The Return of the Last Martian

Thursday marks my final strip in the KC Star for this run. It features the Last Martian and it will be posted online next week. In the meantime, you can check out the first Last Martian story. Let us know what you think!

Side note: I guess we won't be participating in the previous mentioned Comics Jam War this Saturday. Our local store had some trouble getting it all arranged. Oh well. Maybe next year.

Remember, a new Rook City story starts on Tuesday!

Webcomics and such

Well, the last page of the "Sleuth" story is up at the Rook City page. We'd love to hear any comments you have about the story now that it's wrapped up. Remember, though... Rook City will continue as a weekly webcomic (updates on Tuesdays).

Here are some other excellent webcomics that I have been checking out recently. Some of these update regularly and some don't. But they're all worth a look!

Copper- An excellent monthly comic by Kazu Kibuishi, starring a boy and his dog.
Count Your Sheep- Cool daily strip that is better than so much you'll see in the paper these days.
Cow and Buffalo- Dairy humor. Gotta love it.
Set To Sea- Drew Weing's current comic about a man forced onto a pirate ship. Great, great stuff.
Pup- This older strip by Drew will expand your concept of what webcomics can be.
Evil, Inc.- Where do supervillains go for customer service? Here.
FrankandFrank- So simple. Sooo funny. You can't look at these without smiling.
Holy Cow! Christian Comics- Dean Rankine's quirky adaptations of Bible tales. Truly unique and well done!
Panda Express- A beautifully rendered story of a girl and a panda.
Welton Colbert- Ryan Estrada (who's productivity puts all of us to shame) made up this cantankerous character you can't help but love.
The Tenth Life of Pischio the Cat- An epic tale starring a cat. Great drawing.
Spacegirl- Travis Charest is one of my favorite artists and this is a really fun comic he does semi-regularly.
Guffman and Godot- I always knew cats were evil. This strip proves it.

Check 'em out! They'll make ya feel good.

Happenings

Page 3 of the current Rook City story is now in print in the Star, and page 2 is online at the webcomics site. I was up (too) late last night finishing page 4 for next week. I'm pretty happy with how it all turned out. I think it has the feel that I was going for. And hopefully it sets up some things about Toby's character for future tales.

It's spring break! Now is when it's great to be a teacher... I'm hoping to get a lot done in this next week. Still trying to get Random Ink #1 ready for reprinting. Dusty has been working on a new pin-up for that book... sort of a preview for his upcoming Pixie Pirate story. It's some pretty dang fun stuff. You guys are going to love it!

More Rook City

Well, Rook City has been in print for a week now. In fact, the second installment was in today's Previews section of the KC Star. It's cool to think that a lot more people are getting to read our stuff now.

The first page of the new story is already on the Rook City webcomic page, along with past stories. Keep telling us what you think, either by comment here or email to us. We're addicted to feedback. Seriously.

I want to thank my wife, Laura, for all her help in writing the current story. A lot of the main plot twists were her idea. She has always served as my "creative consultant" (basically telling me if an idea is dumb or not), but it's been great to actually write something together. Dusty and I are both very lucky to have wives that not only tolerate our obsessions (comics, football, etc) but have become big fans themselves. Laura even won our fantasy football league this year. Oh yeah... I know how to choose 'em!

Rook City Goes Big-Time

The weekly Previews section of the Kansas City Star this week features a full-page Rook City story. That may be how some of you found this site! We will have a story in Previews throughout the month of March... that's five weeks. The first four pages will be one continuing Rook City tale, and the last installment will feature a Last Martian story (he's the guy in the top right corner of this page). We will post the first page of these stories on Tuesday.

But the really big news is... this is only the beginning! We are turning Rook City into a weekly webcomic. Every Tuesday a new page will be put up on the site. For free. That's right. So you might want to bookmark www.rookcity.com and check it every week for a fresh page! You can already read 10 pages of story on there right now. We will still be collecting these stories in print, as well.

Meanwhile, if you found this website after reading the first strip in Previews... we would love to hear your feedback on it! You can leave a comment here or shoot us an email at feedback@threetreesstudios.com.

Thanks for looking!

Major Website Update

Well, if you haven't seen it already... you might want to check out our fancy new opening menu. Finally got that thing colored. Plus, there's some new hidden goodies on there... you might want to click around.

You can check it out by clicking on the nice little picture here. And then come back here and leave a comment telling us what you think!

Ugh... I'm pretty sick of website stuff for the moment. Back to good ol' pen and ink and paper!

Random Stuff

Here's a new sketch for ya. May it give you strength in the dark times.

Got a three day weekend starting. There's a lot I want to accomplish... continuing to update the website, finish Random Ink #1 for reprinting, drawing the comic strip for the Previews section of the Kansas City Star... Hopefully, this all gets done.

An update on the Moonfall project mentioned earlier... it appears that the book is on hold. The soonest it will be printed will be April. But you will see it... one way or another.

Also, you can now subscribe to the feed for this news page. Just click on the link to the right.

Back to work! Feel free to leave some comments!

Name Change

Well, if you click on our COMICS page you might notice that we've made a slight alteration to one of our main series of stories. What was once Edge City is now Rook City. Why the switch? Well, it turns out there already is an Edge City out there. Oh well. Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks for a big announcement involving Rook City.

In other news... Elton, Dusty, and I spent Sunday meeting with a couple of other up-and-coming comics creators from the area (Nathan and Dwayne). It was a lot of fun just hanging out, showing each other what we were working on, and talking comics. I introduced everyone to the excellent Set to Sea and Pup webcomics by Drew Weing. (Mr. Weing, we bow to your skill...) Anyway, we hope to be able to collaborate with these guys in some way eventually.

It's pretty amazing how many comics guys there are in good ol' Joplin.

This Means War

This should be fun...

Some of you may have heard of 24 Hour Comics. Basically, it's an artistic marathon where one artist tries to complete 24 pages of comics in that many hours. I really want to try that sometime... maybe in summer when sleep is not as precious.

Anyway, the people at 24 HOUR COMICS DAY are organizing another national event. Basically, it is a shorter version of the 24 hour thing... this time the goal is 8 pages in 12 hours. And you can work in teams! It's called COMICS JAM WAR. The trick is that everything has to be done at a comic shop who agrees to host it. The winners get some cash and their story printed in an anthology of the event. I'm really jazzed about this! A chance to get together with other creators, make comix, promote a local store, maybe get new readers...

We've already got the Vintage Stock down here in Joplin to agree to do it. They are pretty excited about it. So you know where we'll be on April 1st.

Anyone else interested?

The Coming of Dusty

Some of you have noticed already that we have added twelve new drawings to our SKETCH page from a new creator, our good buddy Dusty Roberts. Well, he's not really new, just new to the site.

Dusty, Elton, and I all went to high school together back in Montana. We made mini-comics together back then, some of which you may be unfortunate enough to see someday. Dusty and I were both art majors at good ol' Missouri Southern State University here in Joplin. Eventually, Elton came down, too.

So now, we're all making comics together again. Dusty is working on some new stuff... a pin-up for the reprinted Random Ink #1 and hopefully a story for #2. He's got some really cool ideas percolating. Some of these sketches are from back in high school and some are much more recent. The one above shows one of his Pixie Pirates, a great idea that I can't wait to see in story form. I think you'll all agree that this guy has way too much talent and creativity for his own good...

I Won?

I've been checking out some comics-related podcasts for several weeks now, my favorite of which would have to be INDIE SPINNER RACK. It's all about independent comics, and the hosts (Charlito and Mr. Phil) do a nice job of promoting books and creators that deserve more attention. Plus... they're crazy. This show is highly entertaining.

Anyway, they had a contest where listeners could write in about their favorite indie book of 2005. I wrote in to nominate the excellent Kabuki: The Alchemy series by David Mack, and somehow... I won! As a reward, I get to be on one of the upcoming shows, to talk about Kabuki and other stuff. Hopefully, we can use this to promote our books a bit.

I'll let you all know when the show is going to be available for download.

Here are some other cool podcasts:
- Digital Strips (all about webcomics)
- Comic Geek Speak (a very popular podcast about mainstream books mostly)

Moonfall Preview

These are some random panels from the nine-page story that I recently finished for the Moonfall graphic novel. It is being put together by members of the Kansas City Comic Creators Network. It is an anthology, but with one central theme... the end of the world. The moon is crashing to the earth and all life is about to end. What do people do in those final hours? That is what our individual stories explore.

My tale is about a man who is isolated from his family during the crisis and has to deal with his feelings of frustration and fear. It was pretty different from anything I've done before. Pretty serious stuff. The art was fun and challenging. I wanted it to have the look of scratchboard, but I also wanted to experiment with brush pens. So... every white area you see in the story was originally black ink and then inverted to white after I scanned it in. I'm really happy with how the look of it turned out. It was definitely what I was going for, and the feedback I have got from people about it so far has been encouraging.

Anyway, we'll keep you all updated on the status of the graphic novel and how you can get a hold of it when it comes out.

Update

Hey everyone. I haven't been putting up much but I wanted to put some notes up about what we are working on. Seth has recently finished his story for Moonfall and it's really cool. I believe that his next project is going to be a story which will be running in the Kansas city star. I'm also excited that Dusty has began to discuss doing some stories from us. Next time I see him i'll talk to him about putting up some sketches, and set him up so that he can do stuff on the site if he wants.

As for me, I am still writing every day and have more than enough character and story ideas to keep everyone busy for the next ten years.

There is a threat looming though. Within a few week Oblivion is scheduled to be released. Since the last morrowind story dropped my productivity for a month it could be dangerous.

Elton Gahr, January 30

A Blog is Born...

Well, here we go with our brand new news blog. We're moving the News page here just to make it quicker and easier for us to post stuff. This should increase our updates considerably. No... seriously. It will. For sure. Maybe.

Lots o' stuff is in the works here at Three Trees. I just recently finished that Moonfall anthology story I'm working on with some KC comics guys. I'll post some preview images here soon. Not sure when that is coming out exactly, but we'll let you know.

We are getting ready to reprint Random Ink #1 as a full-size comic with added pages and a full color cover! Pretty excited about this... it will be our first book that really looks professional. Random Ink #2 is well underway. We are trying to bring in a couple of new creators to help out... including our buddy, Dusty Roberts. You all will really dig his stuff when you see it.

Keep watching our website over the next few weeks, because we'll be adding lots of new content. We also have a big announcement coming up... all I can tell you now is that it involves webcomics.

Thanks for sticking with us!