EPUB

 specific to iBooks (iPad, iPhone);  ePUB (iBooks, Nook, Sony® Reader);  MOBI (Kindle, Lexcycle Stanza, Calibre, Okular)

DESIGN/ PRODUCTION

Pacific Coast Brewing Co.

Zero Division (visit website)

I designed this website for Zero Division, a web design firm I often collaborate with. I usually create all elements from scratch because of dissatisfaction with stock images and the hours of research involved. I created all of the beer bottle images used here.

Wolverine/Hercules: Myths, Monsters & Mutants

Marvel Comics

I designed the cover and interior for this trade paperback collection of Wolverine and Hercules. The border and the Wolverine and Hercules icons are designed by me.

She-Hulks: Hunt for the Intelligencia

Marvel Comics

Another Marvel title I worked on. For this title I had a lot of fun playing around with the text design, particularly the "Hunt for the Intelligencia".

Test Preparation Guides

Learning Express

Due to the complexity, working on text books and test preparation guides can be very intense. I often typeset a lot of math, which involves a special plug-in and the use of MathML and LaTeX. I also design puzzles, graphs, and complicated tables.

Egmont's Fall 2011 Catalog

Egmont

Egmont is a publisher of children's and young adult literature and their books are a lot of fun. For their catalog I got to design one-sheets, some of which look like movie posters. I love getting to do stuff like this.

Moon Michigan, 5th edition

Avalon Travel Publishing/Perseus Books Group

I got my start in publishing at Avalon in 2004 and I still do a lot of work for them. This is 2nd edition of Moon Michigan that I worked on. I do a number of jobs for Avalon: photo optimization, illustration, design, typesetting, and sometimes photography.

Heathers

Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint

Deep Focus is a fun series of books where established authors get to write about oddball films, usually of the cult variety. For these titles I get to clean up the usually grainy film stills and design the title page along with typesetting.

The Harveyville Fun Times

Fun Ideas Productions

I have always been a fan of Harvey Comics ever since I got my first copy of Hot Stuff when I was 5 years old. Over two decades later I got to design this long-running fanzine edited by Mark Arnold. Mark and I no longer work on this, but the zine lives on, though.

ILLUSTRATION

Nice Girls,
Naughty Sex

Seal Press

I painted the cover for this title in oils, a medium I am not entirely comfortable or familiar with. The clent asked for an old school pulp-style painting and I figured, "Well, better use oils!" I had a lot of fun on this and jumped at the opportunity. My friend and former colleague Domini Dragoone came up with the concept and designed the cover.

Too Much To Dream

Counterpoint

The image on the desk is a reworked digital painting I did based off a sketch I did back in 2003. The publisher and cover designer were looking for something to help communicate a man's retelling of his adolescent experiments with psychedelics.

Cartoon Horror

Personal Work

After my first graphic novel was published back in 2008 I quickly set about working on my next book. Sadly, my move to New York and burgeoning career as a designer in publishing slowed me down. A lot. I still plug away on this book when I can, but now I am focused on bringing this work into the digital world. I have been merging the static drawings of the comic book with animation and programming effects. A sample of the book can be downloaded in the Ebook section above.

Salome

Personal Work

In 2004 I started working on a graphic novel adaption of Oscar Wilde's play Salome. I've always been fascinated by this story ever since I saw Ken Russell's Salome's Last Dance when I was a teenager. At the time I was drawing this I was very inspired by the art of the Austrian Secession movement, particularly the drawings of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka. I wanted to create a comic style based on that influence, but I never was able to finish it due to a plethora of reasons. I still hope to revisit it one day.

Drinking From
the Firehose

Penguin Books

I do a lot of spot illustration and graph/chart creation for publishers. Most of the time I need to work off of the crude images supplied from an author's Power Point presentation and the data is not easily at hand, so I need to recreate and embellish what I am given without getting the actual data wrong. It can be real challenging, but it's important to do, especially when working on business books for popular speakers. This image was actually printed in grayscale, but I prefer it in color.

Dog Lover's
Companion series

Avalon Travel Publishing

Phil Frank was a beloved Bay Area cartoonist who passed away in 2007. Aside from his comic strip, "Farley", which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle for 22 years, he also illustrated a popular series of outdoor travel guides for dog owners. After his passing, I wound up taking over some of his illustration duties and was asked to mimic his style in order to continue the series into new titles. It wasn't easy, but luckily the prolific Frank left me a bevy of reference work to draw from.

Lulu & Mitzy:
Best Laid Plans

SLG Publishing (2008)

After years of trying to get a comic published I finally succeeded. In 2008, I wrote a story inspired by characters in my old neighborhood, the notoriously seedy and vice ridden Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Lulu and Mitzy are two tough cookies living in America illegally and working those grimy Tenderloin streets hoping to one day have better lives. A low-brow comedy with heart, the book received excellent reviews from Publisher's Weekly and other publications.

A Couple's Field Guide to Sleeping Positions

Personal Work

In 2002, I sent out a series of gag cartoons making fun of people's sleeping patterns and how partners react to them. An agent soon picked me up as a client and copies started going out to publishers. Quite a number of publishers were interested in the book, but in a story told far too often about the publishing world, it kept getting shifted around, picked up, dropped, and picked up again. Finally, after three years of that, a similar book was published in 2006, squashing any hope of my book ever seeing the light of day. Until now! You can download a free ebook version of it above in the EPUB section.

ABOUT

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I have been in book publishing since 2004 as a production artist, designer, and illustrator. Prior to 2004, I worked mainly in animation and comic books doing a variety of jobs. I currently live in Queens, New York with my wife, our new son, and a cat named Milk-Chan.

I also work as a cartoonist under the name S. Eddy Bell. My debut graphic novel, Lulu & Mitzy's Best Laid Plans, was published in 2008 by SLG Publishing to great reviews. My current graphic novel, Cartoon Horror, is a collection of short horror stories done in classic animated style with a twist that will hopefully be out sometime in 2012. A sample of it in epub format is available above.

MY RESUME (PDF)

RESOURCES

I use a number of great open-source tools and services in my design work and particularly on this site. Please check them out, use them, encourage them, spread the word, and donate to them if you can.