The Steier Striporama

Welcome to the Steier Striporama!

Elena — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 03:42:29 +0000

Here is your gateway to my weird little world. Here you’ll find comics and stories about vampires, strange little scouts, occult investigators and talking dogs. I’ve tried to make it so you could get lost looking through all this stuff, kind of working your way through the same kind of labyrinth Jack Nicholson did at the end of The Shining, or something. It’s all kind of quirky.

I like to think of my cartoons as the flip side of Mad Magazine. The early issues of MAD were an exuberant celebration of counter-cultural hipness. My cartoons are reflections of a beaten down culture resigned to putting up with whatever comes its way. The vampire, Vladu, for example, spends most of his time trying to figure out how to dump old girlfriends in the same way that CIA operatives plan drone strikes in the hills of Waziristan. I do political cartoons all quirky, too, having recently settled on a long form graphic novel to take on the real center of power, the investment banking system via the character of a very cute little queen. You may notice that the calibre of art is uneven in these cartoons. I became a cartoonist not quite thinking I could draw. I had what you would call on the job training over these past umpteen many years. One of the best things that has happened in the world of cartooning is the influx of so many women. It’s been kind of lonely by myself. Thank goodness for all the characters I created to keep myself company, or I might have gone entirely mad.

Storyboard for an imaginary cartoon

Elena — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:30:50 +0000

Our thirty-something son moved back home this past week which has inspired quite a bit of humor around here. It made me think of a cartoon strip revolving around a young prince returning home from the crusades. I’m not quite handling the workload I’ve given myself already, so I’ve decided to post these as the same type of storyboards as Diary of a Cranky Aunt. Maybe someday someone will turn these into a real animation.

As for other Steier Cartoon projects, there are new Jane Quiet cartoons up and running, plus an addition to the Queen of the Cosmos Website.

Horror High

Elena — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 01:55:11 +0000

I’ve just uploaded the Horror High strips which you can find when you go to the Vampire Bed and Breakfast page. These were the first comic strips I ever created, back in 1997 or thereabouts. I loved the strip, but the drawing was kind of basic. I regurgitated the gags in the Zombie kid sequence of the Goth Scouts. I did this mainly so that the gags wouldn’t be lost, as the original Horror High scans are on a zip drive in my closet. I scanned in a hard copy of the strip that had been printed out in order to create the digital version you see here on the website.

Updated New Look

Elena — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 03:27:40 +0000

I spent the evening tinkering with this website. It was looking kind of spare and I wanted to spruce it up a bit. I don’t do much as far as fancy web design goes. Thank goodness for wordpress and all its plug-ins.

As far as general updates go, the Vampire Bed and Breakfast stories are now available as gallery images. I had them as flip books previously, but I found the quality to be uneven. Also, the loading time was kind of driving me batty, not to mention the ubiquitous “demo” slug every time you’d load it. I still have more stories than these, believe it or not, but it’s late and I think I’m just going to upload those another time.

Probably in future blogs, I’ll go story by story and give a background to their genesis.

Diary of a Cranky Aunt, Conclusion

Elena — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 03:17:59 +0000

This is the final installment of Diary of a Cranky Aunt.

Bye, kids!

Diary of a Cranky Aunt, Part 3

Elena — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 02:15:24 +0000

The third part of the Diary of a Crank Aunt is now up and running.

Eat

Diary of a Cranky Aunt Part 2

Elena — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 19:25:06 +0000

The second part of the Cranky Aunt series is now online.

Diary of a Cranky Aunt

Elena — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 04:10:11 +0000

My niece Lola and my nephew Boris are visiting us for the week. One of our projects is putting together some Diary of a Wimpy Kid types of journals. The kids are doing a great job! I’m cheating a little, and using the program Toon Boom Studio Storyboard Pro to put together my journal. I’ve uploaded the first part, the part I’ve actually done. In keeping with the spirit of Jeff Kinney’s book, all the names have been changed in the goal of creating fiction.

Maggie asks Zach if one of the animatronic gorillas had farted. He says no. She says did too. He says did not.

Updated Goth Scout Archives

Elena — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 20:53:51 +0000

The Goth Scout Cartoon Archives are up and running. It’s very extensive, and kind of fun. Each page refreshes with a new cartoon, and there’s a list of links for more cartoons, all more or less by category. It covers most of the themes in the Goth Scouts. There are those themes which seem to recur.

Site Update

Elena — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 03:42:00 +0000

I’ve been updating the site. Now you can see daily cartoons when you click on the Block, Dinosaur Circus and Suzy Q, Toy Repair links. These are the three strips of mine that were syndicated by DBR Media in the early years of this century. They are real oddball strips. But then everything I do is oddball.

This is Keesha from the strip "The Block". The premise of the strip is that there is a little girl being brought up by three men in a lower class neighborhood. We used to call it the ghetto, but now it's known as the Block.