Right now I’m working on a new comic called Hurricane Baby for an anthology put together by wunderdude Joe Lambert. Hurricane Baby starts off with the lines “In the middle of America, Superman and Storm are having a baby,” and, oh no!, it ends up being an ever-growing hurricane.
The way I work, I always collect my roughs into a comic book I can hold in my hands. So for this one, I did my thumbnails on note cards that I scanned into Photoshop, and then used my Wacom tablet to create panel borders and redraw some areas. I print out the pages, staple them into a book, and then go back and edit:

You can tell I keep it a bit messy! At this point, I didn’t know exactly how I wanted the final art to look, but as I rummaged through my art supplies I found the goods: a blue Prismacolor pencil, a Kuretake brush pen, a stick of graphite, and digital screen tone:
I’m working on the final art for all of the 12 pages at the moment. It’s silly and lots of fun!

Back when I was working as a teacher assistant at UT, I created the illustrations for an American Sign Language course website. These were created using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Hop around the website to see over 100 illustrations and watch videos teaching you basic ASL!

How odd, one of my old, old comics is up for sale at Poopsheet Foundation!

I drew this while going to school in Austin, 2000 or 2001, at a time where I was focused on creating comics with, you know, characters. It’s been so long since I’ve drawn a conversation in comics! These folks are sitting at Spiderhouse Cafe, for all you Austinites. So I’d draw something, paste it up at Kinkos, leave comics at Spiderhouse and at Sound Exchange—I don’t think I even have a copy of this one anymore. This is one of the first mini-comics I made to give out. I probably wouldn’t have started doing comics if it weren’t for zinesters Ben Snakepit and Jeff Lewis, who would leave free copies of their comics around Austin.

Thanks to Rob Clough for the recent review of Polite Fiction 2. You can read a story from PF2 called Tree Island Birds here.

“Olivares’ comics have a visceral quality that’s an exemplar of the mark-making school of comics. That said, he’s fully embraced the temporal and narrative aspects of comics, fusing them with a vividly crude line that creates a remarkable immediacy of experience.”

I have about 5 copies still for sale, good porch-reading material.

Moved away from White River Junction and I’m now living in Medford, Mass., near Boston! Actually in Texas right now, visiting nieces and nephews.

Thanks to Penina for taking photos at the going-away party. The theme, of course, was Mexican Christmas. Pictured with wonderful roomies Betsey and Nick!