For over twenty years I’ve been making graphic novels, but none brought quite the kind of joy as my first one called GEAR. It was originally published by my pal Rob Schrab’s Fireman Press but later got picked up by Image comics, where we hammered together some colors for it. Now, after twenty years, we got a chance to tidy up some of the art and colors (Some of the pages were so abstract that readers couldn’t follow the story) and it’s coming out well thanks to my colorist, Katherine Garner! Here’s one of the newly recolored pages in all its glory:
Some of you may not know it, but pre-orders of books deeply effects the overall sales. Amazon has some of the best pre-order tracking and they market accordingly, so if you’re a fan of my work, or are curious to own a spanking new copy of GEAR, head over to my Amazon page and preorder the new copy before it comes out this July:
https://www.amazon.com/Doug-TenNapel/e/B001K7Z214
One of the long term problems with being an artist and an “inside boy” is that my body just withers into nothing. As I get older, I’ve had to exercise regularly to maintain my energy at the art table. It’s like life told me I couldn’t just be in the studio forever or I would wilt. So I started going to the gym regularly, and even the gym is pretty abstract when you think about it. We don’t generally do hard labor, but we want our bodies to look like we’ve done hard labor so we go to the gym and do hard labor, we don’t go outside and dig ditches.
To counter this, I give myself big outdoor projects to sculpt my backyard into a paradise for the Beloved Mrs. TenNapel. This month, I started building a koi pond which at first broke my back, but now my strength is catching up and I’m digging ditches with a purpose! I’m trying to post regular updates on my work and you can follow along by joining the live feeds from my facebook channel here:
https://www.facebook.com/dougtennapel/
While some of you have followed my youtube channel, I also started a Vimeo channel which has quite a few tutorials you might like. Subscribing helps, but no pressure… I just want the little movies I make to be seen. I try to keep the information tight and easy to watch in under five minutes:
https://vimeo.com/dougtennapel
Finally, if you want to learn more about my entertainment career outside of comics, you can look here:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0855066/