Pages of the week

I managed to keep pace, this next sequence should go pretty fast because it's a talking head sequence. I think I've decided to hand letter it, I think digital letters might be 'too digital' for my taste.

2 fer' week!

It's fun to go back to these pages that truthfully I didn't spend much time on in the original and level them up a bit.

Pagina de Semana

These quiet pages are interesting to work on, I've learned a lot about color and mood over the years and it's fun to put that to work on something you did so long ago.

Page O' da' week!

I'm almost done with this first action sequence, this is about in the middle of the book. I wanted to start there and work my forward, and do the first part of the book last. I seem to always get 'better' or maybe more focused, less experimental, toward the last sprint in a series. I want the first chapter to really smash people in the face....as much as a comic is capable of such a thing. Once the this first sequence is done I'll put a PDF together, so you can read the past 2 months of work in context. I'm really happy with it, which is unusual. I'm still enjoying this a great deal.

I've been reading a lot about digital distribution. I had the thought today that this is an excellent opportunity to lead with a digital only version. Obviously I'm a big fan of digital, Mark Waid is very passionate about the subject, and I agree with his suprisingly controversial idea, we as creators need to lead the charge, it's an opportunity to recapture our distribution, digital is currently a level playing field. I can get as much exposure as the newest X-men on Comixology. I'm all for a new business model for comics. The current one is just not sustainable or good for anyone, especially graphic novel guys like me. With Oink I could see offering the first 32 pages for free, and the entire graphic novel for 9.99, rather than the 19.99 price tag the original carried. Personally, I think comics are the worst entertainment dollar you can currently spend, take video games for example. In a video game you get minimum of 8 hours up to...hundreds of hours of entertainment for $59.99. If you break it down hour by hour, at it's worst case it ranges from $7.00 per hour to pennies if you play something like Fallout 3 for a hundred hours like me. Entertainment money is disposable income, and it's more about bang for your buck.

Comics are more like an album, but typically you listen to a song more than once, but rarely will you read a comic more than once...so even in that comparison you still get more value from a 1.99 song than you do a 4.95 comic that takes up space in your basement.

I think we would have a lot more fans if the price point dropped to .99 or 1.99 for digital. I think the creators can make more money with increased volume and a lower overhead on materials..and almost no cost for distribution. When you buy a comic for $4.95 the pie chart on where that money goes would make your head spin, everything from the paper suppliers, to the shipping cost of the books to the shops, to the guy ringing the register, it all factors in.

I love my local comic shop here, Austin Books. I'm viewing this as a creator who was driven out of comics because of the business model couldn't sustain a creator like me. I'm not a volume type of guy. I get one good idea every few years worth exploring, and I would spend probably 2 years per 100 pages of art and story..and I don't want to paint other peoples stuff, I just don't have any passion for that.

Consider this, I would say a $5.00 cup of coffee at Starbucks has the same entertainment value per dollar, as far as time/money sink, and look where they are right now in this economy...now imagine you want to drink 20 cups of $5.00 coffee a week, it would put anyone in the poor house fast, it punishes your consumer. I remember my last series Blood & Circus was sold for 4.95 for 24 pages of art and story, and because I'm artsy I don't use a lot of text...so you could blow through an issue in less than 10 minutes! I thought they were mad...mad as hatters! They had to though in order to make money, it cost them almost $2.00 per book just to print! Personally I would only see about 0.25 of that per copy! If you ever wonder why I left the wonderful medium of comics...I've never been a believer that creators should have to suffer for their art....poets...poets suffer for their art.

Page of the week

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 ones for you blue pig...sorry about that.

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.

Run for the light, run for your life.

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!

two-fer-week

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.

Page of the week

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.

Page of the week

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.

Judas make-over

Judas! Now we're getting into some fun stuff. This is the main bad guy's right hand, he actually was the lead bad guy in the sequel Blood & Circus. The original is definitely the epitomy of my Bisley phase.

The Angels of Mercy

So,this sequence I've been working on sort of culminates with Oink's first showdown with the Angels of Mercy. I actually don't have this page and I thought I would have to have it drum-scanned from my original film, which I was dreading a bit cost-wise. This morning I had an idea to try to photograph the page itself, the problem with using the book pages as my source is that when you scan them you get a really prominent Moira pattern from the light of the scanner being so close to the page that makes it impossible to work with...Nikon D5000 to the rescue! I cut the page out and hung it in my little lighting booth like I would the original art and I was really happy with the results. It's not as crisp as the original, but I'm practically repainting this page anyway.

This weeks page is off to a good start I think, again re-framing the panels to more clearly tell the story...have I mentioned how much I'm learning reading Scott Mcloud's books?!! He's really brilliant and if you're making any kind of panel to panel story it's required reading, it will save you a lot of frustration...trust me.

I also found a link to Andrew Loomis' amazing book on just about everything illustration. It's way out of print, and super expensive if you try to buy an original. This was the book i was trained with in college, it's a treasure of the man's theories from color to perspective, he covers it all.

Illustration Island

Page of the week

This was one of those weeks, one of the weeks I knew would be challenging. I had an extremley busy week at work, and I also came down with a cold. This was also a page that in the original series was a very 'meh' type of page, one of the pages I used to blast through to get to the 'fun stuff'. So with everything else going on I was working on a page that never really did much for me the first time around, but that's why I'm doing this. I want to give every page the same bit of attention so that the story flows with the art and you don't hit 'speedbumps' along the way that slow you down or pull you out of the narrative.

This is another good example of almost a complete 'do over' because the panel flow in the original was just bad...thank you Scott Mcloud for your amazing books.

New page for the week

This is my page for the week. I'm going to try to just update when pages are done with the new one on top and the old one on the bottom. This was a fun page, my goal was to get the narrative to flow better without words. I also wanted to foreshadow the page after next...enter the Angels of Mercy!

The basics

So I've really been going back and hitting the books hard on layout. Looking back on the series the truth is...I just didn't know what I was doing, or to be kinder to myself. I was learning on the job, and now one of the things I'm enjoying most about this is going back and adding clarity to the narrative.

So this example above is really about drawing out the moment, so that when we get to the 'oh my god he's going to kill me' moment it has more impact. I think in the original it's also unclear what's going on, there aren't enough moment to moment transitions to tell the reader why this guy is so terrified. The new layout shows the transient character looking on in horror as Oink hacks up his friends. Then Oink lifts his head looking back over his shoulder, next panel, close shot as the guy realizes...oh shit...he's seen me!

Now I think we have a better idea of why he's so scared. You can scroll down to see what the full page layout looks like.

Good times!

Overhaulin'

This is the following page from that last sequence. I actually cut down the number of thugs to 3 so I could do some of the major tweaks on this page. The other guy was always superficial, and these next 2 pages IMO, are probably some of my worst panel layouts...they're hard to follow.

I really wish I could use my time machine and go back and give myself a copy of Scott Mclouds series of books- aspect to aspect, moment to moment! This is one of those major overhaul pages, but I think it reads much better and the narrative is clearer...let me know if you can tell what's going on in the scene without word balloons.

The Butcher

I mocked this up fast and furiously, it's really a blush at a cover concept. I doubt it will be the final, but it feels fresh.

Blood in the gutter

I really wanted to keep the spirit of this original layout, I think I remember why I used all those warm colors, often times l use a specific color to set the emotion in a scene. Oink is not a skilled fighter he's all brute, so he's sort of even keeled, but once his cork comes off...watch out! So I really wanted to push that, you'll probably see a lot more of this red during Oink's fight scenes. Red is the dead color. Cardinal Baccar the main bad guy is all decked out in Red too.

So I'm also polishing some dialogue, some naming things I never liked. So, Billy from the original series is now Jacob, it's more biblical. I want to reinforce how this place evolved, Heaven is basically a city where all other religions were wiped out, everything in their culture would have one source.

The making of...

So the process to get this stuff into my computer has been a learning curve. The series was originally drum scanned which produced color separations that I have, but the scanning is not cheap, the most affordable way for me to do this is to shoot all the art work digitially, and retouch. The first pages I did were at a questionable resolution, just barely comic format under 300 DPI, and shot with my Sony point and shoot which really didn't get a very crisp focused shot. I don't mind painting over stuff, but the original art has some nice character that I was worried I was losing...enter the Nikon D5000 I purchased today. The resolution and crispness is really incredible, I'm still trying to figure out the right settings for my set up...I just discovered tweaking white balance...so no more yellow shots. I'm going back to take a class with the sales guy from Precision Camera, who oddly enough remembered Oink! I told him about this project, so he may even be reading this, what up Joel! Thanks for all the help today!

Gyahhh!!

I was totally swamped today, but I found this quick panel I busted out. I use Jaime's brushes for everything I do these days. It's just a very simple straight forward brush set, andi haven't ever come accross something I couldn't accomplish with the set. I also discover brushes like the 50 squaure texture thing (photoshop when will you let people label brushes??) anyway- you can probably find the set by searching conceptart.org