OINK is the creator owned project of artist John Mueller. This blog documents the creation of this new edition. The new book will be available in 2014. The new art will be posted here as it's created, comment, critique, and discuss with creator.
Some pages are harder than others, I re-drew half the page on this one. I think I crunched too much action into too few panels in the original, and the panel layout was unbalanced. I still don't like that Judas' action isn't really resolved. The original scene Loki falls ontop of him after Oink blows his head off...not sure if it matters. I like the way the digital re-work of the page came out, considering I was feeling a big lethargic this week....I blame the new Fallout Vegas game!
This is the culmination of Oink's first encounter with the Angels of Mercy, the main bad guys henchman in the series. I really had a lot of fun with this, the pages are going surprisingly fast. This is one of my Frank Miller homage pieces, when I began writing the series I was deeply inspired by Sin City.
Sometimes I have to go google image search reference, googling anything with the term pig in it will get back some truly heartbreaking stuff. This noble beast was tortured at the hands of some employee's at the Hormel factory farms, look in his eye and tell me there isn't a soul there, and he's totally telling god what we did to him. This kind of treatment of pigs is VERY common, factory workers in the US often times severly abuse and beat these animals, and very little is done to the offenders. It's not enough we raise them in grossly over crowded food farms, can't we let them die with some dignity. This is a far cry from the 'local farmer' we all imagine is raising our meat.
It's really fun to be able to reinforce the story, and not have that constant weight of 'oh, my god, I need to finish this.' I'm also approaching every page with this is the LAST time I'll do this, so get it right...haha. FOR REAL THIS TIME!
I had a productive day, this thing popped out of nowhere. I started roughing the layout in and I just started have a lot of fun with it. I'll probably still pick on it over the week. There was quite a bit of redrawing on this page, but that didn't seem to slow me down.
I'm jumping ahead a page because I couldn't find the original previous page, but I think I'm going to just photograph the printed comic page and paint on that, seemed to work pretty well for the angel splash page.
This page was fun, and it came together pretty easily during a very busy week. This will start sounding redundant if I always say 'wow, shocker it was a busy week.' Doing the production of the original it took 18 months of my dedicated focus, most of the time I just wanted to be done. I was really poor and I spent most of my small advance 6 months in. I know for at least a year I was doing other work to eat, then work on this at night. When I had completed the first 32 pages I thought I was just going to not be able to do the others. I don't think I understood that graphic novels are the artistic equivalent of marathons. The second book was much better than the first, and just like the other series I did the last book was the best in my own opinion. There's sort of an initial excitement about a project, at some point regret and rejection of the amount of work that needs doing, and then finally you accept that your other plans just need to go away and you dismiss all sense and reason and lash yourself to the board until it's finished. The problem with writing, drawing, coloring, and doing everything on a book is that it becomes exactly that, you're a man in a box and nobody knows how to help you because there's no reasonable point of insertion of aid. If you have a penciler, an inker, a colorist, a cover artist, and a letterer I imagine it feels much more sane. It's probably why very few people do this kind of thing. I think because time and money aren't really affecting my decision making this time around (because of my day job) I'm genuinely enjoying it, where the first time I was just blowing through pages like the devil was on my heels...I'm now a month in and I'm still really excited about the project, even though it will take two years, which sounds like a long time, but when it's done, it will be forever done. I hope to do a few more books in my lifetime, but it all starts with getting one right.
