NEW SPOOKY/SILLY COMICS A haunted toilet! Vengeful ghosts! A garbage-eating werewolf! Spooky Sleepover is my newest book, packed with hilarious horror comics for all ages, written by Dave Scheidt and illustrated by Jess Smart Smiley. Stories include: “The Terror of the Toilet”, “The Horribly Haunted Bike” and “Dinner and a Werewolf”. The book includes an illustration…
To celebrate the very first Batman Day (and the character’s 75th anniversary) yesterday, I hosted a special comics jam at Dragons Keep in Provo, Utah. 40 comics-lovers showed up to make their own Dark Knight pass-along comics and the results were amazing. Rules of the jam: 1) Cut out a panel from an existing Batman comic…
THANK YOU to all of you that have sent me your photos! It’s really amazing to see so many people enjoying the things I’ve had so much fun making. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Send in Your Photos Today! If you don’t know what I’m talking about…I’m working on a new project and I want…
THE GEEKEND IS HERE! Get Your Sci-Fi/Fantasy Fix at WesterCon This Weekend Westercon 67 is a general interest science fiction/fantasy convention covering literature, art, science, gaming, movies, comics and more…and it starts today! Guests include Brandon Sanderson, Cory Doctorow and Dan Wells (among others), and I’ve been invited to participate in a couple of panels…
I love what comics can do and I love teaching this comics workshop. Yesterday we were talking about panels and when to use larger or smaller panels. We found this page from Craig Thompson’s Blankets, where we see a narrow panel of Craig’s mom waving goodbye, and then a large vignette of Craig driving away, leaving his…
Ryan Simmons works as a character designer and animator, and now he’s trying his hand at a graphic novel! Ryan and I had a chance to talk for about an hour at LTUE back in February and I was really taken by his experience in cartoons and animation and “Aiden finds himself in the Afterlife having traveled…
MAKING COMICS | JUNE 9-13 Have children ages 12-18 that want to make comics? I’ll be teaching a five-day comics workshop at Higher Ground Learning in Salt Lake City, June 9-13, covering everything from generating and filtering story ideas, developing characters and story arcs, laying out comics pages and speech bubbles, making rough drafts, and publishing opportunities for comics-makers. I…
WRITING SYMPOSIUM Taking its name from the Douglas Adam’s books, Life, the Universe and Everything is an annual symposium on sci-fi and fantasy, geared toward writers, artists, filmmakers and fans. I’ve been attending the symposium for several years now and this will be my fourth year participating as a panelist. LTUE is a great opportunity for writers…
YEAR IN REVIEW 2013 has been quite a year! I’m so grateful for the opportunity I have to work in a field that I love and to put more of my favorite pictures and ideas into the world. Here are a few project highlights from the year: Life, the Universe and Everything This was my…
For those of you who are new to this blog, or are trying to figure out who I am and what I do: this post is for you. HELLO. MY NAME IS JESS SMART SMILEY & I MAKE RAD PICTURES. Drawing and writing have always been my biggest passions. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to…