in the cafeteria. We lived as kings at lunch time. Now this might seem unimportant, but it served a purpose. We had to stick together in Middle School, it was a jungle. There is nothing more cruel than a Middle Schooler. Kids are bullies, troublemakers… Douche-bags to put it lightly. Popularity is everything. If you don't have the right haircut, you get picked on. If you have braces, you get picked on. If you don't wear the right cloths, you get picked on. Girls laugh at you, guys throw things at you and teachers ignore it all. The more you get hassled, the more you sink into your own mind and become even more outcasted, more quiet. Kids go into Middle School with hope and good nature… They leave defeated and damaged. This is why our close-knit group of outcasts was so important. We were a reminder to each other that we were okay… That we were normal. Despite the fact that we were odd to the rest of the world (i.e. Middle School).

It was this situation which led Kevin and I to create our first creative venture… "Oddballs". It was our feeble attempt at a comic book. Kevin was the main artist in this endeavor. The comic starred our Middle School posse as a bunch of outcast kids with very exaggerated personalities who would find themselves in stupid little adventures… Oddballs: In Space, Oddballs: Stranded, etc… It was a stupid little comic, but it was our escape from normal life… And we had a blast working on it.

I'm going to skip forward a few years to High School. I'm still a big dork with dorky friends. I'm in Youth Group at my church and my good friend Edgell and I are sitting up front during a service. It's break time, time to mingle! Our Youth Leader, Dave, encourages us to meet visitors to the group and make them feel welcomed. See, while I was the lowest of the lows in High School, I was the most average of the averages in Youth Group. So Edgell and I take it upon ourselves to greet the new guy in the back… A chubby little guy wearing flannel named Dan. I've seen him around church, I know he's a normal guy… But I had never taken the time to get to know him. We start to talk to Dan, who turns out to not be as shy as we think he is… He's actually very easy to talk to… And he's freaking HILARIOUS. Dan and I began to hang out more… See, I was drawn to his deadpan sense of humor, I'd never known anyone to keep such a straight face while saying some of the most absurd things I'd ever heard… I began to learn more about Dan. When we first met, I thought that we couldn't be any more different… In the end, I discovered that we couldn't be any more alike. Maybe that's an insult to Dan, but I'm honestly quite flattered.

I soon discovered, that like me, Dan had a passion for drawing… And he was GOOD. I quickly discovered that I was actually… quite bad. I mean horridly bad… So bad that I was on the verge of going home and slapping my parents for encouraging my efforts at art. HE WAS SO GOOD! To this day, my own art style is the bastard child of his talent and stylization. He actually taught me a very valuable lesson in art… Less is more. Daniel, you are legend to me. I hope you know that.

But I digress… Dan and I shared a similar friendship to that of me and Kevin… Sleepovers, movies, sporadic goofiness that only he and myself found amusing at the time… But we differed artistically. He was on a whole different level, and quite frankly, I didn't want to draw around him out of embarrassment. So we exercised our creativity together in different ways… Typically it was through conversation, role-playing stupid scenarios, joking around, etc… But we discovered a far more amusing way to have fun… My dad's video camera. I'll never forget that fateful Saturday morning when we busted out that old camera, grabbed a few plastic swords and filmed the most embarrassing film ever created… It was titled: "Dan vs. Queenie"… Oh sweet Buddha it was bad. Another way I differed from Dan was that he was an improvisational master. I, on the other hand, did not fair too well in front of the camera… But that video, horrid as it was, turned out to be the cornerstone of our friendship. Almost every weekend he'd come over and we'd bust out the camera and film ourselves doing stupid things… We'd film First Person Shooters, movies about toys coming to life and attacking us, people with vacuums for heads, you name it, we embarrassed ourselves with it. We soon got to a point where we couldn't satisfy our scripting needs with just a cameraman and an actor… We needed a cameraman and TWO actors! This of course led to that unholy merger of friendships…

I brought Kevin over to meet Dan.

It was glorious. They clicked instantly. It was movie magic as they played off of each other, improved some of the most bizarre scenarios and weaved their two very distinct styles of humor into GOLD.

What was golden, though, wasn't the films we were making… They were crap; Inside jokes that only we will ever really find amusing. What was golden was our chemistry. We were an unstoppable triad of creativity. But I need to be honest… I've always felt myself a third wheel in the group. Having little humor to contribute, I usually resorted to fake fist-fights when I was put on the spot… Or poop jokes. I typically go back and watch those videos and forward through my parts, cringing the whole time. I've always wondered why they didn't just hang out without me and film their own videos. Though that's probably because they didn't have a camera. What I'm getting at is that my friendship with those two has always been a great honor, a privilege. I wasn't as creative, or as talented as either of them, but they kept me around, included me, laughed at my stupid jokes and let me throw my fake punches on camera and never rubbed my nose in the bad humor… But I'm getting sidetracked.

The year is now 199… 9? 2000 maybe? And it's a defining moment in our lives (or maybe just my life?). The camera is out, we're striving for ideas, we don't know what to film. I do what I always do when I'm low on creativity: I point the camera at Dan and yell, "Action!". Dan's brain kicks into gear and these words come out of his mouth: "Today we'll be interviewing a man who lives in a fridge and hates cats"… And he proceeds to open the basement refrigerator and walk in. We run outside to the pool, which was the location of another refrigerator. I turn the camera on. Dan walks out of that fridge and walks over to Kevin, who is now sitting in a poolside recliner with a long black wig on and a pair of thick woman's sunglasses, complete with a white Hawaiian shirt. Dan walks over and begins to interview Kevin, who beings to act out an eccentric, awkward yet lovable character who allows Dan to interview him in his "Refrigerator Abode". They talk about a Barbara Walters interview which went sour and ruined the Refrigerator Man's life… It becomes a 10 minute long improvisational masterpiece climaxing with a chase scene between the reporter and the Fridge-Man traveling through common household appliances and ending with the fugitive popping out of an occupied toilet and being chased out of the house by the occupier. I couldn't pull this kind of stuff out of my butt if I tried!

This film led to two sequels, transforming the Refrigerator Man into a murderer (Scream was all the rage during this time period) and the reporter into a determined cop. We put MAJOR effort into this film. We even got our hands on some primitive video-editing software and made this thing pure HOLLYWOOD. Our process was to start on a Friday afternoon, load ourselves up on sugar, and edit that sucker through the wee hours of the morning… Finishing when our bodies could no longer sustain themselves and we'd collapse in a pile of "Tasty-Cakes" wrappers and empty soda cans. The time of completion? Six AM. This time would become a legendary hour… We named our little production team "Six AM Productions". We produced one complete "Refrigerator Man" film just before we parted ways and went off to college. The summer of our college freshman years, we reunited and fine-tuned that film, adding a new intro and filming a trailer/music video and a blooper reel. It was our last hurrah before a long hiatus as we went our separate ways in college. During these college years, we all began to fine-tune our skills and find new passions… Kevin discovered, while at Keen State in NH, that he was an excellent writer and had a real talent for marketing. Dan, while at Flagler College in Florida, dabbled in music as he became a member of a Folk-Hop band named "DJ WHY and The Image… Featuring Dr. G". I attended the University of Massachusetts in Lowell and came to realize the wonders of Macromedia Flash. During my time at school I also developed an actual art style and fine-tuned the HECK out of it over the next 5 years. The three of us rarely talked during these years, not out of spite or a lack of interest, but we were living new lives, making new friends, discovering ourselves and becoming our own individual selves.

Of the three of us, Kevin and I stayed in touch the most. Talking on Instant Messenger, emailing, and occasionally meeting up. One time stuck out more than the others, however. We met up in our hometown of Derry, NH at Kevin's parents' house. That night we reverted to our middle school selves as we turned on the radio, busted out some pencils and paper and began doodling what we could. We began to discuss the next chapter in the Oddballs saga… Only this time we dropped the Middle School Posse and focused on our experiences with each other in High School. No more wacky adventures, just real life humorous situations. As we continued to bounce ideas off each other we created a comic named "Scholars". The premise was our High School experiences portrayed in a college setting, featuring ourselves as the respective characters of Stan (Kevin) and Jason (myself… Mark). As we evolved the scripts and sketched out the look and feel, we decided the best outlet for this comic would be the web, which was evolving at a RAPID pace. Before the night was over, we named our website… Six AM Comics. Named after our High School video productions. These comics didn't reach the online world until 2003/2004ish… When I finally purchased the domain name "6amcomics.com" and created a website with the help of a good friend in College.

Towards the end of our College experience, we got back in touch with Dan. It was as though nothing had changed since High School. We instantly began joking around again and being stupid. Even made a couple of videos… An abstract horror trilogy named "Lavament: A Tale of Darkness", "Roped In", and "Drain". The production value had obviously gotten much better since the primitive days of Refrigerator Man. Realizing we had that old spark still, Kevin and I asked Dan to be a part of Six AM Comics, and he was very quick to jump on board, contributing his own web comic named "Honestly". We began meeting up at a Starbucks in Beverly, Massachusetts to discuss the direction of the site… Which is when I first discovered the joys of the Mint Mocha-Chip Frapaccino… A rare delicacy which can no longer be served at Starbucks… This was also the beginning of my caffeine addiction (Oh the sacrifices I've made for the site).

I suppose the specifics from then to now aren't terribly necessary. We've gone through about 4 to 5 different variations of the site design, everything from Flash to HTML to content management systems, we've canceled comics, we've rebooted comics, we've re-imagined the purpose of the site, we've dabbled in video games, movies, film review, literati, blogs and gone through about seven hiatuses. I guess what I'm getting at is that Six AM isn't about comics. Really, it's not even about a website. Six AM is about a very unique and important friendship between three very different artists with a similar vision. To create, to entertain, and to have fun. Our goal isn't to be the best, it's not to be famous, or rich (although that wouldn't be so bad)… It's not even a stupid dream. It's an outlet for creativity and expression. For me, it's a passion, and although I go through times where I don't keep up with the site, or stay in touch with the fellas, I always end up coming back to it… To go deeper, I feel like it's always been a calling for us. We have a chemistry which you can't just recreate… Kevin and Dan are my family, we're brothers (whether they like it or not). Someday, I hope to bring others into our family, I hope we can be more than just a family… I hope we can be a community of artists and friends with similar chemistries, similar passions and visions with unique and different artistic talents working together to create something awesome. It's the only inevitable step left in the evolution of Six AM Comics.

But until then… I'm just happy to make art that someone out there can enjoy.
~ Mark

www.6amcomics.com

PG-MEN - Dr. Fluffles

2011-07-11T21:23:00.000-07:00

I feel like the issue of physical deformities comes up a lot when dealing with the Marvel Universe... After all, a mass evolution caused by nuclear radiation is bound to cause a few extra limbs here and there, but the one thing I figured WOULDN'T occur from radiation would be the growth of extra hair. I would also think death to be the natural progression of genetic mutation... That just goes to show that I am not properly educated on the matter of genetics, and who better to teach me than the doctor turned big blue abomination... BEAST.

You will not find a friendlier hero in the X-world than Dr. Hank McCoy, AKA Beast. When he first debuted as one of the original X-Men, he was an average man with a less than average appearance... Big feet and big hands. Like a bald gorilla... And you know something? Had this not changed, than Beast would be a perfectly acceptable addition to our newly found PG-MEN... But nooooo, Marvel had to go and make him all scary, which usually results in making him blue... e.g. Nightcrawler and Mystique. So they went and turned our big lovable Beast into a monstrosity! Sharp teeth, yellow feline eyes, claws, fur, devilish hair reminiscent of devil horns and pointy ears... And this is a man our children look up to! Not to mention he's practically a nudist now... Oh yeah, like a little blue speed-o is supposed to be appropriate. If you can't wear it to school, you shouldn't be allowed to wear it anywhere! Might I mention the speed-o blends in perfectly to his blue body, so he might as well be naked anyway!

So now we have a similar problem to that of Nightcrawler... However, it would be unoriginal to simply slap a paper bag over this character as well... Hence, now we have to get a little creative. The truth of the matter is, Beast is a scary man. He looks like he would eat a live puppy and chuckle while it still whimpered between his feral fangs. So you know what? If he's going to be a puppy-hater (not be confused with our first PG-MEN entry, Puppy), then we're just going to flat out make him a cat! He can now retain his blue, fluffy, nudist appearance and not be frightening to children... And what kid wouldn't want a blue kitty? It's like the opposite of Clifford the Big Red Dog!

Dr. Hank McCoy isn't much of a cute name either... It sounds Irish, which in itself isn't appropriate for children. So we're going to give him a new name... Dr. Fluffles! We're also going to up the cuteness by giving him an over-sized pair of glasses (like he thinks he's still a person) and a pencil in his ear... Aww, look at little Dr. Fluffles doing highly complex mathematics, he's like a little fluffy person! Now THAT is what the PG-MEN are all about! Teaching kids math and fighting crime in the cutest of fashions!

Knowledge is power!
~ Mark

There can be only one... Part II

2011-07-10T20:05:00.000-07:00

A loooong while back I drew a picture of Walmart, Target and Kmart mascots fighting to the death in a Highlander fashion... Well I like the theme so much that I decided to do a much, MUCH different take on the Highlander franchise. I think this one's rather self-explanatory... As well as mildly unsettling. Or awesome.

Depends on how epic you consider conception,
~ Mark

Cryptic Love Part II

2011-07-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

You know, for all the friends on facebook, I have a very limited amount of "old cryptic conversations"... So if you have any, you should send them to me: mark.marianelli@gmail.com and I'll post them in the next Cryptic Love post... Mmmm... In any case, here's part 2!

-commence-

- Underwear leopard print which I may or may not have, or the rug that I generally pose as a sailor on?

- you need another hit of lance. Maybe you don't have water polo skills, but you've got water polo skilz?

- Eff that cat. It doesn't let me pee.

- i always knew there was something good under your shirt

- No ma'am, that was ALL me! ... with some help from the internet:-/

- Top on chocolate phones? Don't worry, I keeps it on the low bout y'all devil's dandruff while you double up on dat 2 for 1 sale for all my Tecatos, yeah, you know I be in with the toss ups on my interplanetary mission fo' dat makeup, quit ya' wiggin' whiles I Jack that Jelly for a Jab and keeps my Jag, yo. Keep it real Jolly Pop.

- michael w. smith has AIDS? what!?

- I will devour any giant you love.

- ... did... did you give me a gingerbread voodoo doll? ... for Easter?

- I like to call them "Practice Runs"...

- Don't worry, I'll make sure it's a NICE shady mexican...

- ... rocks... and your imagination... so pretty much anything you want...

- hm... i could go for a meatball i think...

- Frickin' heck yes Igloos with Burritos! Burrito Igloos!

- Their chub amuses me.

- psh, goober... you'd catch a cold.

- Aww, poor little Snow Asians…

- Nose-ferrah-taoew! Woohooah!

- You get your filthy hands off of that!!!!

- Well... you obviously don't smell your own farts enough...

- I wanna squeeze you from the inside

- HAHa Jacks naked!

- It's not gay if you pretend you're a woman... right?

- Nah, I just need to eat more apples and turn my cell phone off...

- Why was that wizard puppet naked?!

- AH! Uno plagues! Would you like flies with that??

- Psh, beats genital herpes.

- THAT position... clever boy.

- ahh ha... I get it. Like gay sex.

- mmm do-do bird blood......I'm thirsty!

- And how you gonna' kill Foxy Brown and stick her head on a pole like that?! That's Foxy Brown!! She'd've gone ape sh* on the whole planet!

- Is Nicki talking about poop?

- WtF? She sounds like Daphy Duck!

- ... or was it AIDS... crap, I think it was AIDS...

- mmm... come here boy. Daddy's got some chores for you...

- False alarm!.....it was just gas

- I don't care if you had your tubes tied! Life found a way!!

-end-

Hamster n' Doll

2011-07-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

Yeah, there's no logic behind this drawing... I was doodling while watching TV with the Misses. Nuff' said y'all.

Eek!
~ Mark

Cryptic Love

2011-07-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I spiraled downward into the addicting webs of Facebook... As I typically do. This particular time, however, I was feeling incredibly nostalgic... And the mighty FB has the perfect functionality for nostalgia... The "See Friendship" option. For anyone who doesn't know what this is, if you go to one of your friends' profiles, you'll see in the upper right an option to "See Friendship"... Clicking it will bring you to a page where you can view all of your interactions between one another from the very moment you became virtual buddies.

There was a time on Facebook where you didn't have the option to comment on wall posts. If someone wrote to you, you had to then go to their page and write back. It got us by for the time being and we never thought of it again after the comment feature came about. Well, this primitive form of communication has provided me endless hours... or minutes... of entertainment. As you read through your "friendship histories" you find some very cryptic posts which contain ZERO frame of reference due to the nature of posting back then... The following is a compilation of some of the gems I came across while reading through my friendships... Be my guest to try and figure out what the heck any of these meant...

- commence -

- Friggin a! A frickin' caveman can do you but I can't even get a fistful of that Greek dairyair without gettin' slapped with a half-broken wooly gimp hand!

- Yeah we smell like crabs

- Yes, her typography is just as good as yours. You should both write gay novels in the gay voice...

- Stop putting butts on my wall!......................... Las Vegas!

- Dude, we're EATING that blood this weekend...

- Hugh Grant have mercy on me... I have a Klondike Bar and a very awkward itch... what will he do for me.

- HEY LAY OFF! You know I like the way cloth tastes! THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT!

- Its red, silly buns...

- No no. That is us. We are ONE!!

- Haha. Opposite Action... like Prison.

- Indeed it was harsh V-Lo... I bet you wouldn't be so harsh if I slowly killed everything you love...

- Yeah... always... like they grew up together fighting Alien Kung-Fu Zombies... and yes, the aliens used kung-fu.

- Please don't make me type the word "poop" again, it makes me uncomfortable...

- I do not suckle on freaky Phildog, man-tete!

- Don't just stare at it.

- Michael W. Smith has AIDS?

- Hey we've all got our skeletons in the closets...........your skeleton just has dong shaped marks on its cheek bone from where he slapped you with it.

- Buy it, play it, and one day you will see glory. Dr. Mario compels you.

- Shut up! I had just eaten a pizza! THAT'S ALL!

- Shave that sh*t.

- WTF? Wow. Jeff getting a snowball in the crotch... What a night.

- Holy 70's Porno, Batman!!

- Oh, I gots EVERYTHING else... like a size 13 which fits comfortably in your big mouth, boy!

- Hot... but shame on you.

- YOU KILLED CARLOS!?!? NOOO

- Wait a minute, lemme see if I have this straight... BEST SEX EVER... is with... Jesus?

- end -

PG-MEN - Harlot

2011-07-06T22:47:00.000-07:00

If there's anything more inappropriate than an X-Man, it's an X-Woman! Skimpy outfits, supermodel figures, sexual independence... And did I mention those dang skimpy outfits?? If I could think of one specific X-Woman that exists as the living embodiment of LUST and CONSEQUENCE, it's the infamous Rogue!

There's nothing terribly wrong with her mutant power... As a matter of fact, I'm going to allow this particular hero to keep her power come re-imagination time. What is truly deviant about this character is the way she flaunts that untouchable body of hers for all the young boys (and adult boys) to ogle after! Her mutant power is the ability to drain the life-force of anybody she comes into skin-on-skin contact with... Which I must say, is a devastating display of superpower. So what does she do? Naturally she wears skin tight outfits and CLEARLY spends hours in the morning making herself a knockout amongst other whorishly dressed women!

Now you tell me... If you had the ability to drain people's life simply by touching them, would you allow yourself to be the object of all living things' desire? An entire world full of people just ACHING to touch you only to come to a drastic realization that you're about to die because you couldn't control your urges... And she allows this to happen! Clearly she is not taking the proper precautions to prevent such a horrible tragedy... And for that, we must create a child-friendly PG-Man... er, woman.

For starters, I would compare this character to a "street walker"... Unclean and uncaring for the health and safety of others... She's like the "(name I shall not use) of Babylon", yet we hail her has a hero! Well that comes to a stop this day! No more skimpy outfits, no more tights... Heck, normal cloths aren't even enough to hold the tides of raging hormones and pre-pubescent lusts back. No, she clearly needs to go through some major extremes to keep this bio-hazard contained... Which is why we're decking her out in the finest of winter clothing. Snow-pants, scarves, heavier gloves, earmuffs... No sir, there will not be ONE inch of skin showing, nor will there be any chance of her well-carved body figure being portrayed in silhouettes. Sunglasses shall also be applied to keep her eyes (the gateway to the soul, which is clearly corrupted) to prevent those baby blues from teasing another man.

What's that? She's still too sexy? Well fine. It's time for extreme measures! If that puffy outfit isn't going to be enough, than we're just going to flat out put a sign on her... "FILTHY". Oh yeah, nobody's going near her now. Nobody decent at least... Which is who the PG-Men cater to... The pure of heart! "But Mark, why would any villain go near her now and be defeated?"... Well that's a good question. My answer to this is simple... What villain DOESN'T run from the good guy? Huh?

Now as for that name. ROGUE. The dictionary defines it as such: An unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person; a scoundrel or rascal. Oh, that sums her up alright... Deceitful temptress that she is. But then, most people associate the name Rogue with something cool, akin to a renegade or a loner. I, however, refuse to allow a generation of children to grow up overlooking obvious seduction because a name sounded cool... She will be named exactly what she is... HARLOT. Now we all know what we're getting! The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem... I think our new hero is the perfect example of facing your imperfections and bettering one's self.

Let the cleansing begin!
~ Mark

Got Apocalypse? - The Truth About Zombies

2011-07-05T13:57:00.000-07:00

Worked on a post for "Got Apocalypse?" over at Six Am Comics. Go'on and check it out, y'hear?

ALL LIES!
~ Mark

Son'Uva: Boneyard Finisher

2011-07-04T03:34:00.000-07:00

I struggled with an idea for devastating your opponent using the elements from the "Boneyard"... Again, my one-track mind thought, "impaled on bones!"... But as I've said before, I've done that a lot already. So I went back to ye olde drawing board and came up with something which took a lot more time than I was planning on putting into this... So you better love it! I slave over an overheated MacBook all day long for you people!

Criss Cross'll make ya, CLICK CLICK:

Yeah, he got boned,
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

PG-MEN - Evening-Stroller

2011-07-04T00:26:00.000-07:00

Ay Dios Mio! Where do I begin with this abomination... Talk about a difficult task. I attempt to make the comic book world a better place for the innocent children of the world and I am forced to clean up the act of a teleporting demon named Nightcrawler!

Very well... Let us begin with the obvious. His appearance. Sadly one cannot change the physical appearance of another and maintain a non-bigotry example while exclaiming "it offends me!" through the streets... However I can't exactly allow a blue demon to parade around the pages of a children's comic book saving the day and inspiring love for such a creature... Sure, the comics portray Nightcrawler as a man of Christian faith, but in my eyes all I see is hypocrisy and deception! So let's just avoid the controversy and put a paper bag over his head, shall we? And just for promotion's sake, we'll commission Shaw's to provide the bag! Free advertising! Now he's helping the community AND covering up his demonic nature. Though there is that tail of his... vile hell-spawn appendage that it is, I'm sure it's a useful commodity for fighting crime... Let's just chop the end of it off so he looks more like a blue monkey with a bag on his head. Now he shouldn't be so scary.

I'm also iffy about that mutant power of his... Teleportation. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if he wasn't traveling through the deepest pits of Hell to get to his final destination... But that's what he does and that's how he does it... So he doesn't get to teleport anymore. But fear not! He can still get to where he needs to go in the quickest of fashions... Via cab! That's right, our little blue friend now has the ability to hail a cab no matter where he is! Free of charge and always available! ... And we all know that cab driver will get you where you need to go quickly... No matter how many pedestrians he has to mow over (but we won't show that part for PG purposes). Plus I imagine he can always just tell his cab driver "To the villain's secret lair!" and that'll save time on all the detective work, am I right? Yeah. I'm pretty right.

Last but not least is that terrifying name of his. Nightcrawler. The mere mention of it makes me feel like I'm being molested by a centipede while sleep. Truth is, that name never really made much sense for a teleporting demon in the first place. He's not really crawling anywhere, he's teleporting! I figure the least we can do is tone down the intensity of the falsehood to this much more pleasant sounding name... Evening-Stroller! Beware, criminals, he's going to stroll right up and ruin your evening!

Eh, I work with what I've got,
~ Mark

PG-MEN - HUG

2011-07-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

Who doesn't love the French! Well, besides America I'd have to say villains world-wide... Which is why even the slippery frogs of the Cajun swamps need a protector... And that protector is the poker-faced sweet-talker known as Gambit.

Now you might ask, "Hey, what's not kid-friendly about Gambit? He's so dag-gone charming!"... Well to this I say, what IS appropriate about this card-wielding brawler?? Let's begin with his roots, shall we? Gambit was a thief, a crook, a liar... And if there's anything politics has taught me it's that you ARE what you WERE. Sure, we may forgive him in our hearts, but in our minds, we know exactly what kind of a man Gambit is. He's a deceiver! Why his name alone stands for a chess move early in the game in which the player sacrifices minor pieces in order to obtain an advantageous position! I.e. This is a man who will sacrifice the little people to get ahead! Which is why the FIRST thing we're going to do with this wretched little Frenchie is change that horrible name! Why associate him with deceit when you can associate him with trust? Children need to trust SOMEONE in the world, so rather than given them a symbol of lies, let's give them a symbol of affection... Gambit shall now be known as "HUG".

Speaking of hugs, there's enough aggression out there aimed at our European brothers of feminine love, so why make their champion a man who can truly embody the good nature of the French... They need a man who leads by action, not cheesy accents and card talk... You know what? Let's just eliminate words from the equation altogether and give the French a clean slate. Let's show off the French in a positive light, by making "HUG" a true symbol of France... He is now a MIME! Now, consider the compromise I've made here on your behalf, America... Gambit also had the unique ability to "charm" anyone he spoke to, he was trustworthy (all the better to betray you with, my dear)... Well now he doesn't need something as atheistic as "charm" or "luck", he can use mere gestures to make you think he's behind a glass wall, or busy pulling on some rope. Who's going to shoot at a man who is CLEARLY behind an invisible bullet-proof wall??

Oh, come now, I haven't forgotten Gambit's REAL power. He has the ability to fill any object with kinetic energy, making whatever he touches an explosive weapon of destruction... CLEARLY a PG-MAN is not prone to violence... Nor would he use such objects as "Playing Cards"... Playing cards are an analogy for all things sinful! Poker games, a game of lies, cigars, drinking and gambling. What kind of hero gives children the impression these things are acceptable?? So away with those playing cards! You get UNO. A game the WHOLE family can enjoy. They're colorful cards as well, so they're bound to tantalize our youth into paying attention to this wholesome individual. And to go along with the "mime" theme... He doesn't ACTUALLY charge them with energy, he just makes you THINK he's doing so. He's so dang clever, that HUG!

So let us all support our European defender of justice and truly... VIVE LA FRANCE!

Maercie boque!
~ Mark

Spiders...

2011-07-02T11:00:00.000-07:00

With my parents moving to the grand state of Texas, there's just one thing I can't get out of my head...

Shhh,
~ Mark

PG-MEN - Eye-Boogies

2011-07-01T15:57:00.000-07:00

One cannot completely re-imagine the world's most famous group of superheroes without first analyzing their leader... No, not Professor X. I mean the team leader, the one who rides with his troops into battle and sets a true example... The ever brown-nosing CYCLOPS.

Well, let me tell you, there are ALL kinds of issues going on with the leadership in this group. Let's begin, shall we? And I'm just going to jump into this issue without a parachute and without sugar-coating it... Why does the leader ALWAYS have to be white! And not like, "Oh, I'm Italian and my skin is olive but just light enough to get me the respect my dad says I deserve!", no, no, no, I mean white white. Anglo-Saxon, SPF 500, Elmer's Glue, pasty, Water Polo-playing white! Yeah, we have a multi-cultural lineup of heroes, everything from Thunderbird (dead, might I add) to Luke Cage (but really, does anyone read his comics? He's not even an X-Man), but none of them LEAD. Not one! So you know what? Cyclops is Black now. Racism is not kid-friendly.

And speaking of Cyclops, his powers are LETHAL. Lasers? The comics portray his eye-blast as being more like a punch to the face, which I'm sorry, is terribly inaccurate. If I shot you with a laser beam, you wouldn't get knocked back, you'd have a hole in your stomach. You'd catch a brief glimpse of your seared intestines dangling out of the cavity in your belly just before the lights go black and you die in a pile of your own ash. So I think it's safe to say lasers are CLEARLY out of the question. I mean, your kids are going to grow up in the future when lasers are more commonly used (along with flying cars and hover boards) and they're going to put their hands in it because, "Hey, Cyclops's EYES can handle laser beams, why not my fingers?", and them BAM! No more fingers! Then your kids have to go to special schools and they're going to THINK that's going to be awesome because the X-Men attend a "School for the Gifted" and they're going to hop on that short bus and find out all it is is a bunch of handicapped kids with no superpowers and they're going to be so upset and so depressed by it that they're ultimately just going to take a laser to their head and end it all!

So our modified, kid-friendly PG-MEN are going to have a leader who shoots the BEST THING IN THE WORLD out of his eyes... JELL-O! What, that's not enough to put fear into the enemy? Fine. It'll be LIME JELL-O. Blech. I'd go with lemon, but then we're getting into the PG-13 territory... Lemon flavored anything is nasty.

Now the only thing that's needing some improvement is the name. Cyclops. He is named after a horrendous creature in Greek Mythology which was known for eating people. I'm sorry, but cannibalism and fear is NOT the PG Hero's way! Nor is Greek Mythology... We're Christians, our heroes will not associate themselves with the monsters of the gods. PLUS he doesn't technically have ONE eye, he has two eyes, now he's just a liar. What kind of example would this leader be setting with false truths?? No, no... He needs a name which can easily be related to his super-powers... EYE-BOOGIES. Because he shoots green goop from his eyes. And hey, kids love things that are gross! Eye Boogies are the perfect substitute! Oh! And think of the marketing we can start with this, candy that resembles their favorite PG-MAN!

But we probably won't go the marketing route, money is the root of all evil, and PG-Men FIGHT evil, they don't endorse it.

Now eat your JELL-O!
~ Mark

PG-MEN - Puppy

2011-06-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

Growing up, the X-Men were always a controversial subject in my household. My brother and I were huge fans, traded the cards, watched the TV show, read the comics, collected the action figures... And, of course, played the Arcade Game RELIGIOUSLY... But it took some work to get there.

See, my parents were of the more conservative nature. While my brother and I saw superpowers, action and make-believe, most parents at the time saw sacrilege, violence and overall filth. Even the name, "X" Men sounded a little wrong. I remember the first time my brother brought home a pack of cards, my mom caught a glimpse of it and was like, "X-Men? What is that?"... So she proceeded to look at the cards my brother had purchased and, naturally, there happened to be a character named "Lucifer"... You can only imagine the reaction which occurs in a Christian household when a child brings home a picture of Lucifer. What my mom didn't know was that "Lucifer" was the name of an alien in the comics... Not the prince of darkness as one would assume. But then, what parent read comics?

For a long while X-Men were banned in our house and to this day my mom is always suspicious of Mutant protectors of America. In my eyes, the fact that a villain was named Lucifer was a good thing, cause nobody wants the bad guy to win... It all equaled Christianity to me! Not a convincing argument. Now that I'm older, I doubt I'd go very easy on my (hypothetical) kids if one of them brought home a picture of the devil... Though being a child of comics, I'd probably read about the character first before deciding whether or not to burn my child's playing cards... I don't think my mom burned the card, I'm fairly certain it's still in the attic.

On a side note, my mom may very well be an X-Man herself... She has the uncanny mutant ability to turn whatever it is we're watching/listening to/reading into something horrific and foul just as she enters the room. I'm serious. You could be watching Barney and the second my mom walks in, Barney will rape a child and curse the church, thus resulting in your immediate punishment for watching something so horrible. There was no winning growing up. Did you ever think, growing up, that by muting the television when your parents walk in the room that you'll avoid any and all suspicion on their part that you're watching something you shouldn't be watching? Yeah, I think it's actually safer to just let it happen... no need to add deceit to your list of broken rules.

I'm seriously portraying a twisted version of my parents for the purposes of this blog. They weren't that strict, but X-Men was a problem. And it all stems back to that freaking Lucifer trading card. Oy.

In any case. I got to thinking, maybe it's time the X-Men had a simple re-visioning for the purposing of children programming. I think what the young world needs is a new breed of worthless heroes... We need... The PG-MEN!! Because "X" is just a little too pornographic for my taste. And nobody likes letters that remind them of algebra.

My first subject: Wolverine.
Everybody's favorite X-Man, possibly favorite hero, ever. Which is ironic. How come the hero that cuts people with giant blades in his hands is a childhood favorite? Why does Marvel keep attempting to put this character in every cartoon and PG-13 movie they come out with? Blades cut. Cuts bleed. Blood is a BIG problem for Television producers AND movie producers. If you're going to make a film or cartoon about Wolverine, you have to accept the fact that there is going to be some serious violence involved... Typically they cop-out and have Wolverine fight the Sentinels, or have him try to slice somebody and miss or hit armor, or use his claws to stab a garage door opener to keep bad guys out of a room... It's pathetic.

My vote for the re-visioned Wolverine is the following: No more blades... Now he has pipe-cleaners in his hands! His whole skeleton has been infused with... Wire... And fluffy stuff. He can get tangled up in high places and he can scratch you just enough to annoy you... As a diversion while the other heroes call the police and wait for the negotiators to arrive to allow a peaceful outcome! And he cleans a mean pipe! He's so handy!

Oh, and as for that pointy mask of his, someone could poke their eye out on that, let's (as my parents have told me many times in the past) put a cork in it! There! Now those won't hurt anybody! ... And while we're at it, let's just change his name. The Wolverine is a very aggressive animal, children might get the impression that they can count on a wolverine for help or pick one up and hug it only to have their faces chewed of in the most unpleasant of fashions. Let's name our hero... PUPPY! Yeah, now that's something we can market. Who doesn't love puppies?? I'll tell you who doesn't love puppies... Satanists. You want your kids worshiping the father of lies? Yeah, I didn't think so... Buy them a PUPPY action figure and go to church!

Berserker Rage! ... er... Cuddly Aggression!
~ Mark

Sonuva DNA Tree Finisher

2011-06-29T23:34:00.000-07:00

Back to Son'Uva! Don't get me wrong, it's been fun playing with Turble animations this week, but I gots a game to finish! ... Someday.

This week features a lovely finisher for an older stage.

I debated actually having a finisher for this stage, it didn't lend itself to a lot of violence (though that giant ribcage in the back has been very tempting... but I think we've impaled enough combatants), so I analyzed the elements of the stage and decided the only logical course of action was to use the vegetation which is obviously a dominant presence.

So clicks it up thug-style forealz!

Lil' Flash o' Horrors,

~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

kill turBle

2011-06-28T23:50:00.000-07:00

When I was concepting some villains for Turble back in the day, I came up with this guy... He's a little mutant thing in a ball. I only had time to animate him rolling around and messing Turble up for the time being, but he'll do some thangs I'm sure... Ahh, time. Actually, time is the reason I went with creating an Orb for a bad guy... What's easier to make than a circle with some limbs? Eh? Yeah... Maybe I'll just end up scrapping this guy, but he's simple and I wanted to accomplish SOMETHING today... Especially after just attending a design conference, I think you're supposed to be inspired after those...

This particular character has no name yet... I've been referring to him as either "Ball" or "kill turBle" (because of the scrolling text on his screen). Maybe he has potential.

Alright, enough reading. Do the usual. Click the image, watch an animation, up my analytics, then let them drop until the next post... I'm sure if this little ditty keeps up long enough I'll be filthy rich in no time...

How exciting! He rolled!
~ Mark

Turble Taters!

2011-06-27T22:44:00.000-07:00

This new character might be a little twisted... But it's a cool enemy and I'm keepin' him gosh dangit! If you remember the days of Mario there was a character called "Bob-omb", a walking bomb which would explode if you touched them... Well I've created a character named "Taters". It's a creature stuffed inside a potato sack with a bomb strapped to its mouth. Get too close and it blows up. I actually got the idea from the animé "Ninja Scroll", where one villain would sow people up and stuff explosives in them. Only this character isn't an unwilling creation, he's more like a really diabolical teddy bear.

Ironically, I animated this character while waiting in an airport this morning... Yikes.

As you could probably guess, the name "Taters" comes from this character being a walking potato sack with a label on it that says "Taters"... Anyway, I'm thinking of having him be a creation of "Ragavont".

You can click the image below to view his animation work. You'll notice there's a "hurt" animation for Turble now as well. Boo yah!

Gimme yer' tots!
~ Mark

Turble Robot

2011-06-25T10:42:00.000-07:00

Good things come to them that wait... Everyone else gets this post.

So I've been in Chicago since Wednesday at the HOW Design Live conference and thanks to the Hyatt charging you for every dump you take in their toilets, I've been avoiding the "internet fees" as best I can. So no posts. But all is not lost. The great thing about attending conferences is that while you're sitting through self-centered artists talking about how far the perfectly designed stick up their anus goes, you actually get some quality doodle time in (it's actually not like that at all, it's pretty interesting stuff, but there's been a few gems, blech). On one particular morning, I sketched up a delicious little robot for Turble to duke it out with. Then after a night of doing what it is we do in a new city, I stumbled back to my room during the wee hours of the night/morning and did some VERY sloppy Flash work...

Today I went back to that Flash file and did it over... This is the end result.

The robot enemy is actually a revised version of a robot Dan sketched up a while back for the game.

I've incorporated the previous Turble post's animation to put it into perspective as well. I'm happy with the end result. Sadly the conference is a little more intense over the weekend (and quite good), so I doubt I'll have much time to do anything else before I get back home to my lovely wife on Monday (who I miss terribly right now).

Anyway, that's all I got.

$13.50 for this post,
~ Mark

Turble - Martini Madness

2011-06-21T13:40:00.000-07:00

Another Turble Update...

My good friend Dan, when I originally showed him my concepts for Turble, thought the game should be called "Martini Madness", due to the fact Turble's cannon looked like an olive... I love that name. I love it so much that I decided to name Turble's tank "The Martini Madness". However, I wanted to take the tank a step further and hopefully introduce some new elements to the game.

The Martini Madness is now going to be more than just a vehicle... It's going to be a metallic ball made up of rings which will rearrange themselves to form various weaponry and vehicles. This will be Turble's main weapon throughout the game. I imagine as the game progresses the player will be able to upgrade Martini Madness to create new weaponry, etc... Below is a quick animation of how it will probably look in the game. Click the rings and view.

Yeah, a lot of text for such a little animation, but I'm on a tight schedule this week.

Deal,
~ Mark

Turble Animations

2011-06-20T02:30:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's healthy to take a break from one project and dabble in another... I'm the king of this process . I'm certainly not going to stop working on Son'Uva any time soon, but for today I wanted to just play with another toy... Turble the Gerbil!

Up to now it's mostly been concept art and animations which would never fly in the real world of gaming. So I decided to crack down and create Turble in all his animated glory. You can view a brief demo animation below... Ignore the dullness of the background, that's something I'll have to work on later. The focus of this little ditty is Turble. Click on it!

On major difference you'll notice is that he's not riding on his trusty metallic steed, "The Martini Madness", he's on foot... I think his cannon-mobiles will be acquired as you play and upgraded. For now, he's got a cool little space-pistol for cappin' cyborgs, mutants and cryogenically frozen yet now reanimated fiends from the past! ... None of which are in this animation. So enjoy this breath of fresh air because there isn't any in the future!

Adorable,
~ Mark

Son'Uva Status Update

2011-06-20T00:10:00.000-07:00

You know, I've put in about 5 or 6 hours worth of work on Son'Uva this weekend and yet I have nothing to really show for it... The sad thing is, once you get to the point I'm at with a game like this, a lot of the work becomes technical and less creative.

For example, this weekend was almost entirely devoted to duplicating the animations for the fighters on the receiving end of the finishers... So if I had an animation of one person getting burnt to a crisp, decapitated, mauled to death, etc... I have to make that same animation for every other character... Which is tedious at best. I've spent so much time swapping out symbols that I literally looked for a "SWAP" button on my cloths this morning when I needed to get changed... I also looked for an "Undo" button when I passed gas in church.

Needless to say, I'm not going to show you 10 animations of Gazael finishing each fighter sequentially (though it was a tempting thought), I'll just show you Archfiend's "defeated" animation and call it a night. It's the only real updated I made this weekend that's new from a visual standpoint.

It may be this way for a little while,
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Adventures of D. Carota!

2011-06-16T21:58:00.000-07:00

My good friend Kevin has been hard at work promoting/producing a play titled "SMUDGE a new play by Rachel Axler"... For a viral tie-in to the film, he asked me to create the following ad... I won't go into any details for fear of giving away it's purpose, but the gist is that it's a happy carrot with a Saturday Morning cartoon!

So here it is... The Adventures of D. Carota!

The ROOT of all evil!
~ Mark

Son'Uva HUD work

2011-06-15T18:05:00.000-07:00

In all the animation chaos I forgot to focus on one of the more important aspects of any fighting game... The HUD (Head Up Display). I figure the fight would just go on forever without a health meter or a time limit (a concept which I hate, but sadly must conform to for classic gaming's sake). I was struggling with where to go on this one, traditional boxes with a red and yellow bar, percentages, etc... I went with skulls, spines and tubing. I think it fits. Check it out:

So you'll notice in the above animation that there's a bunch of purple glowing orbs next to the health meters... The purpose of these is to represent how many more times the fighters can use their special moves... I've been referencing this concept since I started talking about the game and I really think it'll take the "cheap" factor out of the gaming experience... Preferably avoiding cheap nonsense like this.

Anyway, that's where I'm at. The only downside is that I have to illustrate each number on the timer... As you can see, I only had enough patience for the "2"... Maybe I'll do "3" tomorrow and make a REALLY useless blog about it...

I do anything for blog content,
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Son'Uva: Pinkerton Tower Finisher Update

2011-06-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

I felt like updating the Pinkerton Finisher to not be so much like the other stage finishers (one, two)... So here's the direction I took... Not that much different, but enough of a change to make me happy... Cause it's all about my happiness, y'heard?? Click. Pic.

Is there something in my eye?
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva Legacy Updates

2011-06-13T21:43:00.000-07:00

Legacy always feels incomplete. So today I decided to freaking complete him already! The only move missing for him was a second special attack. It feels like everything he does is already so devastating that I couldn't think of anything else he could do without being a rip-off of some other big boss out there. Fortunately I had one last idea which I decided to execute... He wraps himself in "soul hands" like armor and charges at his opponent. Hopefully this move won't be too cheap...

In addition to finishing up his moves, I thought his finisher could use a little tweaking. The ribcage didn't seem to match the cartoon nature of the animation/illustration styles, so I updated it. There are also a few other tweaks which I won't bother going into because... well, they wouldn't really make any sense unless you've been glued to this game's development like I have.

So go on and give this little image a click and view the carnage!

Charge!!
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva Weekend Updates

2011-06-12T23:09:00.000-07:00

I was sadly out of town Thursday and Friday and was unable to make any updates... So over the weekend I did an extra amount of development on my never-ending project "Son'Uva"... I was debating spacing these updates out over a couple of days so I could take some time off of working on this game, but I thought a nice long post with lots of content would be more fun to my very few readers...

I realized this past week that I never had any kind of defeated animation for the fighters which would cue the player to finish off his opponent... So that's exactly what I began working on. Defeated animations for the fighters... I have four done and should have the rest finished before the end of the week. Fortunately, they're really quick to animate/illustrate. And that makes me a happy designer. Click the image below to view the animations to date.

Having done these animations, I saw it fit to revisit a few finishers I felt were lacking... Hunter's is the first. I have never been 100% satisfied with how this finisher comes out looking... I've redone it at least twice now and it keeps failing to live up to the others... So I cracked down on it and tried to figure out what made it suck so hard... Not sure if I can explain it, but I think I figured out what the problem was and I believe it to be in a good place now... But you can be the judge, click it.

Gazael was another finisher which I feel I may have cheaped out on due to either time restraints, laziness, or my wife watching me animate a character based off of her... Regardless, the concept was spot on, the execution was off the mark. I went all Michael Bay on it and decided to go bigger, badder and more epic. Not sure how well this one will cooperate when it comes to development, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there... You know how this works. Image. Click. View.

And speaking of bridges to cross, how about bridges to fall off of? I gave a sneak peak of the floating bridge's gruesome ending, but never actually delivered on the goods... So without further adieu, I saved my favorite for last... Here's the Bridge Finisher. Click dangit, click!

Alright, I hope you got your fill of updates for this game, cause I'm fresh out! I'm sure to have more as the week progresses, and who knows, maybe when this game is actually complete, I'll go back to doing some art work everybody can enjoy! ... Don't get your hopes up.

Son'Uva II, maybe?
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva Nark Specials

2011-06-07T18:40:00.000-07:00

So Nark has the ability to manifest his artwork into reality... I wanted to work on this concept a little more, and touch up the sketches to make them more animated. Nark now creates a giant demon which swipes the opponent if he/she comes into contact with it. The attack where Nark creates a giant fist underneath the opponent needed a touch up as well to be A.) more noticable B.) more animated. The fist closes as it goes back into the ground. Anyway, I'm probably making a bigger deal out of this update than it really is... But with all these Son'Uva updates, this blog needs some written content...

Click the image below and watch away!

Have I mentioned he's kind of me?
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva Throws

2011-06-06T21:20:00.000-07:00

Just a quick posting...

I went back and modified two throws in the fighter line-up; Hunter and Canaan. I thought their throws were a little weak and needed some beefing up... Hope you enjoy!

CLICK IT!

Kiss the pavement!
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva: Nark Finisher Update

2011-06-05T21:09:00.000-07:00

I was never terribly happy with Nark's original finisher... It didn't appeal to any of his characteristics. I had previously just slightly altered Hunter's finisher, seeing as Nark was nothing more than a "color-swap" of Hunter. So I went back to my old sketches from when I first started concepting the game and used that as a starting point... You can see from the image on the left what the idea is... He's got a pencil, I suppose he should do some erasing. Though that implies that he makes mistakes. Maybe if you're fighting him that means that YOU'RE the mistake! Take that.

Click the image below to view the new finisher animation. Love it.

Do-over!
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva: Edgell's Tomb Finisher

2011-06-03T01:08:00.000-07:00

Real quick cause it's late/early and I needs my sleep! I worked on a stage finisher for Edgell's Tomb... I'm pleased, but it needs a little tweaking.

Click the image below to view and have a good weekend!

* UPDATE: I touched up the animation, should look a little better now... Played with some lighting, etc... Enjoy!

Split decision!
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva: Edgell's Tomb

2011-06-02T00:29:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, my good friend Edgell sketched me up a design for a stage in Son'Uva. I've been meaning to get this stage created for a while and just never got around to it. Well no more of that! I cracked down this week and done got her done, y'hear!

I've tweaked his design a little to fit the mood of the game, and it's going to have a pretty sick finisher integrated into it... Basically the concept was an old Egyptian tomb. Hence I'm going to name it, "Edgell's Tomb"... for now.

Click the image below to view it and be sure to comment and give Edgell his well deserved compliments!

You da'Man, Edge!
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Son'Uva Ragdolls

2011-05-30T21:01:00.000-07:00

Every good game should have a "Practice Mode"... At least I think so. How else you gon' get soooo good?? Rather than just creating your typical mode where you spar with another fighter, I thought it'd be fun to go another direction and create dummy ragdoll versions of each fighter that you can smack around and practice on... Plus if there's one fighter you just can't beat, it's fun to go death-match voodoo style on em', right?? Yeah, you know.

So anyway, I created a basic ragdoll template (seen to your left) to work with and took it from there. They're meant to be a little goofy.

So as always, clicks away at the image below and see a lil' Flash goodness! Oh, and you best appreciate this, I drove my wife crazy working on this all weekend...

Little Big Planet, eat your heart out,
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva: End of a Legacy

2011-05-25T19:39:00.000-07:00

If there's one character in this game that's been a thorn in my side, it's Legacy. He's huge, his movements are limited, his body is close to impossible to animate and he can't succumb to normal finishers... Which means I had to go and create a custom death animation for him.

...

And ironically, this is going to save me OODLES of time when I'm finishing up, but I won't bore you with the details of that one. What I can say though is this means he most likely won't be a playable character come time for production. Sad times, but I'm over it.

Below is Legacy's death animation. You'll see how it transitions the background nicely into the next, and maybe the second background will now make more sense... Basically, Legacy (in a nutshell) is like Hell's encasing, so when he dies, all the souls of the wicked get released... And tear him a new one.

Click the animation below and enjoy the gory goodness! (Just refresh the page if you want to watch it more than once, sorry, I was too lazy to create a loop)

Hell hath no fury!
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva Update LXV

2011-05-24T22:07:00.000-07:00

After many months of animation, I figured it's time to work on something a little different for Son'Uva. I've been debating the best possible menu system for a game like this... I still don't really have an answer, but I think I'm on the right track... This obviously isn't anything final or even properly coded, but it makes for a nice demonstration of the menu system I'd like to use for the game. It's incredibly similar to my original sketch of the game.

Not every link works obviously, only two links are functional: "Play" and "Enter Code"... I know, it's a little early in production to be messing around with cheat codes and passwords, but I wanted to play with some AS functionality because honestly, I'm incredibly rusty... And this is still pretty amateur level stuff I'm doing. One man's trash, I suppose...

In any case, here's a run through of what you can do:

1. You'll notice all players in their stance positions at the bottom. One of them on the far left is grayed out. If you've been following these posts, then you'll be able to deduct that it is Maith.

2. By clicking "PLAY", you'll notice a slight menu change, the logo grows smaller, and the words "Select a Fighter" appear beneath it. You may now hover over each fighter at the bottom to see their name as well as some production art to better show you who you're about to select. As I mentioned before, Maith on the far left is disabled. He hasn't been unlocked yet.

3. So how do we unlock Maith? I have some ideas for how he's unlocked in gameplay, but obviously this game hasn't gone into production yet. So if you click the Son'Uva logo at the top, it'll bring you back to the main menu. From here, select "ENTER CODE"... Now that you're on the crudely designed code screen, you can type in a 5-Letter cheat code... Can you guess what it is? Yeah, I'm feeling original, it's "MAITH", make sure it's in ALL CAPS. Then select "Enter" underneath. Now that you're back on the main menu, you'll notice somebody is available now:)

4. For kicks, if you want to enter the code again, it'll disable Maith. This was intentional because I'm bored.

Okay, have at it! Click the image as usual and give it a few to load this tremendously large file.

* UPDATE - Same principles now apply for words such as "SONUV" & "NARK".

JUSTIN BAILEY,
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva Finisher Update

2011-05-23T21:54:00.000-07:00

Since redoing Jack's finisher, I've wanted to revisit a few of the older ones I did when I started animating this game... Here's Son'Uva's... REMASTERED!

Yeah, yeah, gushy,
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Ain't NOBODY sick of Son'Uva updates!

2011-05-22T23:02:00.000-07:00

I finished up the second phase of The Cathedral stage... And just as a bonus (for presentation purposes), I've updated Jack's finisher. It needed some serious work... Specifically how it looked like he was ripping the opponent's crotch out. Seriously, watch it... Totally looks like that. Amateur mistake... or professional subtlety...

Enjoy!

So many guts!
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva Cathedral Work-in-Progress

2011-05-19T23:23:00.000-07:00

Did some more stage work for Son'Uva... This time featuring an alternate version of "The Cathedral"... This version would be for the final showdown with Son'Uva (You'll notice she's no longer in the background)... Anyway, there's more to do for this stage, but I think it's a good work-in-progress.

I wouldn't watch this for too long, you might get a seizure... Don't sue me, you've been warned.

It takes two baybay,
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva Stage Update

2011-05-19T08:56:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a chance to work on the Bridge stage a little more... Specifically the bottom of the bridge. For now I'm just calling it the Boneyard. You'll notice my High School in the background as well... I'm not bitter.

Click Clack I was takin' a bath.

Those were the days.
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva Stage Finisher

2011-05-18T23:24:00.000-07:00

Got around to animating a stage-finisher... I'm calling the stage "badlands" until I can think of something a little... more... good. So anyway, this one was probably pretty obvious, but I had fun wid'it. Click n' love it.

Mmm, juicy!
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva: Generators Finisher

2011-05-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

Nothing huge in the way of Son'Uva development, but I worked on a stage finisher for the "Generators"... Thoughts?

And by thoughts I mean "Compliments",
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva Animations

2011-05-16T22:34:00.000-07:00

Also, if you're interested in viewing the updated animations for the complete lineup of fighters, here ya go...

Just remember all of this is property of both myself and Six AM Comics, so if you attempt to copy, duplicate (same thing?), steal or in any way make money off of our stuff (or claim credit for it), we'll burn your house down! ... With... Legal action! That's how that works, right? No? Well in any case, let's all play nice and leave the rough stuff to the Son'Uva characters... winky face emoticon.

Give it time to load, aight? It's a HUGE file...

Much love till' you steal my stuff!
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva: Maith Update II

2011-05-16T22:30:00.000-07:00

The saga continues! Finally finished up Maith's animations... The end draweth nigh?? Did I even spell "nigh" right? Who knows, but what I do know is that Maith turned out to be a MUCH more intense character than originally intended. Who uses blood as a weapon??

Click the image below to view Maith's animations... As always, give it time to load.

BLOOOOD.
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva: Maith Update

2011-05-15T21:18:00.000-07:00

After going back and re-creating some of Nark's animations, I figured another color-swapped character deserved the same affection... Maith. There's still much to do, but here's a lil' glimpse into how it's coming... Click the image to view the animation.

Aaaaaand thoughts?
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva Demo

2011-05-13T12:31:00.000-07:00

So yeah, Blogger in all of its awesomeness somehow managed to delete my latest Son'Uva post due to some technicality... Well no matter, I'm just going to post the same basic thing, only animated! So yeah, I made a new stage and here's a (silent) animation of that stage in all it's glory. Click the image below and enjoy! Just be patient while it loads.

Blogger.
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sonuva Background - Floating Bridge

2011-05-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

Created a new background for Sonuva! You'll notice this one is a lot longer (height) than the others... I think it's pretty self-explanatory as to why that is... Thoughts?

Don't fally off the bridgey!
~ Mark

Sonuva by Mark Marianelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Scholars #21

2011-05-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

Scholars! My most cherished of web comics... This week I used an idea my good friend "The Keith" sketched out for me a few years ago that I've been meaning to illustrate for a while now. So thank you, The Keith... You are an inspiration to us all!

Enjoy! Click the image for a larger view.

Well played Keith,
~ Mark

Tangled Up

2011-05-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

I gave a slight preview of this image in a post I wrote about my wife (fiance at the time)... I didn't post the entire illustration cause we were going to have it out on display at our wedding and didn't want it to be something everyone had seen already... So anyway, I'm guessing there's a good chunk of people out there who haven't had a chance to see this, so here ya go!

The drawing was taken from a scene in the Disney movie "Tangled", where the two main characters share a tender moment in a boat with lights filling up the night sky... My mom says Rach and I look like the characters in that movie, so I went ahead and drew us in the scene using our wedding colors.

Untangle that!
~ Mark

Night of the Unread!!

2011-05-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

Why do these things come into my head...

Honestly, it's from a deep hatred for books and an intense love for Zombies. I guess that's fairly simple.

BEWARE!!
~ Mark

Coldstone

2011-05-02T13:39:00.000-07:00

I've been getting my fix of Ice Cream over the past couple years, my wife is a "Coldstone Creamery" fanatic... And that's putting it lightly. I always found Starbucks' coffee sizes to be a little odd with all the Italian (Latin? French?) words in place of Small, Medium and Large, but Coldstone SERIOUSLY takes the cake on this one.

They almost make you feel bad for getting anything smaller than a large with names like "Like It", "Love It" and "Gotta Have It"... Seriously? If I get a small it means I only kinda' like your ice cream? Of course not! I freaking love it! Don't guilt me into getting larger sizes to make you feel better about your product, yo! If you ever decide to make another size larger, I have a suggestion...

Cause seriously, that's how we feel when we order something that unnecessary.

Love it,
~ Mark

P.S. - This one's for you, Rach.

On Easter...

2011-04-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

I imagine I'm a little late on this post… But I mean, Easter is on a different date every year, so maybe if you read this a year from now it'll be right on time! … Right? Yeah, I guess not… But I have an excuse, I've been on a Honeymoon (rather MY honeymoon) for the past couple weeks and I only got back a few days ago… Then the cold weather of New England depressed me too much to really pull together anything creative. Sad times indeed.

In any case, the day after we arrived back in New England was Good Friday… And the Easter festivities commenced! i.e. Come Sunday we were engorged in food and family. Easter's a funny holiday for me… Not that there's anything truly comedic about what it stands for, but I get overwhelmed in how people respond to it. I've said it a hundred times, but I'll say it again… I was raised in church and I am very much a Christian. So for me, every Easter is dedicated to the death and resurrection of Christ. The Jews dedicate this time of year to Passover, recalling the exodus of the Jews from Egypt and anticipating the coming of their Messiah. Everybody else on the planet eats candy and hunts for eggs!

Three very distinct traditions, yet I find myself pulled in all three directions. Like I said, we returned on Good Friday, which is generally when my father (A devout Christian who studies Hebrew customs in his free time) performs a Seder for his church, detailing the specifics of Passover and showing how each tradition points to the coming of Christ, etc… So I get my fill of Passover. Then on Sunday, every church on the planet spends the morning telling people how we should be calling it Resurrection Sunday… If you call it "Easter", you're in for a world of hurt. There's no mention of a magical bunny who poops candy eggs, just talk of Christ dying on a cross, conquering Death, and rising from the grave on the third day.

…

And don't take this as sacrilegious, but EVERY time a Pastor talks about how Christ Conquered Death, this image pops into my head…

The reason most churches shy away from the name "Easter" is because it comes from a Babylonian god named "Ishtar" … Not 100% on the spelling, but you get the gist. Ishtar was the god (goddess?) of fertility… Which when you think about it, explains a lot about how Easter is generally celebrated. Bunnies are about as fertile as you get and eggs should be pretty obvious as well. Which brings me to Easter Egg Hunts… Apparently that too is a Babylonian custom where people "Hunt" for fertility… So next time you're curious why your children are getting pregnant at such young ages, think about how many eggs they found the previous year…

Though I'd be careful about how you go about opening those plastic eggs… It's not always candy…

Easter is an oddball in the Holiday lineup… Especially when you think about how many movies have been made about it. Name the first Easter movie that pops into your head… HOP, right? When did that come out? This year? Think about another Easter movie… There's practically NONE. And it's one of the few holidays that doesn't have some sort of Horror film attached to it… Even Independence Day managed to get Aliens!

I have a suggestion… Alien Doom Bunny Pods.

I guess that's really all I have to say on the subject… Easter's just a funny time of year. So many cultures, so many oddities, so many images in my head… I call it Easter solely because it's easier than saying "Happy Resurrection Day, my brother!", my parents won't say it, but we're both on the same page I think. We know what we're celebrating... It ain't fertility. Come to think of it, with the amount of abortions in the country, I don't think ANYBODY is celebrating their fertile nature... Just sayin'.

Savior Suplex!
~ Mark

Squirrel

2011-04-05T08:43:00.000-07:00

So yeah... I drew this squirrel. He has an acorn. He looks surprised.

I'm surprised this is the best I got right now,
~ Mark

TO THE FATMOBILE!

2011-04-04T10:43:00.000-07:00

You know, I'm not sure this illustration requires any sort of description... I've been attempting to draw the Dark Knight himself since the 4th grade... It's kind of sad that this is my strongest effort to date.

To the Fatmobile, Robin!
~ Mark

Rachael

2011-04-03T03:23:00.000-07:00

So I'm getting married. Those are words which I've practiced saying to myself in fantasy and make-believe for nearly 22 years. You ever notice how if you say a word long enough, it almost doesn't sound like tangible dialect anymore? That's kind of the effect I get from those words. I've been thinking about the concept for so long that now that it's finally happening, I can't wrap my mind around it. I keep thinking the world could end at any moment because now that I'm about to achieve my life's goal, I don't know what I'm gonna do. It was always sort of my end game. Game over… But not in a "oh crap I'm out of quarters" sense. It's more like beating a game you've spent the greater part of the year trying to accomplish, only to find yourself wandering around the house aimlessly trying to figure out what do next. I suppose kids and a family is the next possible answer… And no doubt, that's my future as well, but how do I take all this in? 22 years of wishing, praying and even begging.

I remember my first crush. First grade. I walked in the room, looked around at all the other students and there she was. Megan L. Holy crap, it was like I had never met a member of the female race before. It was in that moment that I started thinking about the future. I was raised in a Christian home, the ideology was, you meet the girl of your dreams, you get married, you die and go to heaven. Life is simple when you're young and Christian boy. I still remember thinking her buck teeth were like Chicklets from heaven. See, while most boys were giving themselves Ye Olde "Circle, Circle, Dot, Dot" treatment, I was thinking up schemes to "rescue the princess"… Good Lord, there were so many Castles and she was constantly in another. I was the only boy in school playing house instead of football or tag. Megan was always mom, I was always dad… Screw sports, I wanted me a wife! What made that year even more interesting was there was this girl, Rachel M., who used to chase me around the playground at recess and try kissing my hand. I was disgusted by her because I felt like a committed man (sad story is, she ended up being one of the hottest girls in High School. You win some, you lose some). It's how the majority of my crushes went from there on… One crush, one year, no other possibilities. I say one year because every school year you had a different class. I didn't see Megan again frequently until High School when she was in my French Class. Kids get distracted easily, you go through phases of interest. One year I was into Batman Action Figures, the next it was Terminator, the next it was X-Men, and so on and so forth. It was the same with crushes… Sadly, this is a concept most men don't grow out of until they're in their 30s. So sad.

In any case, second grade rolled around and it was Rebecca M. Playing "house" was so last year. I was on to bigger and badder schemes. I remember having some of my friends chase her around the playground so that I could save her and be the hero. It kinda' worked… That is until one of those friends forgot the plan and pushed me over. Brian C… I was forced to improvise and modify my plan. Rather than continue the tough guy hero approach. I fell right over and lied there like I got hurt trying to save her. Her sympathy was mine! … Pathetic. I'm not going to go through every crush I had. The point of all this is, my whole life has revolved around finding that special someone. Every year a new girl, every year a new disappointment. By my third crush, I encountered my first rejection. I finally built up enough nerve to ask out the girl of my dreams. It was 5th grade and her name was Sarah. My Lord, if she wasn't the most beautiful thing a kid could have laid eyes on. I obsessed over asking her out to the point where I was starting to ask my friends for advice. The old "Bro's before Ho's" concept doesn't develop until High School/College and I fell victim to that unfortunate truth. By the time I had built up enough nerve to ask her out in all my grade school innocence (i.e. tell your friend to tell her you like her), it turns out that friend had already asked her out and she accepted. And I got a taste of my very first "Just Friends" speech.

Women. Girls. Females. Please heed my word… Just be rude to boys. Don't say you want to be friends… Say your'e gay and that we're too manly to appease to that preference. It's easier on us AND it's an ego boost like no other.

From here on out it was rejection after rejection after a little more rejection. And as this continued, the concept of marriage began to slip faintly into the realm of science fiction. Sure, a girlfriend here, a girlfriend there… Nothing solid, nothing permanent… Nothing even all that interesting. I'v been turned down, cheated on, toyed with… I've gotten the "friend speech" on a date before the appetizers even came out at dinner… And had to sit through the entire meal with her. Seriously, I'd like to see you TRY to get through a meal like that without ripping your nails out and gritting your teeth to a fine powder. Worst 45 minutes of my life. I loath you, Pollyanna. I even flew down to Florida for a girl only to have her change her mind about her interest in my moments after getting off the plane. I want my money back, !@#$…

If you're not getting the point yet, I'm trying to say finding love is gauntlet of hurt… If you can make it through without finding yourself bi-curious, misogynistic, dead or socially awkward, then you find something more rare and precious than anything today's culture can offer you. You see, I think people all too often give up, settle or try to out-devastate the opposite sex in some horribly twisted game of cat and mouse. The world tells you to conquer as many women as you can until your libido is ready to settle down and admit defeat. At the end of that road is little more than two tired, worn out people with too much baggage to settle down with each other. It's why so many don't even bother to unpack. It's easier to visit and hit the road again.

I'm happy that my relationships were few and far between… I feel like I have more to give. Despite how hard it was to see that light at the end of the tunnel, I kept running towards it. That light is mere days away from me and I can't even sleep I'm so excited. That's why it's 6:13 in the morning and I've been up for over an hour. Do I wish this could have come sooner? Absolutely… But I'm grateful it didn't. Through all the rejection and hurt, I came to appreciate what it is to be with someone who truly loves you as much as you've been yearning to love them. Had we found each other sooner, I may have taken it for granite and ultimately ruined the whole thing. Truth be told I'm happier than I've ever been in my life… And after two years with this woman I can safely conclude it's not the hype of a new relationship, or the captivation of laying my eyes on a beautiful woman for the first time.

Rachael, it's like you've replenished my faith in a heart's single desire to catch the ear of God and grant a miracle. You excite me now just as you did when we first laughed together in Portland, Maine. I haven't stopped laughing with you since and I plan to laugh with you through all of life's comedy. I love you to the point of insomnia and I hope I don't sleep through a single moment with you.

So much closer,
~ Mark

4

2011-03-31T22:13:00.000-07:00

Decided to do some story boarding tonight, quick sketches for a graphic novel I hope to make someday. I've posted this character in the past (one, two), but anyway, it's called "4".

Thoughts?
~ Mark

How to be a kid...

2011-03-30T14:07:00.000-07:00

I'm a sucker for nostalgia... It's a drug for me. I'd like to say something like, "I'd love to crawl back into my 5 year old body", but I'm fairly certain someone would read that and call the cops on me. So let's just say, it'd be nice to relive my childhood. Not in an old-man, "end of my life and I'm full of useless regret", kind of way... Just more of a general desire to return to simplicity. Because when you really think about childhood, it's just simple living. Sure, when you're in it you don't see it. You're stressed over bullies, bad grades, curfews, physical limitations and, of course, getting the same Happy Meal toy you got last week. Yes, I'm aware that there are children who had to deal with REAL issues... But this isn't about them, this is about me and all my upper-middle class white boy problems.

But back to nostalgia. I helped my parents gather some things out of their garage last weekend to bring to the dump and was thrown back in time 20 years. There's an overwhelming sense of familiarity every time I visit my folks... The house they live in is the only house I've ever known. They moved in back in 1981, I was then born in 83'... The greatest housewarming gift anyone could ask for. (Actually, the greatest housewarming gift was received at "La Hacienda del Rio" in Nashua, NH circa 1984... Don't feed a baby Mexican food). Since then, "HOME" for me has always been that house in Derry, NH. I drive my fiance insane calling that house "home" because to her, home is where you live. It's a concept nobody can understand unless they've lived in the same place their whole life. I walk into that place and every room, every corner, every outdoor scent brings with it a flood of memories. I look at the side of the house and remember throwing basketballs against it and teaching myself how to dribble. I look in the bathroom and remember taking baths and pitting your "Ghostbusters" action figures against the dreaded toxic water bubbles. I lie down in my old bedroom and remember sitting at my old desk drawing "Power Rangers" while my DC Talk - Free At Last cassette plays on a Christmas evening.

The point is, it makes me feel like a kid again... And I like that. It's a carefree, relaxing feeling. I then go back to my apartment, go to bed and wake up on a Saturday morning. Still feeling the effects of nostalgia, I turn on the tv to watch some Saturday Morning Cartoons, curious of what kids are watching these days. Oh... what disappointment. I don't know if anyone's already gone on a rant about this, but Kid's shows SUCK nowadays. If it isn't some generic animé CRAP involving trading cards and flashy colors, it's a culturally diverse educational show teaching kids how to speak Lithuanian. It's complete garbage! Not to sound all "Motherland-y", but since when did we start outsourcing all our animation programs to Mexico and Japan?? Yeah, it's a given that America is behind on animation, but COME ON. That was half the charm of our programming, it was just bare-bones, old fashioned entertainment... It didn't have to be GOOD... It just had to be ON!

But I'm not writing this long-winded post to complain about cartoons... I watched the commercials. When I was little, commercials weren't so bad because they were basically a sneak peak of what you were going to ask for come Christmas. Action figures, play sets, NERF weaponry, Super Soakers (I never did get the 200), and two words... CROSS. FIRE. epic. But there's none of that anymore... It's all Yu-Gi-Oh Cards, Video Games and online digital pet/dolls simulation nonsense… When did it become a favored past time to sit in front of a computer and pretend to have a doll? Personally, I love the internet… Without it, I'd be out of a job. But I am SO grateful it wasn't around when I was growing up. I never would have gone outside. Sure, the NES ruined a sunny day or two, but as a kid in the 80s/90s, there were other things to distract me. Like going outside. Or… friends (though that came to a screeching halt once the awkward Middle School years kicked in). I guess digital dolls are weird to me because I grew up in the era of "Action Figures".

My point is, I don't think kids really know how to be kids anymore. Before the internet, we had to force ourselves to be creative. If we were into something, we went outside, pretended we were in that world… We'd dress up, wrestle, explore, make goofy videos with our parents' expensive cameras (and probably break them… getting in trouble is half the fun of being a kid). I don't have kids, so maybe I'm wrong about how they spend their time… I'm just going off of what I see… Which isn't much, as I suspect you can get in trouble sitting around watching kids that aren't yours all day.

I'll touch briefly on being imaginative. Every kid wants to be a superhero, or any kind of hero for that matter. When I was little, I fantasized about hostage situations, running in and saving the day, rescuing the girl. If I was alone, that's where action figures and "Wrestling Buddies" came in. You can't punch your friend in the face, but you can practically murder a stuffed doll, rip out the stuffing and wear its head like a hat when you're done with it. Stuff a "hero" wouldn't do, but this is make-believe, have a little fun with it, be violent… You're a boy for God's sake! And if you couldn't flat out act the scenario out, that's where your action figures came in… Let me tell you, I'm one of the few kids out there who ENJOYED getting sent to their room for misbehaving. That's where my magical toy kingdom lived. I had every batman action figure known to man in there, I had all kinds of craft supplies and drawing utensils. Getting sent to my room meant it's time for mayhem! Nowadays kids just go to their room, sulk, and play XBox when they get released from their bedroom prison.

I TRIED to get in trouble when school was out for the Summer, that way my parents wouldn't get on me about not going outside or spending too much time in my room. Why would I do that in the summer? I'll explain… I loved me some Mortal Kombat when I was little. LOVED it. And every year in the summer, my room became an arena of make-believe death. I held tournaments for my toys. I built spike pits out of cardboard and toothpicks, build arenas out of my desk and a bunch of toy dinosaurs, had action figures ready to burst into pieces on command, and an assortment of visual effects that would make Pan's Labyrinth look like child's play. I had clay for creating "Clay Man", the champion of the toy tournament, I had different torn up colored cotton balls for fake blood, I would even go to those slot machine toy dispensers at the grocery store and buy tons of that rubbery goop that every mom hated because it stains everything it touches and ALWAYS ends up dried to the ceiling. Let's just say if toys could talk… They wouldn't… Because I killed them ALL.

Maybe that's just being a kid… Or maybe those are just the early stages of a sociopath. Either way, I didn't need a Sega Genesis to play with fake violence. Really, whatever games I couldn't play, I just found alternative ways of enjoying them. I didn't NEED video games, I didn't NEED movies and I didn't NEED to spend hours in front of a television. If I was grounded from the NES, I just ran around outside touching flowers, eating leaves and pretending to fly… Which explains a lot I suppose. Me and the other neighborhood kids would dig up rocks and pretend they were Dinosaur bones, we'd go exploring in the woods, we'd have water-gun fights and play in the pool. I'll tell you what we DIDN'T do though… We didn't play stupid card games and collect Pokéballs. The closest thing we had to that were POGs… And we all know how that ended… Quickly.

I know kids still do the things I did, but I just don't understand why it feels like those things have been watered down. Television cartoon violence has been replaced with educational programming, toys have been replaced with online games, and cartoons are little more than animé or animé rip-offs. I'd complain about how they're just used to sell card-games… But then, cartoons have always been used to sell something. In my time it was for action figures and play sets. But those allowed us to be creative, it was something you could actually play with, interact with… All this other stuff is little more than Dungeons & Dragons… or Go Fish. What they should be selling are playing card templates so kids can create their own whatever-mons, let them be creative, use their imagination. You know what? I'm gonna make those and sell them. Don't use that idea…

I'll sue the pants off you!
~ Mark

more promotionals for something you won't see in a lil' while...

2011-03-24T22:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, The Keith, you bet your bum bum I'm still working on this...
~ Mark

Some Sketches...

2011-03-23T22:11:00.000-07:00

I was going through some old piles of paper, doodles and sketchbooks and found a few gems that I had all but forgotten about... The first is this pile of frogs. I drew it for someone who liked frogs. Y'know, there's really not a whole lot to say about it, I just drew some dang frogs. I think I found the photo it's based on somewhere on google images...

This next one was something I whipped up for a girl who sang... music... Obviously hasn't gotten anywhere with it otherwise I'd just be linking to her on wikipedia, in the meantime we'll just call her music girl... And this was her logo... That was never officially a logo... Basic Black & White...

Aaaaand up next! This is a guitar which has apparently been completely ignited by the holy spirit. It looks all 90's glow-in-the-dark... ish. There's no logic behind that. I just like making things glow. Next stop, my teeth!

Last but not least... Though technically it is least, because I spent the least amount of time preparing this one for the web. We have a tree that I titled "Branches in the Shadows"... It's pretty much a ghost tree... But in black & white. I think it was a season of negative space for me.

Thus concludes my random sketches.
~ Mark

Coloring Book!

2011-03-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

So at the suggestion of my good friend Kevin, I've started de-colorizing some of my drawings and I'm making them into a coloring book of sorts. I'm featuring them on Six AM Comics if anyone's interested. Just download, print and color!

And if you want, email me with the results of your coloring adventures, I'd be curious to see em'.

Here's one of them (probably the best):

Color away!
~ Mark

WWF Threadless Design

2011-03-23T07:05:00.000-07:00

Looks like I got another design in on Threadless... Please score it/vote for it/whatever you gotta' do to get it printed! I NEEDS IT!!

http://www.threadless.com/submission/330841/Remembering_the_True_Titans

Yeah... Vote it up! Unless you want me to keep wasting my time with these posts;)
~ Mark