Sketch-Off this Friday!

I am doing one of my "Twitter Sketch-Offs" this Friday! For those who don't know, sketch-offs are where I live-draw pictures like these based on your tweeted (or emailed) suggestions, and then let any interested folks purchase the finished drawings.

This time around, I am in the mood to draw some superheroes! So I am looking for you to suggest one of two things:

a) a style/powerset to give to an existing Sam and Fuzzy character (ie: Fuzzy with ice powers, Fig Pig with laser vision, Sam with ultra high-speed typing)

b) an existing superhero for me to reimagine/redesign into how I'd draw them if they were a Sam and Fuzzy character

I'll be livedrawing all these suckers this Friday -- one batch in the afternoon starting at 1PM PST, and one batch in the evening starting at 7PM PST. You can send me your suggestions then (not now please!) by twitter or email, and watch the finished drawings come in on twitter and livestream. And like previous times, I'll be selling the finished drawings for $25, either to the original concept suggester or to the first other person who asks. It should be fun!

It's probably about that time for me to remind everyone about the (relatively) new Skull Panda webcomic, a terrifying collaboration between myself and infamous alternative cartoonist Rikk Estoban. (The redesigned Sam and Fuzzy site will have a proper permanent link to it, but until that's ready to go live, I'll just keep harping about it down here now and then.)

Thanks for all the kind words about the new story, everyone! I'm thrilled to see so many of you are as into it as I am. There is a lot of interesting stuff ahead!

-Sam Logan

Application Pending

A new story begins today! I don't want to say anything about it other than that I am very excited about it. So I won't!

Only two weeks until Anime Revolution, my next public appearance here in my hometown of Vancouver! AR is the third first-year show I've done in Van this year, after Fan Expo Vancouver and the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival. Hopefully it will be as succesful as those two shows were!

Thanks to everyone who has been picking up the new Buddy and Ninja Mafia t-shirts! Or any of the other Sam and Fuzzy shirts, books or assorted paraphernalia, for that matter. For the past several months now I have cartooned full-time and lived nearly entirely off the support and generosity of you guys, which is something that I never cease to be amazed by or appreciate.

-Sam Logan

Sam and Fuzzy Q & A: Crime Edition
Got a question you want answered? Just drop me an email with "Q & A" in the subject line!

"Do your ideas for plots always originate with Sam and Fuzzy, or do you sometimes think of a random plot and then adapt it to Sam and Fuzzy?" -Kathryn

Plots not so much. Most of the story ideas I've come up with outside Sam and Fuzzy have stayed outside. (And thus far, remain unrealized entirely, but hopefully that will change someday!) Sam and Fuzzy is driven very directly by it's larger, long term story... even the relatively stand-alone individual smaller stories are almost always crafted to fill specific narrative or character arc needs.

But characters are another story! The world of Sam and Fuzzy is full of such weird and diverse people and creatures... it's very easy to slip an unusual character in even when they were originally designed for another project. (Theophilus the cat is a good example of this.)

"I saw news about this and couldn't help but being immediately reminded of Sam and Fuzzy. Snoop "Lion" telling everyone he wants to make an album without any rapping just seemed like something out of the Noosehead storyline. I hope the guy doesn't mysteriously die soon... I suppose this isn't really a Q&A style question. I just wanted to let you, and hopefully many other readers, know that reality is totally about to rip you off." -Jon

It's OK. I rip off reality all the time. We are totally even.

I see what you mean about that trailer! It is very easy to picture a jump cut inserted immediately after Snoop says "an album with no rapping," to Mr. Sin, watching YouTube in his darkened office, eyes narrowing.

"Referring to Wednesday's comic, is Brain actually Venom in cat form? I think Brain would make an awesome Venom in the Spiderman universe!" -Nick

Brain is... complicated. I probably shouldn't get into it because, you know... spoilers! He'd be a fun stand-in for Venom in a Sam and Fuzzy Spider-man parody, though.

Even though I've depicted Brain exactly as I planned from day one, I have been really (delightfully) surprised by how creepy these sequences have turned out. I guess some things look a lot more disturbing on paper than they do in your head!

That's a wrap for this week! Come back on Monday for SPLASH PAGE ACTION.

-Sam Logan