Work on Missile Mouse steadily progresses.  If there’s no hiccups in my work schedule I’ll be wrapping up rough pencils next week.  Today I had an extra minute in between stuff so I sketched up this little robot piloted by some sort of rodent.

I’m excited to announce that I’m working on Missile Mouse’s first graphic novel: The Star Crusher. Publishers Weekly has the details here:

Jake Parker Two-Book Pact
The Flight generation—cartoonists included in artist/editor Kazu Kuibishi’s acclaimed anthology of color comics—continues to prosper in the new graphic novel era. Cartoonist/animator Jake Parker has signed a two book deal with Graphix, Scholastic’s graphic novel imprint, to produce two graphic novels starring Missile Mouse, a cute crime fighting mouse character that will star in Parker’s two sci-fi adventure graphic novels.The deal was negotiated by agent Judy Hansen of the Hansen Literary Agency. Missile Mouse was introduced earlier this year in Flight Explorer, an anthology based on Flight with comics created for young readers, published by Villard. Missile Mouse: The Star Crusher, the first of the two graphic novels, will be published in 2010. Parker’s work has also appeared in Out of Picture, another color comics anthology that collects the comics works of animator that is also published by Random House/Villard.

So that’s what’s replaced my social life for the past 6 months, and why I’ve had Missile Mouse on the brain so much lately. I’m super stoked to be doing this book. The more I live in the Missile Mouse universe as I create and draw it the more I want to share it with everyone. I know 2010 is a long way off, but I’ll be posting little works in progress, concept art, and few pages here and there as we barrel towards the release date. To start off here’s one of the panels from early on in the book:

No artwork today, just a few commercials that have inspired me recently. I subscribe to nofatclips.com, which is where I found these. Nofatclips scours the internet for cool music videos, comercials, and animated shorts then posts them on their site in nice crisp quicktime splendor. A lot of the time it’s the same old stuff you’ve seen everywhere else. But every once and a while there’s a gem. Here’s a few diamonds to get your day started:

Ad for Zune:

Ad for Monster.com:

Promotion for BBC and the Olympics by Mr Hewlett. Super talented art ninja Kevin Dart worked on this one too:

And where do you think all the creativity for this stuff comes from? Here:

Over at Tony DeTerlizzi’s blog he had a dragon design contest. My son drew a dragon and submitted it. I loved his dragon so much that I wanted to do my own take on it. After sending his drawing in a realized I forgot the rule was to have it full color. Oops. Hopefully Tony will have another contest sometime. Here’s the back ground info my son came up with for his dragon:

Name: Steamer
Habitat: Ocean
Diet: Great White Sharks
Notes: Steamer is a water dragon that uses his internal fire to create high pressure steam that shoots out of his nostrils. He uses this to kill his food and defend sunken treasure which he is in charge of protecting. He has an affinity to skull jewelry. And he has eyes on his wings giving him the edge in situational awareness.

And his drawing:

Drawn by: Tate, 7 years old

Sometimes a speeder just isn’t a reliable form of transportation.  In which case using indigenous creatures suitable for riding is the preferred alternative.  Here MM has found some sort of double toed ungulate that seems to be part fungus and part slug.