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I’ve been super busy this week with several new projects including a cover commission from my good friends over at DWAP Productions. The cover is for the latest issue of Caffeine Dreams. I‘ve done interior art for this magazine as well. It’s an interesting read. For comics lovers.

In other news, apparently my laptop’s problems were worse than I thought. Apple offers a nice one-touch-data-transfer option to pull all 90 Gigabytes of my applications, files and presets from my old G4 PowerBook onto my new iMac in a few short hours.

I had no such experience. My laptop’s hard disk has just enough damage to be inconvenient. A week later and I’m still transferring files but I’m still really happy to have a new computer.

Last week ended with the purchase of a new mac. I had hoped to put it off but my old laptop of four and a half years decided otherwise.

The switch over from old to new is a really easy one-step, one-button process. Those Apple guys think of everything. Except that my old laptop has hard disk problems that prevent me from doing anything in one step. I’ve spent the past four days transferring files from the old mac to the new one.

Tiring as this all may be, (haven’t slept more than a dozen hours in those four days) I feel inspired every time I look at my new 24” iMac. So, I made the logo above to celebrate. I’m offering it as a desktop wallpaper you can download HERE.

I have no aversion to trees but I tend to avoid the more rural areas of Japan. Even the parks in Tokyo I’ve been avoiding for some time. Not that I dislike them, I just jones for the Kafka-esc streets of downtown Tokyo a bit more than I do for parks.

In 2007, a friend of mine told me of a park that was a very heavy spot for ghosts. So, I took myself to that park at 2am. With camera in hand I sat outside a particular bathroom in the park, supposedly the ghost epicenter, hoping to take pictures of the supernatural. I was there for about an hour. And since I found no ghosts it was several years before I went back. This was my introduction to Hikarigaoka Park.

Recently, I was back in the area to help a friend apartment hunting. And in the daytime the park looked quite different. It was spacious and inviting. But a wise woman once told me, “Beware the empty spaces. For they have a memory.” If ever there were a place to find ghosts, I thought this was it. As I understand it, this area was used as a Japanese airbase in World War 2. Post war it became Grant Heights Army base under the US military before being returned to Japan in 1973. The area was then turned into a park, a symbol of peace to offset the harshness of war and post war occupation. And the secret underground rail line that stretched from the base to the Tokyo parliament is now a public subway, the Oedo Line.

But the park itself bares no obvious markings of its history. In fact, I feel only positive when I’m there. The park is often filled with people playing in it’s many tennis courts, basketball hoops, baseball fields and playgrounds. There are even camping grounds and a bird sanctuary.

There are almost always people playing music. The picture above was drawn to the sound of someone practicing the clarinet. I don’t know the classical piece she was playing but it set a delightful mood. And despite the rain, I stayed for an hour painting trees while getting soaked.

Drawing in the rain.

I don’t often do superheroes. Yes, I am a comic artist but I’ve always preferred the finite Graphic Novel or the one off comics of indie-artists. Not that there aren’t cool hero comics out there, I just prefer things to have a beginning, a middle and most definitely an end. And as of this writing Batman is on its 687th issue.

An extremely patient friend of mine suggested I do this piece. Having worked with me over the past few years and across several reinventions of my art style, he felt it just fit. I had my doubts at the initial sketch but as it began to unfold and evolve, it slipped into my portfolio. Thanks, Dale!

Last year, I met an architect whose name is Tetsuo. Maybe you’ve seen his most recent achievement: a newly constructed building on the Waseda University campus. He showed me a brochure of the building, something akin to the Death Star, all black-shiny metal and concrete. He was so proud. I’m sure it will serve the faculty and students well.

He told me about his school days. How he often went to old buildings to study their construction and design. One story in particular stands out in my mind. He had traveled to Tokyo station, the Marunouchi side, to examine what used to be the Emperor’s entrance to the train.

The Emperor’s entrance, I assume, is the center section of the Marunouchi exit. Somewhere around this point, either Tetsuo’s English or my memory of the conversation begins to fail. From my recollection, he was looking at the entrance when he noticed a small, unmarked door next to the men’s room. He went to the station manager’s office to ask about it and was offered a peek inside.

Behind the door was a long hallway lit intermittently by a string of light bulbs nailed to the ceiling. The hall was lined with elevators that traveled up to the train platforms of the station. Water dripped into large pools under the elevators. Rust and mold everywhere.

The station master giving my friend the tour said this was, at one time, wheelchair access to the trains but was discontinued after the stairs of the station were retrofitted with wheelchair lifts.

It has been suggested to me since by other people that Tetsuo’s account, or at least my memory of it, is dubious. And this hall of rusted elevators was, in fact, the Emperor’s entrance to Tokyo station.

Trying to corroborate one of the two stories I started asking other people about the Tetsuo’s hall or the Emperor’s entrance and got a third story: The Emperor’s entrance was not the rusty hallway near the men’s room or the center section of the Marunouchi exit but was, until recently, a secret underground passageway that was established, I assume, sometime after the Prime Minister Hara Takashi was assassinated at the south gates in 1921.

Several people I’ve talked to remember the current Emperor announcing a few years ago that the secret passageway would be closed, as it was now safe to walk amongst common people. One person I spoke to felt the idea of there being a secret tunnel that shuffled the Emperor to and fro under the feet of common people seemed distasteful. She found it hard to believe such a system would exist but nevertheless remembered the announcement.

After all these stories, I went to Tokyo station to see some of these spots mentioned above with my own eyes to discover that the entire area is currently under construction and looks like it wont be completed for some time. But I fear Tetsuo’s hallway, at least, will not survive the renovation and fade into the forgotten city.

A few weeks ago I had a sudden flash of inspiration partially responsible for the website you are now reading. Another part of that flash was the idea for a new series to champion farther my artistic endeavors.

The effect / inspiration in painting is mostly in my efforts to control my oversized brush and finding that happy accident and incorporating it into the piece as I go. With this one caveat: It always takes me much longer to paint as I am constantly pushing my brush into new ideas as I go and working my way out of trouble when I find it.

This first piece explores some of the themes I’ve struggled with as an American émigré to Tokyo. Starting with some familiar elements: a beautiful woman, a cool car, and the city. And adding some other sparks and specs: a Sci-fi theme and a gun to give her a bit of a femme fatal or an “in over her head” sense of danger.

To be honest, my expectations of any piece almost always change as I work on it. The sketch is always stylistically quite different from the finished piece. But much less than fighting with the ink and color I find it informs my progress and reinvigorates me as I work.

This piece is no exception.

And that happy accident I look for? This time it developed into it’s own painting.

The final two pieces are available, for a limited time, here as downloadable wallpapers in four sizes for your desktop or iphone.

A year or so ago I was hanging out in Kanda, on the east side of town, when I found these lantern-signs all over the area. Not something I would see on the west side, where I live, and though I had lived in the east before I somehow missed them. I was inspired to sketch, so here you go.

A Japanese friend asked once, “Why do foreigners always seem to cling to the traditional parts of Japan?” Although I think this may be true for some ex-pats living in Japan I don’t think it’s the common sentiment of foreigners here. There is a definite sense that Japanese have “let go” of a lot of the old art forms and there are some foreign people who become the sole custodians of those arts. I’ve never considered myself to be one of them although I may be drifting toward that as my art begins to take on some aspects of sumi-e.

But the thing that inspires me most is not the art styling of the old masters or a sense of rustic wabi-sabi but the way the old is retrofitted with the new. The zig-zag of the Tokyo streets as new buildings try to fit around old ones whose owners have decided not to give up their old way of life. This kind of thing being so prevalent in Tokyo that it reaches beyond frugal convenience to a kind of tortured panache.

Tokyo has a definite attitude toward itself somewhat in common with other large cities but there is something more here, the city is layered not only in old and new but also in the architecture and planning of the city. Many of the major stations in Tokyo have sprawling basement shopping centers below and sky rise hotels and restaurants above. There is also a sense of play and mischief. The Yamanote train line, as just one example, traveling in a circle around central Tokyo is timed to take exactly one hour to complete it’s loop essentially making Tokyo a giant clock- a monument to a very time conscious society, tick-tock-ing one station every two minutes.

Within all of this there are far too many nooks and crannies to explore here but that is half the fun. There is always something to explore and even after 18 years in Japan there is still a lot that is new to me.

Welcome to the new design! It was a year ago that I made my first upgrade to this site. Big, bold pictures to impress with twitter and even a Japanese blog. But for the past few months I’ve hardly touched it. My blog should inspire me to write and post. But it hasn’t. This time around I’ve decided to remove all of that. Time to refocus. So, with the clutter and chaos of the old design, gone are the twitter feeds, the Japanese blog and the really large pictures at the top. You can still click on the pictures in the posts to get your big picture fix, though. My blog looks much cleaner and simpler but with that it is more dynamic, intuitive and focused. And, most of all, it inspires me.
Not everything is up and it may take some time to repost all of the elbis comic and reopen the store but I’ve decided to wipe the slate clean and build rather than let the old site sit untouched.

Ah, at long last I can return to the things I love. No new stories yet as Elbis is currently searching for a new home.
Feels good to be painting again, though. I’ve been away from it for far too long.