Comic art is my specialty...

Hi, my name is Brad Olrich and I am a college art professor with a passion for comics. I currently divide my time between comic art and being the lead faculty of the Art Department at Mid-Michigan College in the Central Michigan area.

Cover art for Pulp Fan #7

A recent thrill for me was the assignment from Main Enterprises to illustrate the cover for their ongoing publication for pulp magazine collectors and enthusiasts, Pulp Fan. 

This assignment was to recreate a small interior pen & ink illustration of Doc Savage and the Fabulous Five from Doc Savage Magazine published in the 1930's. The challenge was to stay as true to the original while making it my own. And it had to be in B&W. As a fan of Doc Savage since I was young, I tried to subtly imbue the characters with features as I imagined them. The publisher was very please with the results and decided to use it a a promotional piece as well as a cover. Below is the original and my pencil art recreation. The final piece is on the right.

Wolfman (1940) and Fantastic Voyage (1966) Interior Illustrations

Character Design Concept Art

This was a fun little summer job. I was contacted by a cartoonist/publisher friend of mine about doing a little character design work based on a character that he had created years ago, but wanted to revive. With the briefest of descriptions, I was able to come up with a general look for this female barbarian-type character. 

The Apocalypse Comes to St. Louis

I'm not usually a horror guy, generally speaking. Sure, I'd grown up reading 70's era supernatural and horror comic books like DC's Swamp Thing and House of Mystery...I had tried doing horror comics in the past but didn't really like spending that much time ruminating in the darker recesses of my mind. At least long enough to try and write horror. Illustrations are another matter, though, so when the publisher of Aazurn publishing contacted me about creating an apocalyptic splash page, I was more than happy to do so. I was given pretty much free reign. I simply had to select a identifiable location and depict either a demonic, hellfire and brimstone kind of thing or a zombie kind of thing. Having been raised going to church I have a fair amount of trauma related to hearing terror tales from the book of Revelations (most of which I found out later, when I was old enough to read the thing, were fabrications and weird interpretations of some pretty incoherent ramblings) I chose the hellfire and brimstone route.  As for the location, I chose St. Louis, MO for no particular reason. I'm glad I did, because I was able to find some excellent reference photos to work from. One in particular stood out. It was of some sort of bridge or walkway that had a great view of the city at sunset. It even featured the famous arch or Gateway to the West, as it's called. After that it was a simple matter of adding a bat-winged demon or two and a number of poor damned souls fleeing the city.

The work was rendered in pencil on 11" x 17" Bristol board, scanned and then digitally inked in Adobe Photoshop using a True Grit Crispy Inker brush tip. I want to specifically draw attention to that brush because it allowed me to give the piece an old school inking quality much like I would achieve using a crowquill pen. I highly recommend it if you are interested in digital art.
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Color work is by artist Gary Scott Beatty, owner of Aazurn Publishing.                                                   

Arnza: Well of the Warlock

Here is a sample of my latest project Arnza: Well of the Warlock.
This story will be appearing in Main Enterprises comic book anthology Brain Freeze #7. Arnza, an Etruscan student of the physical sciences and his pal, Dexios, roam the Mediterranean world of 7th Century B.C.  Here are a few pages from this inaugural tale.
Penciling is a huge part of the process of making a comic strip or book. Everything is planned out in advanced on thumbnails sheets and then penciled on 11" x 17" Bristol board in more detail.

Latest Illustration Work...

 I guess word on my affinity for working on period pieces, particularly ones from the ancient world, is getting around. I was recently asked by a publisher if I would like to contribute work for their upcoming folio of characters from Greek Mythology.  I was giving my choice of characters to choose from, so I selected Achilles and Bellerophon to illustrate. Beyond that (and some general dimensions) I was given complete creative freedom to do whatever I wanted. For those of you that have forgotten, never read The Iliad or have never seen the movies Helen of Troy (1956) or Troy (2004), Achilles was supposed to be the fiercest warrior of all of Greece. Now, I always envisioned him as a dark, brooding, viscous brute. So I chose to show a savage, but weary, Achilles in his tent in the moments after his epic duel with Hector (who's body you can see slung under a camp table). I also decided to eschew any ink wash or grayscale and go with a very stark black and white rendering. 

I also do Digital Painting and Cover Art

The fun part of being a full-time Professor of Art & Design is using my own work as demonstrations in lectures. Here are a couple of recent comic book cover concepts done using my painting skills, but in Adobe Photoshop rather than acrylic or oils.

Commodore Dinosaur and me...

As a lifelong comic fan, I began creating my own comic as soon as I was able. In the late 1980's I began publishing my own work. Soon after I was contacted by other small press publishers and began producing professional comic art. It was around this time that I created the character of Commodore Dinosaur. Then, around 2003 I created a web strip centered around the character which ran for 3 years and produced over 350 strips. Finally, in 2017 a redesign and reboot of this character was done as my MFA thesis (Yes, I have an MFA in comic book illustration). Here are a few pages from that thesis...

At Galaxy's Core now available in full color at comixology! 

That's right! My space opera comic strip At Galaxy's Core which appeared in Aazurn Publishing's Indie Comics issues #1 and #2 is now available in color for your iPhone or tablet. Now you can read the adventures of Grif and the Drifter on the go wherever you want. Just follow the link below to Comixology where you can find Indie Comics for the low price of only $2.99 per issue. talk about a deal! That's 54 pages of full color comics. Not just At Galaxy's Core, but many other series as well!
​www.comixology.com/Indie-Comics/comics-series

Contact me!

Portraits, paintings, illustrations and comic art. All at reasonable prices. Contact me with project proposals or art commissions.