Cavegirl Combat, week 10

Oko pummels Mika's bare tits in week 10 of Cavegirl Combat.

I hope all of you have a great 2012!

Update

Sorry I haven't been more conscientious about updating the blog.

I agree that Cavegirl Combat is a little long on fist fighting and needs some variety. There are changes ahead, but as I said before, it's moving forward slowly. I will probably not try to create a story of this length again.

And I am working quite a bit ahead, so it may be awhile before you see the maneuver or fighting style that's your personal favorite.

As I mentioned before, I remain concerned about some of the material I've created that has not yet been published. I'm sure all of you will like it, but there are some things in this art that I've never seen portrayed before, or at least not portrayed this graphically. I'm speaking in terms of sexuality rather than violence. Well, it's sex and violence together, of course, because that's what the catfighting fetish is all about. But the art is more sexually explicit than violently explicit. One panel in particular may be over the top, and I'm not sure I'll use it, although it's one of my personal favorites.

Lastly, a health update. I am on a medication that seems to be knocking me flat on my ass. I am lacking energy and enthusiasm. This drug has a mood-altering side effect in a small percentage of users, and I appear to be in that small percentage. I've experienced this off-and-on for several years, since I was first prescribed this medication. But the doctor recently upped the dosage, and I am now just zoned out about two-thirds of the day.

This drug treats a condition that crippled my father, and killed both of his parents, so I'm not going to mess around with it.

If you read between the lines of this blog, you will correctly infer that I am not a young man anymore. I have no desire to be 20 or 30 again, but I have reached that stage where aging has started to be a real fucking nuisance.

Cavegirl Combat, week 9

Several weeks back, at the end of October, I mentioned a page that just took over my life. This is that page. The original art had 105 layers, which is simply insane. Plus the additional Illustrator art.

Mika and Oko continue pounding away at each other's boobs, but it looks like Oko is starting to get the upper hand.

Cavegirl Combat, week 8

Mika and Oko continue trading punches, and Mika drives a knee into Oko's midsection.

Random art

It's been awhile since I've posted any random art from the archive. So here's a panel from 2005.

Cavegirl Combat, week 7

Now we're getting somewhere.

The first punches are thrown as Mika and Oko target each other's breasts in week 7.

I realize this has been moving along about as fast as an episode of Mary Worth. But it gets faster from here on out.

A note

I haven't been paying as close attention to the blog the past couple of weeks as in the past. I've had some personal and medical issues come up. Individually, they're rather trivial, but they all popped up simultaneously, and they've undermined my motivation a bit. Well, more than a bit. I hope things get back to normal in a few days.

Cavegirl Combat, week 6

Action at last! (Thanks for waiting...)

Mika's and Oko's bodies slam together as they finally lock up for battle.

Custom videos

I have never tried to order a custom video from a catfight producer. I always assumed my scripts would be too elaborate to be affordable ('Princess Alannara slams her fists into Space Ranger Jennifer's exposed breasts as an Imperial War Cruiser bears down on Jennifer's starship.') or that the results would be unsatisfactory for the money invested.  ('Why does that Imperial War Cruiser look like a pie pan?')

So, I'd like to ask you: Have you ever ordered a custom video? How much did you spend (please feel free to answer anonymously)? How many performers were involved? Were you satisfied with what you got? Looking back on it, what would you have done differently, if anything?

And if you answer, let's please not get into criticizing individual performers or producers. I don't want to this to turn into one of 'those' discussions.

"I'll try anything once"

I'm chatting with two women on a dating site who, in their questionnaires, answered the question, "How open are you to trying new things in bed?" with the multiple-choice response "I'll try anything once."

I hope I get to find out whether that's true.

Cavegirl Combat, week 5

This week: Mika and Oko finalize the rules for their battle and face off to see who will drag whom back to the cave as a trophy.

Can I really show that?

Cavegirl Combat is the first story I've drawn where I've made it public as I go. In the past, I drew stories with the notion already halfway in my mind that no one would see them. This time,  I'm committed to publishing it.

But I continue to draw in a vacuum; no one sees these pages or offers any kind of feedback until they're up on the blog.  And every so often, I step back from what I've drawn – pages you haven't seen yet – and say to myself, "Hmmm. Can I really show that?"

I'm not drawing anything I haven't drawn before, but sometimes I'm drawing it in a way I haven't drawn it before. Maybe the action is more aggressive than I usually draw. Maybe the closeups are tighter. Maybe there are more bodily fluids involved.

And sometimes it's stuff that's probably biologically impossible. One of the advantages of comics versus video.

There's no one around here who can look at this stuff in progress and say, "Oh, that's sexy," or "Oooh, that's gross." (And no, I'm not sending any of you sneak previews. Sorry.)

Ideally, this would be the job of my sexy thirty-something catfighting girlfriend, who would respond to my drawings with a 'meh', or by dragging me by my shirt collar to the floor for an on-the-spot wrestling match. That, unfortunately, is not happening right now.

I subscribe to a blog called inappropriate.co (no 'm'). The art is always gorgeous, which is why I read it, but the subject matter is often, at least for me, stomach-churning. But it reminds me that whatever it is I'm drawing,  there's more extreme stuff out there.

More on commissions/customs

I have had several inquiries about custom art and commissions since this blog launched.

To reiterate something I wrote previously, the issue for me is the price I could charge for commissions versus what I would make just doing regular freelance art. I spend anywhere from 12 to 18 hours on every panel of Cavegirl Combat. In my local commercial art market, those would be worth a few hundred dollars each.

I don't mind doing that as a labor of love (or lust), but I can't bring myself to spend that kind of time on a commissioned piece that's probably going to bring me less than a hundred dollars.

If I can develop a style or a workflow that can get me to doing a page in four or five hours, then I'll consider commissions.

And even then, they won't be cheap.

I owe the blog some art

Here's a panel from an unfinished story circa 2005. I shared some of this story with foxyfighter.com, but I don't think this was one of the panels.

I was trying to work in a looser style with this, but I wasn't satisfied with the results.

Anyone know anything about Pixiv?

Became aware of this a few days ago. It seems like deviantART, only with far fewer pictures per member. Then it occurred to me that maybe I have to join to see entire galleries. I can't figure it out.

TOM

link: deviantART

I've been wanting to write something for awhile about catfight manga. But this is a subject about which I know almost nothing, except for what I like and don't like. Generally speaking, I don't like cartoony catfight art, but I find the best manga is extremely sexy.

The art at left is a snippet from one of my favorite artists of this genre, TOM. It's from a series of pages he posted to his deviantART page. Click on the photo to see the whole work.

He wrote that he doesn't especially like the way they turned out, and he's going to redraw them. Which I think is a shame, because it looks to me like they turned out pretty well.

One of the criticisms I have of my own art is that the characters often seem to lack energy. This is generally the result of the way I've posed them. TOM seems to get energy into his figures in a way that I'm not.

Does this sound like you?

You see a story on the web about the latest and greatest 'lifelike' Japanese girl robot, and you're pissed because they still can't be made to fight each other.

The new disclaimer

You'll notice there's a new disclaimer permanently affixed to the top of this column.

I added this because I noticed the search term that most frequently brings visitors to this site from Google (and, to a far lesser degree, Bing) is "wildebeest art".

All I need is to have some middle school kid writing a term paper on 'Great Wildebeest Paintings of Africa' accidentally stumble onto this site and be turned into a perpetually frustrated catfight kinkster like myself.

Of course, I have the 'Adult Content' warning page activated.

I wish there were a way to sort of do reverse-SEO and have this page not show up in certain searches.

Bah. FML.

You know, there are other things that turn me on besides catfighting. But there's nothing that turns me on as reliably as catfighting.

I've paid my dues in my life. I've worked hard, been mostly responsible, treated people with dignity and respect regardless of race, creed, color or station in life.

Is it too much to ask to have a couple of sexy, 30-ish women come over to my house and fight in cavegirl and/or superheroine outfits over which one has sex with me first? Is that unreasonable? Am I not entitled, after all I've done?

I think the government needs to establish a bailout program for us. Something where we can just say, "Look, we're horny. We need the government to send a couple of hot busty fighting women (or, for tag team fans, four hot busty fighting women) over to give our lives purpose and meaning."

But the politicians don't care about us. Noooo, they only care about the lobbyists, and the rich and powerful. I'd bet Wall Street can get all the catfighting babes it wants or needs. But us, the honest working class fans?

Nothing.

This is an outrage.

Cavegirl Combat, week 4

Here's week 4 of Cavegirl Combat.

I told you there was a long setup. I hope there's enough sexy trash talk to keep you entertained until we get to some actual fighting.

Does this sound like you?

You go to a new website, and no matter what the general subject is, the first thing you type in the search engine is 'catfight'?

Your input requested

I'm curious about your reaction to some of the technical aspects of Cavegirl Combat. I'm far enough into it that I'm not going to make any changes at this point, but I'd like to know your thoughts before I begin another project.

I'd like to know, first of all, if you're comfortable with the size and shape of the pages.

Are they easy to follow presented horizontally, instead of the traditional vertical comic book format?

And are the pages too large or too small for your screen? Is the lettering readable?

When I started this, I was simply trying to post one page a week of what would end up being like a comic book. But now, it feels like it's starting to take on some of the aspects of an old-fashioned Sunday newspaper strip, and I'm  wondering whether to move further in that direction. It's a little hard to do plotting when the entire narrative is one long fight – but would it be more interesting if it went in that direction? (It may be too early to answer this question. I forget that I'm much farther into the story than you are as a reader.)

Even if you don't normally comment, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

100,000

This blog hit 100,000 page views Wednesday. That's in 10 1/2 weeks.

That number should not be confused with individual visitors. That number is a little over 19,000.

I'm grateful for the worldwide interest.

I guess I shouldn't laugh...

...but someone found this blog today by doing a Google search for "Rockwell Welch".

Moaning and groaning

One of the issues I've had to deal with over the years is what kinds of sounds my fighting women should make.

In real life, to judge from YouTube videos, it's "shit!", "ow!", "fuck!" and the like.

In mainstream comics, it's "HURGH!", "AIEEE!" and so on.

Personally, I prefer sort of orgasmic moans during a catfight.  It ought to sound like they're really getting off on it, whether they're winning or losing.

But it's tough to fill panel after panel with "Oooh!" and "Ohhh!" and "Aaah!".  I throw in some "Unnh"s and "Nuhh"s along the way, but even that seems insufficient.

 I saw a French comic in Heavy Metal years ago in which the heroine, having been smacked around by the villain, is lying on the ground, with the dialog, "HHH..." "HHH..." "HHH..." "HHH..." floating above her in individual balloons. I thought that was extremely hot, and I've wanted to use it ever since.

Maybe I'll work it into Cavegirl Combat.

Cavegirl Combat, week 3

For those of you wondering when I would get around to using that Lake Powell-inspired drawing I posted several weeks back, here it is.

Yes, I'm still setting up the story. Please be patient; this isn't a 1960's photocopy four-pager.

Rough sketch

I usually don't have the rough sketches of my stuff still around, but in this case I did. Here's an early draft of the panel I posted yesterday.

Until Monday

More of lingerie girl/jungle girl.

From 1999.

Ooops!

Some of you may have caught a glimpse of an upcoming Cavegirl Combat episode. A Blogger hiccup posted it as it was uploaded, rather than on its scheduled publication date. If you saw it, please don't share it anywhere or reveal what happens!

Getting comments

Slid has an interesting discussion under way at his blog, BackSlid. Well, at least, I think it's interesting. The question he raises is, "How Do Bloggers Get People to Comment?"

Several erotic artists/cartoonists, including me, have jumped in to talk about how they engage their readers.

I might mention, by the way, that I'm very gratified by the participation of those of you who comment here. We artists all need feedback, and to know that people are actually responding to our work.

I owe the blog some art

A random breast punch from the living room sofa fight I never finished. Done sometime between 1999 and 2005.

Cavegirl Combat, week 2

Here's week two of "Cavegirl Combat".

Have a Happy Hallowe'en!

Lost works

I would really like to find a catfight panel Roy Crane (or his ghost artist) drew for the Buz Sawyer daily strip. I think this was in the late '70s or early '80s.

Random art for Sunday

From lingerie girl vs jungle girl: if I'm reading my own art correctly (and I'm not sure I am), jungle girl has lingerie girl trapped in a scissors.

She uses the opportunity to inflict some punishment on lingerie girl's breast. And it's about to get worse.

File dated 1999, but I think it's older.

Random art for Wednesday

I stumbled across this while looking for something else.

So here it is.

Another day...

of laying in color and adding jewelry and details to the cavegirls. It's wearing me out, and I'm still very early into it. I'm trying to do some other stuff to break up the monotony.

On my tumblr blog

An Embarrassment of Riches... have you ever stopped to ponder just how many vendors and producers there are of female wrestling and catfight material?

Read it or don't.

While you're waiting for Monday...

My very first post on this blog featured a piece of art in which one girl has tied another girl's wrists to the bottom rope of a wrestling ring.

Here it is again, just to refresh your memory.

As a follow-up, here are a couple more panels that wrap up that story. The blonde who tied up her opponent joins her jungle girl partner in going two-on-one against her lingerie-clad opponent. (The two girls in costumes are the actual fighters; the two in street clothes are friends who have been drawn into the battle.)

Lingerie girl is held in place by jungle girl's friend while jungle girl punches her body with blow after blow.

Then, when she's too weak to resist, they drag her across the ring to where her friend is tied up, and slam her face into her friend's pussy, finishing off both girls with a single move.

And that's followed by jungle girl and her friend being declared the winners, as lingerie girl and her friend lie beaten on the mat.

My style was a lot more primitive and cartoony when I did this, probably in 1995 or '96.

But I think the concept is still extremely sexy, so don't be surprised if you see it again.

I learn something new every day

I say I've never finished a story. The truth is, I did finish one, long ago. It was one of those 'lingerie girl vs jungle girl' stories, and I cobbled it together out of partially-finished pieces of different stories. I think a few of the pieces have found their way into the wild, and a couple have been posted on this blog.

The first page and the last page of that story look like they were drawn by different people. I learned new things with every page.

The same thing is happening with this cavegirl story I'm doing right now. Today I stumbled onto a solution to a problem I've had for years, which is a technique for light and shade for figures in direct sunlight. As a result, some pages of this may look a little different from others.

I was an art major in college. I wished I had paid more attention, because I might already know this stuff, instead of having to pick it up through 40-odd years of trial and error.

Cavegirl Combat, week 1

Well, here it is. Page one of a breathtaking work of staggering genius: "Cavegirl Combat".

As I've said, I plan to upload a new page every Monday.

I'll warn you now, there's a few pages of setup before the action starts.

It will be quite a personal achievement if I actually see this through to completion.

Another classic boxing pic

I'm taking a break from drawing to post another boxing pic out of the archive, drawn sometime between 2000 and 2005.

I've updated it just a little with new sound effects.

This got a pretty hot response when I first let it out into the wild probably ten years ago or so.

Women's professional boxing does nothing for me, but the so-called 'foxy boxing' – even the really lame stuff – trips my catfight trigger.

Two (presumably) sexy women going at it, the 'smack' of gloves connecting with breasts and bellies, even unconvincingly, can really crank me up. And if some punches connect below the belt, so much the better.

Even if it's entirely fake, with light blows being directed at the opponent's gloves or upper arms, there's a certain turn-on knowing that two women would even agree to get in the ring and fake it.

Foxy boxing is a lot hotter in a ring, by the way, than in a living room or back yard.

About the best of these I ever saw was a clip from Double Trouble 108, featuring Belinda Belle vs. Tammi.

A day off - not

I had told myself I would take the day off from drawing today, but I'm back at it.

The porn aesthetic

I created a tumblr blog, so now I'm obligated to post things there occasionally. I find tumblr to be a little offputting. I'm not even sure what its purpose is. But it's where all the cool kids hang out now, apparently.

So I've written a short piece there on the "porn aesthetic". Read it if you want to, or don't.

Comments aren't enabled on my tumblr blog, btw.

About my avatar

Someone suggested I write about my avatar. I originally created this for a MySpace account which I never used, except to look for other catfight fans there.

My design challenge was to create something that conveyed what I did without being offensive or violating MySpace's standards, such as they were.

Also, since I'm trying to keep my catfight fan and civilian identities separate, I couldn't show my face.

Even though I work entirely in digital media, I drew myself back at my old drawing board, illuminated by an overhead desk lamp. I did this because I knew if I drew myself using a Wacom tablet, ninety-nine out of a hundred people who saw it would have no idea what it was. But everybody gets pencil and paper.

So there I am with a sheet of paper at the table, with a couple of Conte crayons and a vinyl eraser – stuff I haven't used in decades, but at least the casual viewer will have some notion of what's going on.

As for what I was drawing: well, I knew it was a catfight, but I couldn't remember specifics. The original art is missing in action, but I went back to MySpace, looking for a version as large as possible.

I blew that one up, using onOne Perfect Resize, which is the best thing I've found for getting usable results from tiny jpegs. Click on the picture at right for the enlarged version.

If you look carefully, you'll see the face of a masked superheroine, and a gloved fist connecting with her breast. Her own clenched fist is visible below it. Again, I wanted to draw something that conveyed catfight art, without getting myself in trouble.

Since then, I've used this avatar everywhere I've gone on the web as Cameroon Wildebeest, Jr.

Looking back on it now, I wish I had been a little more careful with the left hand. The fingers look flat. Just a touch of shading to add roundness would have helped.

Cavegirl update

I'm still good to go to start Monday, I think. I hit upon a new angle, as often happens, which prompted me to add pages. But I've got enough to get the thing going for a few weeks now, which ought to give me time to catch up on the rest of it.

Where is she now?

I felt very fortunate to find this video on the Internet a couple of years ago. I bought it as an 8mm reel in the late seventies or early eighties, and eventually lost it.

It came from Curtis DuPont (was that a real person?), which advertised in the back of the 'off-brand' pro wrestling magazines alongside Triumph Studios, California Supreme, Milco and others.

If you've never known anything but downloading videos straight off a website (or a torrent, if that's how you roll), you have no idea what it was like in those early, primitive days.

You'd order these reels by mail, and they would come wrapped in the iconic 'plain brown wrapper' - like your mailman didn't know what plain brown wrappers were for.

You'd open it, drag the projector out of the closet, close all the blinds and drapes, set up the screen if you had one, then meticulously thread the head of the film through the projector. If the producer was meticulous, you got a fairly long head on the reel so you could break it a couple of times while threading and not lose any of the actual footage.

Then, you'd turn out the lights, turn on the projector, and watch maybe three minutes of dim, grainy catfight footage.

And then it was over.

My memory is that I bought some stuff from DuPont because the ads made it seem a little more explicit than the tame-but-sexy Triumph Studios material and the slightly more risque California Supreme/Bellstone products.

This match, as it turned out, was not all that explicit, nor very rough as far as the fighting went. Bikinis stayed on for the entire match. They rolled around on seventies-style green shag carpeting for the whole film, basically trying to pull each other down and get a pin. No punching, no biting, no groping or fingering, and, of course, no sound. But it also proved, at least for me, that sexy and explicit are not always the same thing. Because this match was way sexy.

The girl in the jungle girl bikini (there's that motif again) was called Jenny, and I wanted to be the father of Jenny's children. She looked like some hippie chick that had answered an ad in the Freep and ended up wrestling the other girl in some real estate agent's tacky office for a dime bag. She was slender, willowy, with beautiful long brown hair, and small but perfect natural breasts that occasionally popped out of her chamois top. It's hard to imagine nowadays that a mere glimpse of a nipple over the top of a halter or bra could be erotic and sexy. But it was, and as I looked at this video again, it still is.

But part of the mystique with 8 mm stuff was that you couldn't really know what anyone looked like. The images were so dim and grainy that you got only a vague notion of appearance, so you filled in the details with your imagination.

Damn, that was an ugly sofa.

A book recommendation

I am reluctant to recommend books here, mostly because I think, "endorsed by amateur pornographer's blog!" isn't necessarily the recommendation most authors would want.

But let me take off my 'catfight artist' cap for a moment and put on my 'ex-commercial artist' cap instead.

While wandering around Amazon looking for I-don't-remember-what, I found a book called "The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics". It was written by an artist named Freddie Williams, with whom I was not previously familiar. But he does his work entirely in Photoshop.

I use Corel Painter for the major part of my art, and Photoshop for 'post-production' purposes. There are things I can do in Painter that still can't be done in Photoshop.

But Photoshop has advantages: tight integration with Illustrator for adding dialog, and significantly better color management and filter tools than Painter. Plus, dozens of plugins are available for Photoshop, and none at all for the current version of Painter.

So, I've had some interest in trying to rely more on Photoshop.

Getting back to the book: I guess "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" opened the doors for this kind of product. 'HDCMY' certainly targeted a fanboy audience rather than an artist audience, but there was still useful information to be found within its pages.

But make no mistake: "The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics" is a book for artists, not fanboys. It's published by Watson-Guptill, an art book specialty publisher. It assumes you already know how to compose a scene, draw the human figure, etc., and pencil and/or ink. Its purpose is specifically to help you, as an experienced pen-and-ink artist, make the transition to creating press-ready line art and color in Photoshop.

I think some of Williams' recommendations on backup are a little outdated – with terabytes of hard drive storage available for under $200, it's no longer advisable, in my opinion, to back up huge graphic files on DVDs. Hard drives offer the best bang for the buck for storage, plus the advantage of speed and ease of recovery.

But in all other respects, every page of this book offers useful information I didn't already know.

I'm still wanting to do some art in a more comic-book style format, because my painted approach is so time-consuming. This book may help me get there.

70,000

This blog passed 70,000 total page views yesterday. That's over the course of roughly six and a half weeks.

Thank you, one and all.

I owe the blog some art

Here, from just last year, is a panel from an unfinished superheroine-vs-superheroine story.

The premise, as I recall, is that the red mask woman made some ill-considered remarks to a tabloid web site that even though she and the blue mask woman were both heroines, she could probably kick the other girl's ass pretty easily.

So the blue mask woman arrives in Megasuperopolis and invites the red mask woman to prove it.

Pretty soon, they're both naked over the skies of Megasuperopolis, pounding away at each other's bodies.

(There's a friend on the phone blabbering at me as I write this. I have no idea what she's talking about, and I don't think she does, either. She just calls and yammers away. Thank god for speakerphones.)

Cavegirl story update

I continue to slog through the cavegirl story. I'll get a page finished, then discover the next day I've left jewelry off, or gotten the wrong necklace on one character, or forgotten to finish some element of the page. But I'm still on target to start posting next week.

Chest shots

Once in a blue moon you'll see a staged catfight video where somebody accidentally gets hurt for real. The giveaway is that the victim lets out a real 'Owww!' instead of some sort of fake (but sexier) orgasmic moan, and there's a cut in the video where they stopped the camera long enough to give her time to recover.

I mention this because I saw a video the other day that sort of surprised me. I'm not going to say whose it was, although you may recognize it from the description. Girl A has Girl B on the ropes and is punching her in the chest. The first two punches make contact, and both women are doing a good job of selling the action.

But the third punch is like, "WHAP!" and landed a lot harder than the first two. You can tell just by the way Girl B's breast bounces from the impact. An accident? Testing the limits of what can be done without real injury? Just my fanboy imagination? I don't know. But they kept going with it.

I love chest punching, as is obvious from my art. Even two or three years ago, it seems, you saw very little of this in catfight videos. I always wondered how you could portray this without risking real injury. It occurred to me that maybe the producers needed some of those 'Real Dolls' that they could bring in for the tight shots. Stunt boobs, if you will. But of course, those things are crazy expensive, and possibly even more sensitive to abuse than the real thing.

Now, for whatever reason, you see breast punches frequently, and I thank all you fetish models from the bottom of my, well, whatever.

Cavegirl Combat preview

My tentative plan – my very tentative plan – is to post the first full page of the big cavegirl fight here next Monday. That's one week from today.

If all goes well, I will post a new page each Monday until the story is finished. And that will be sometime next summer. 

We'll see how it goes.

I think my technique here is the best it's ever been. It's turned out better than even some things I fiddled with earlier this year. Here's a preview of some of the panels.

But as I've said before, this painted style is very slow going. It sometimes takes three or four days to do one panel, and I do have other stuff going on in my 'real' life.

Should there be men?

A few weeks ago, I was browsing some genre-related websites when I came across a review of a video. I don't remember the reviewer's name, or the name of the video, but he complained that the video violated one of his cardinal rules: there should be no men anywhere in the story.

I used to subscribe to this same philosophy. I often drew whole stories in which the fighters, spectators, referees if there were any, and all other characters were women. As an example, I've included this really fucking awful panel from a story I gave up in on 2001. Obviously, you've got the macrocephalic jungle girl locking up with – Liza Minelli, maybe? – in the foreground, but in the background all the spectators are women.

Well, maybe not all of them. It looks like I was perhaps at the point where I felt comfortable showing male onlookers, as long as they were standing all the way in back and were shown only in silhouette.

I think the reason some of us don't like seeing men portrayed is because we view the fighting women as sexual objects. We want to watch them fight, and maybe even make out, but we also want to fuck them, and any man who appears on the scene, even in the background of an illustrated story, represents a potential rival.

Silly, I know, but we're talking about a bunch of stuff that makes no sense to the rational mind in any event.

Eventually, I got used to the idea of men appearing in stories. I have no personal interest in femdom stories where the guy gets beaten to a pulp or squeezed between powerful vice-like thighs until his head explodes or whatever. I have only slightly more interest in scenarios where the guy wins. Give me a girl-on-girl slugfest any time.

(I am interested, purely from the standpoint of creative decisions, in Art Ardoni's 'Crosstown Matchup' stories, which feature both men and women fighting each other. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like that before.)

But I realized I was tying my own hands and limiting my options by creating female-only plots. Eventually, I got used to the idea that I didn't have to be insanely jealous because some fictitious cartoon man got to watch my fictitious cartoon women fight.

I'm curious what the rest of you think, though.

"She knew exactly how to do me"

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am fascinated by the concept  of women fighting and making out at the same time.

This item, again from somewhere around 2003-2004, explores that same theme.

It also sort of flirted with another idea I've had in the back of my mind for years, which is two women (or maybe more) fighting on a huge, luxurious bed covered with bolsters and throw pillows and the like.

Here we have purple (the traditional color of royalty) satin sheets and pillow cases, which at least suggest that they're fighting on a bed, and that the bed linens are fairly luxurious and expensive.

I also wanted to make one of the women middle eastern in appearance, but I think I failed in that regard. She just looks like a WASP with dark skin – the facial features are all wrong.

I also added some tan lines, which I find very sexy, but a nuisance to add, just as I do jewelry and such.

Another bling day

Spent another day adding bracelets, necklaces, etc. I have six characters in this piece: two who fight and four who are observers/supporters. I ended up making model sheets for them so I could keep track of who has how many bracelets, anklets, ets., plus hairstyles, relative height and so on.

I am drained by this.

Plus I've been fiddling with the barrage of Mac updates and a new iPhone. I may need a vacation.

More details

Today is, by the way, another day of drawing bracelets, necklaces, wrist bands and other cavegirl accoutrements. I guess in a real-life fur-bikini cavegirl catfight, all this stuff would be removed before the fight began. But then you wouldn't have the ending where they're exhausted and naked except for all the prehistoric bling.

More ideas than time

I have a backlog of ideas for stories.

If Photoshop had some sort of catfight plug-in, where I could just pick hair and eye color and bust size and click 'draw catfight', I could turn a whole lot more work than I'm doing.

I wish I could work faster.

I owe the blog some art

Here's a piece from the 'sofa fight' I worked on back in 2003.

They're trying to make out and continue their fight at the same time.

What I actually remember most about working on this story was the amount of time I spent studying sofas to see how the cushions yielded to pressure, and how the throw pillows sagged slightly under their own weight.

You don't see it in this pic. but the work is evident in some of the other drawings.

Found it!

I knew it had to be out there somewhere!

This is the Jeff Jones wrestling match I was talking about from her Idyl strip.

I think some of the detail has been lost in the scan, but you still get the general idea.

The entire run of Jones's strip is available here.

I have to tell you that Jeff Jones's art probably spoiled me for real women. I'm not talking about catfight fantasies; I'm talking about everything. I keep looking for beautiful, self-absorbed, spaced-out women who remind me of the ones Jones created for her strips.

Worse yet, I sometimes find them. They tend to be much more attractive on paper than in real life.

Welcome to my world

Just a note to welcome all of you who have joined this site via FriendConnect to get updates via Google Reader or the Blogger dashboard. 22 users have signed up as I write this.

(By the way – Beav, is that you?)

Details, details

This cavegirl fight thing is wearing me down. I am determined to finish it, but I've hit the tedious stage: all the little animal tooth necklaces, leather bands, foliage, etc. I hate this stuff, but I believe detail is essential to the story's presentation.

Speaking of detail, look at how nice the turnbuckle turned out in this catfight boxing piece: the turnbuckle itself, the link of chain holding it to the ringpost, the padding wrapped around the eye. This is the kind of detail I'm talking about.

Of course, there are other details – the redhead's bleeding nose, the injury on the side of the brunette's head (inspired by an actual wound I saw in an MMA-style catfight video), the redhead's nipple trapped in the brunette's teeth, the bruises and fading bite marks on both fighters' boobs, the brunette's cum-spattered glove slamming yet again (we assume) into the redhead's vulva. Meanwhile, the referee offers an ineffectual warning to the two fighters; it's clear she has completely lost control of this match.

But what about that turnbuckle, folks? That thing is fucking sweet!

This is another of those things done sometime between 1999 and the end of 2004. I think I must have lost the original file dates while moving these from a Windows computer to a Mac. Previously posted, I think, on Yahoo! groups.

Jeff Jones catfight

Back in the early seventies, Jeffrey Catherine Jones drew a wrestling match between two women. I can't recall now if it was part of his "Idyl" series that ran in National Lampoon, or part of the similar "I'm Age" in Heavy Metal. I have never seen it online anywhere. I used to have it in hard copy, but I haven't seen it in probably thirty years. Which is not to say I don't still have it; I stumbled across a copy of Battling Girls a few weeks ago that was almost as old.

(If you don't know Jones's work, you should Google him. He did a lot of comics and paperback covers in the seventies, then walked away from commercial work to pursue fine art. He died last May.)

What would my artist friends say?

...if I told them that for as long as they've known me, I've had a double life with a 'secret identity'?

...that far more people know me by that name than by my real one?

...that not only have I not completely abandoned art, but that the art I'm producing now is more widely seen than theirs is?

I sort of freak out when I think about this stuff.

I'm really fucking annoyed!

...by this 'maryhfights' person who has been spamming Yahoo! Groups for weeks now with these phony links that purport to play catfight vids but actually take the user offsite for some other bullshit. I get my Yahoo! Groups update every morning and it's frequently completely clogged with these damn things. Knock it off, mf!

I think I owe the blog some art

...so here's an item from 2003. I've struggled, as have many other artists, with expressing motion blur without using the time-honored 'speed lines' to indicate rapid movement. I don't know how well it worked out in this case.

The Burning of the Library at Alexandria

I see that udtqc's collection of catfight art is offline, apparently due to a complaint from a content producer.

I can respect the concerns of artists who sell their work, and don't want to see it given away by others. On the other hand, this was the Last Great Repository of catfight art. A lot of it was no longer available for purchase.

Perhaps he'll find a way to bring back it back online, but otherwise, I suppose it will join tinadiane and lobrow's arena among the lost wonders of the Internet world.

A small request

I've found a couple of pieces of art from this blog reposted in other places. In 99.9% of cases, I am absolutely fine with this. I've never charged for my catfight art, and I've got my url on each pic specifically so when people find these pictures on other sites, they can follow the url back to this blog.

From time to time, I may post things here that I would prefer stay 'among us'. Usually, this will be because the art contains 'spoilers' that may give away the plot elements of the finished story (like there's ever been one).

So, if I ask that a particular item not be reposted, I hope you'll honor that request. Thanks.

Random art

Here's a very recent piece of art, and it's part of something I may actually finish.

This is, however, another example of letting story length spiral out of control. If I do finish it, I've got hundreds of hours of work ahead of me.

The premise is that two women make eye contact in a bar, each realizes the other wants to fight her, and they go at it right there in the bar.

One thing I did differently for this was to use photo references for faces. I'm not tracing, but I am using photos to get more accurate portrayal of shading, highlights, and overall proportions.

I think it made a big difference. You can tell which faces were done with reference photos and which weren't.

Random art

Here's a very rough sketch from sometime around 2001-2002. This was part of a story that, as usual, went unfinished, but that I also completely forgot about.

Looking back on it, I think I got an unusual amount of drama and energy into the figures all through the sketches and unfinished pages.

As I mentioned previously, I grew up in the Swan/Schaffenberger/Boring era of comics, and my early art self-education was heavily inspired by those artists, and others like them. I picked up a lot of bad habits I never shook. As a result, my drawings often have a kind of stiff, static quality to them.

Comic books are not a good place to learn art, even if your intent is to draw comics. Comics are full of artists' shorthand representations of reality, and you end up learning what the shorthand representations look like, rather than how to depict reality. Once you've learned to depict reality, you can develop your own shorthand representations.

Would you do it?

I can easily fantasize about two hot women wrestling or fighting over me, tearing each other's clothes off, working themselves into a panting, moaning sexual frenzy, etc., etc. Oh, yeah.

But let's flip the thing for a moment. Suppose some woman wanted to me to wrestle some other guy naked for her affections or amusement.

No. Fucking. Way.

I'd just tell the other guy, 'Congratulations. You win. Take her, and knock yourself out.' And that would be that. Because there's no woman alive who could get me naked with another guy under any circumstances.

Does that make me a hypocrite? Probably, but I don't care.

Would you do it?

How things have changed

I was looking for something else on the web today, and I stumbled across this panel from a 1964 Justice League of America.

It was originally posted on the blog Crisis on Earth Prime, which looks like it would be a rather entertaining blog if you still follow DC Comics these days.

I glommed the pic because I'm pretty sure it's the first 'catfight' I saw in a mainstream comic. It was drawn by Mike Sekowsky. I put 'catfight' in semi-quotes because although it is, technically, two women fighting, or sort of fighting, I'm not sure it rises to the minimum standard of being a catfight.

The combatants are Wonder Woman, obviously, and her evil Earth-3 counterpart, Superwoman. (She was from Earth-3 in 1964, anyway. I think she's from somewhere else now. DC has rebooted its continuity so many times, I have no idea what the hell is going on. It's part of the reason I quit reading mainstream comics.)

This was about as hot as comic book catfights got in those days. Even in their skimpy superheroine outfits, most of the women in 60s DC comics looked like your math teacher, especially if Sekowsky drew them. But, we had to take what we could get.

It's interesting to ponder that while Sekowsky was drawing his "Up you go, dearie!" Wonder Woman with the 52-inch-hips, in another part of New York City, the man who should have drawn this fight, Eric Stanton, was cranking out – well, who knows what? Some cheesy paperback cover, or a four-pager for Klaw.

In the same web search, I came across this double truck from a 2008 book called Batman Confidential:

Imagine me saying "uh..." in Butt-head's voice. This is, apparently, really Batgirl really wrestling Catwoman in the nude in some Gotham City swinger club. Obviously, the standards at DC have changed since '64.

Some sort of flowers are strategically scattered across the scene. I have seen Batgirl and Catwoman fight at least semi-nude before, but they were always 'unsanctioned' matches, and there were always tiny white squares floating in all the best places. (If you've been as dedicated to collecting catfight art as I have, you know what I'm talking about.)

But yeah.... this is OK. Really, really OK.

Um... are all comic books like this now?

From Facebook, With Love

I have three referrals from Facebook, which sort of surprises me. Is there some sort of catfight group on FB I don't know about?

Today's random art

Today's random art is from about 1999 or 2000. I think it may have found its way onto Yahoo! Groups at one point, but a Google image search turns up no other versions cached.

This has enough potential that I may redraw it someday. I really like the premise.

I think I did a pretty good job front-loading this blog with art in its first month, but I can see it's not going to be practical for me to keep trying to upload art every day.

I'm going to try to keep updating with art at least twice a week, and try to do some other catfight-related text topics on other days.

Damn, I wish I hadn't started this

Here's another page (unfinished) from this cavegirl epic I hope to complete.

But I may spend the rest of my life just getting this one page done, and as you can see, it's not central to the plot, i.e, there are no cavegirls fighting in it.

I would like to post this full-size, but it apparently exceeds the maximum dimensions Picasa will allow. Below is a full-size detail from the art. Of course, 'full-size' is always kind of a foggy concept with digital art, but you get the general idea.

This document currently has 33 layers, and will certainly have at least a dozen more before it's done. I'm currently doing some things with between 50 and a hundred layers.

Sometimes it's better to just suggest the details in the background, instead of committing to hours and hours of detailed drawing. On the other hand, I often like the 'turn off your brain' work of drawing rocks, trees and shrubs better than drawing the fights themselves.

The perspective looks a little off, which is a problem I often have because I tend to inadequately draft my drawings before I start doing details. But I think once the shading and shadows of the figures are in, the perspective will look right.

You'll notice all the girls are young, hot and cavegirlicious, while some of the dudes are kind of old and gnarly. Like me.

I'm just claiming personal privilege here. I don't want to draw old, gnarly women. There actually is an older woman – late forties/early fifties – later in the story, but she's still pretty hot.

All I can do is watch

I have a friend who is a major S&M buff. When she goes on vacation, she'll go visit an out-of-town dungeon before she'll go see the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore. She carries ball gags and medical instruments in the trunk of her car. She met her husband on alt.com. She has always been completely open and upfront about her kink, and I've never heard anyone criticize her or question her morality because of it.

I've had two other friends who were into light bondage – same thing. No judgements, no criticism.

I live in a fairly open-minded, creative enclave of a larger, much more conservative city. People are pretty much live and let live in my neighborhood.

But there's no way in hell I would reveal to any of them that I like watching hot women fight.

Several years ago, there was a mild controversy when a couple of pieces of catfight art were accepted for display in our community's extremely tame, more vanilla than vanilla erotic art show. Light bondage was okay, as was the hint of S&M, but catfights were beyond the limits for many 'open-minded' patrons: 'Catfighting exploits women.' 'Catfighting encourages women to compete, rather than come together as sisters to resist patriarchal oppression.' Etc., etc.

I think part of the problem is that the catfighting kink is by nature voyeuristic, not participatory. I just like to watch; being a man, I can't be directly involved. If your kink is bondage or S&M, you probably have some skin in the game, both literally and figuratively. But as a catfight fan, I'm just an observer, a user, if you will; it's the women who are putting in all the effort.

I think for most men, the ultimate catfight fantasy culminates in them relentlessly fucking the winner, the loser, or both, and that would certainly be participatory. I would personally be in sex heaven to have two girl-next-door types go at it on a California king bed, fighting over which one would get to do me first.

If you're just into tying someone up, or being tied up, at least you have some chance of actually having that happen. I'm more likely to be named Ambassador to the Court of St. James's than to have my fantasy realized in the flesh.

I occasionally see these catfight videos where a group of male spectators are politely watching, with an occasional smattering of soft applause like a golf tournament, and I think, "How can you do that? How can you sit there and watch that, and then, what – go to the coffee shop and have a latte?" Good lord, I'd be sitting there white-knuckled, heart pounding, teeth clenched, so cranked up I'd be about to go crazy, wanting to fuck those women.

I wish I could get hot and bothered over something that I might actually be able to make happen. But, alas, I did not pick my kink. I guess it picked me.

Today's random art

Today's random art appears to be from about 1999. I was at a stage where I was going back and forth between comic book-style art and more painterly art.

I was still using my personal hand-made font, laying out the dialog and balloons in Freehand.

Looking at it from twelve years later, I'm happy with the way the gloved hand turned out in panel two. The rest of it is OK as well.

Stuff I learned from Google Analytics

This blog is insanely popular in the Los Angeles metro compared to the rest of the world. It is less popular in New York City, and not very popular at all in Chicago.

I got a lot of traffic last month from Hamburg, and somewhat less from Berlin. Danke schön, KatFiteManiaK, for the referrals. Germany is the number two source of traffic after the US.

Canada is number three. This blog is extremely popular in Edmonton, but much less popular in Toronto and Ottawa. And just about invisible in Montreal and Vancouver.

In the UK, it's popular in London and Gloucester.

It's also been interesting to see how people find this site. More than 2,000 visits came from the link I posted on freecatfights.com. About a thousand have visited from the previously mentioned KatFiteManiaK.

I even had one referral from HotBot, which I thought had shut down years and years ago. For those who don't remember, HotBot was the gold standard for search engines for about an hour and a half in the late 1990's, in between AltaVista and the rise of Google.

I also found a handful of referrals from wwoecforum,com, which I had never heard of. It's apparently part of a larger erotic art and cartoon site, somewhat like deviantART, but with looser rules. I'm exploring it today.

No visitors from Alaska: I think I know why

As I mentioned previously, Alaska is the only state from which this blog has received not a single visit. I speculated it's because they don't have catfights in Alaska.

After further thought, I decided they probably do have catfights in Alaska.

But since they all look like this, no one gives a shit.

And if this looks hot to you, don't even come near me.

Some amazing work

I don't know who these characters are supposed to be, and I don't know who the artist is. (There's a signature, but I can't make it out.)

But holy shit, just look at this work. Look at how much time and energy was devoted to just the foliage. Look at the way the artist has suggested the mist rising at the bottom of the waterfall.

Look at the attention given to the wrinkles in the brunette's top, and how they stretch with the twisting of her torso.

Look at the bright patch of yellow on her skirt, and the spot of almost-white flesh on her arm, where the direct sunlight is hitting them.

The whole thing is just fucking awesome.

As I catfight fan, I would like to see the contact be more aggressive and erotic. But as an artist, I could spend thirty minutes just studying the detail that's gone into this.

If you know the name of this artist, or whether he/she has produced any other work, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

The first month

I have another blog that's been up almost six years. It's a fairly typical blog, full of 'what I had for lunch/I hate my job/I need to get laid' stuff.

I haven't checked to be sure, but I don't think that blog has generated as much traffic in six years as this one has in its first month: 7,578 visits and 45,488 pageviews.

I am frankly stunned.

I've had visitors from every state except Alaska and from 72 other countries.

We are everywhere, folks.

Well, except Alaska. There's no catfighting in Alaska.

These are a few of my favorite things

Let's start October by pushing the envelope a little.

I've been debating whether I could post this without having the blog pulled altogether.

Like most of my stuff, this is several years old, but it remained in unfinished form until just a couple of weeks ago, when I finished it just for this post.

The typical portrayal of oral sex in a catfight scenario generally involves the winner humiliating the loser by sitting on her face or otherwise forcing the loser to perform the act to pleasure the winner.

But I saw a catfight video once where one woman used cunnilingus as an offensive tactic on the other. The video concealed the actual point of contact, but the way the victim was reacting, one could assume the attacker was alternating teeth and tongue to inflict pain, then ecstasy, on her opponent.

Multiple orgasms later, the victim is too exhausted to fight, and the attacker finishes her off with ease. That struck me as a lot hotter than the standard facesitting shot.

I made reference the other day to an Otis Sweat piece I have since lost. It showed, quite explicitly, a fighter pulling at her opponent's labia with her teeth in just the kind of tactic I'm describing. It was the most graphic portrayal of it I've ever seen, and certainly a decade or two ahead of its time in terms of what you could portray.

Hardware porn chapter 4

A few reboots seem to have solved the 'reluctant mouse' problem I was having. Everything's sailing along splendidly now.

Today's random art

Today's random art is an actual pen and ink drawing. I'm guessing it was done in the early eighties. As you can see, it's yet another iteration of my regular theme.

This was originally done at 17 x 22 inches on Bristol board, and was probably a combination of brush, pen and ink.

I was never very good with the cartoonist's favorite brush, the Winsor & Newton Series 7 #2.

I preferred the Robert Simmons Lancer brush. The bristles weren't quite as flexible as those of the Series 7, but it had a large grip on the ferrule which made it easier to hold. And it cost about 40 per cent less.

Hardware porn chapter 3

Well, the new monitor is installed, and issues have arisen. The left click on my mouse, a Logitech Revolution MX, isn't working with some applications. Or actually, it does work, but sometimes I have to click two or three times before the computer responds.

Also, adding the third monitor has completely thrown off eye-hand coordination with my tablet. Moving to the left or right makes the cursor travel almost twice as far as it used to. There's a way to change the tablet to recognize only one monitor at a time, but that adds extra steps every time I want to grab or click something on the second or third screen.

But I shall persevere.

Also: I owe the blog a piece of art today. I promise to do that.

Hardware porn redux

A question was posted here, and then apparently deleted by the poster, asking whether my hardware upgrade will increase the likelihood I will finish a story. I think it's a good question, so I'm going to answer it, anyway.

As I look back on it, it seems like the most productive period of my catfight art career was in the early to mid-nineties. At that point, I was working on a 486/33 PC clone with a dim, crappy 14-inch CRT monitor. I mean this thing got so dim I had to turn out the lights to see anything. But I got stuff done.

I have two friends who are fine artists. They are both well-known in my community, and are shown in high-end galleries. They both work on large canvases – 36 inches or wider. And they both just prop their paintings on the floor or on a tabletop to work on them. No huge oak easels, no fine hardwood palettes. One mixes his paint on tinfoil.

I remember seeing a clip from a documentary on the legendary MAD Magazine cartoonist, Mort Drucker. Drucker sits at his kitchen table to draw, working with Bristol board taped to an old drawing board.

I like having kickass hardware. It certainly makes the more mundane aspects of artwork easier, and I'm in favor of anything that reduces the overhead of small, repetitive tasks, such as trying to find a particular child window in a maze of palettes in Painter or Photoshop.

But big iron doesn't automatically equate to better work, or more work. If I want to be more productive, the main thing I need to improve is not my system, but myself.

Remixing

I made a commitment to myself, as I previously mentioned, to try to post at least one piece of art every day. This has compelled me to spend a lot of time going through my archive looking for items that can stand alone in a post, even if they were intended to be part of a larger narrative structure.

I have found things that are obviously mine, yet I have no recollection of having ever drawn them. (The piece at right is not one of those drawings, by the way – it's just something I picked out for today's post.)

I've even found entire stories that I don't remember doing, and some of the stuff is pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. It's so good, in fact, that I find myself loath to post it here when I could easily recycle it for another story.

The guy who did the PCToons catfight comics on the old Foxfax web site used to call this 'remixing', and that's a good description of it. Digital art is almost endlessly adjustable, tweak-able and repurpose-able. I could take this drawing, for example, and turn it into superheroines, cheerleaders or some other sexual icons in about 90 minutes.

So as I look at these thousands of drawings I've got (many of them iterative saves of the same piece, by the way), I find myself thinking, "Hmm... I think I'll save that for another story."