Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, Gideon Kendall, illustration, indie Comics, Whatzit

Gideon Kendall's Voyeuristic Passion Project Progresses – A Whatzit Art Preview

Published Tue, 09 Jun 2015 17:30:00 -0500

Gideon Kendall may be one of the first people I met in comics, or at least aspiring to comics, even though he was already a highly accomplished illustrator, and these days has been working on high-profile animation projects as well. It just goes to show that you can be a top-notch artist whose work is highly sought after commercially, but if you got the comics bug, that desire to create your own sequential narrative is going to win out.

For the past couple of years, Kendall has been slowly but surely chipping away on his main comics project, Whatzit, as well as contributing toward a humor anthology, Wait, It Gets Worse, with Doug Latino, and bringing the results to MoCCA Fest and indie shows. All along, Kendall has been making the bold gesture of posting pages online as he creates them with the webseries collective Activatcomix as well. This past weekend, he tabled for the first time in a more mainstream "Artist Alley" setting at Special Edition: New York City where I caught up with him.

I've seen some of the earliest scripts for Whatzit, and even some conceptual art for the series before it progressed into an actual comic, and seeing that happen has been one of those things that reminds me why people make comics, and how much impact the process of creating can have on someone. Let's hope that soon the series can have as much impact on readers.

So what is Whatzit? It's an eerie, oozy, funny, and fairly crazed sci-fi adventure taking us into parallel worlds and back into the 1970's in the lives of teenagers which Kendall describes as a "very graphic novel" that he's working on in chapters. His description for the series on the comic's website reads:

Pimples, the scourge of adolescents everywhere, are actually portals through which creatures from another dimension derive voyeuristic pleasure. Whatzit is the story of a creature from this alien world and an American teenager and how their fates intertwine. It is a tale of adolescent angst, action, adventure and acne.

But I can't help but say that the description doesn't indicate just what intricate and strange worlds Kendall has created here in letting his artistic abilities run wild.

Here's an art selection from the first two chapters of the series to give you an idea:

I wouldn't be much of a supporter of the medium if I didn't encourage you, readers, to find out more about this series and look into supporting its development. I have no doubt that Kendall will keep working on this project in his fragments of spare time, but maybe if we are a little more demanding about seeing the end result, he'll tape his eyelids open for us and push through a few more pages a month.

To support Whatzit, you can: Read Whatzit on activate.com and buy Whatzit here.