I was again challenged to turn waiting time into working time today, this time waiting for a medical consultation. It was off and on, but I got some inking done on "Breakfast". I also got scheduled for surgery in a couple weeks, to fix a pinched nerve that's affecting the sensation and coordination in my drawing hand...which might be more significant.
Finished proofing Bloody Waters and turned it in to the editor. About fucking time! Hopefully this one meets the requirements.
Lettered the Bucket of Glass pages this morning. Holy shit, we're nearly ready to pitch! I'll post them in my worklog next week (as well as facebook, etc). Meanwhile, time for a roadtrip.
Today was a day-job day, plus a phone interview. I had a brief conversation with Lukas about design stuff and planning, exchanged a couple emails with people about press stuff, and got a little thinking done as far as the train of thought I'm currently pursuing about vampires.
Also, THE WALKING DEAD #84 came out, with a preview of the first five pages of WITCH DOCTOR #1 in the back. Which was, of course, terribly exciting — although it pointed out that the lettering needs to be at least a half-size larger! Still, better to know that *now*!
This weekend is about making sketch cards and more web comic pages. @$$hole! hasn't been updating as regularly as I'd like, since I've been focusing on Albert scripts. Next Albert script will be done by end of May!
Finally finished the last of my projects for this semester, it actually ties into the comic project I'll be starting this summer. I'll be posting a worklog on that here in a few. Otherwise I'm no free to start scripting the first story inline for the Leningrad project and do a few housekeeping bits around here.
Doing the day job work on a business trip to Miami this week has kept me from doing much comic work. But I did get today's Perfect Agent lettered and posted on time.
Does posting stuff in The Toolbox category on SeqWork count as Doing The Work? If not, I also fiddled with the pencils for "Fountain", and uploaded page 1 of Captain Miracle (goes live tomorrow evening).
Fiddled around with organization tools, discovered a bug, and other procrastination and then wrote a couple of pages.
I'm hurting my brain trying to pace this story in a way that fits into two panel pages but fits into a regular comic size. The artist wants to do big, clear layouts suitable to an iPad or that don't have to jump all over the place on a smaller digital device. I tried reading comics on the iPod Touch and hated it.
I sucked today, got nothing done except re-drew the pencils on a cover. Tomorrow will be a big one, I have a horrible meeting and then I'm lettering Green Wake #3 and working on my two new snazzy websites before my writer comes over for a beer after five.
not getting as much regular sleep as i should, catching up with me today i crashed and woke with a mild headache. Going to scan some of Lionel's negatives i think, go for a walk, and then get back to sleep.
Monday's the deadline for lettering for the Witch Doctor issue we've been working on — but I work at my day job Monday, and so I'm trying to get it all done early. After seeing our preview in the back of WALKING DEAD #84 I realized I was lettering everything too small, so today I went through half the book and bumped the size up a point... only to discover that now it's just too big for the pages that have a lot of text, and it's covering up too much of the art. So it's back to square one tomorrow. Sigh.
These days, Life has a tendency to interfere with my Doing The Work more than usually. Instead of nagging about all the things that need to be done, life now started SHOUTING STRAIGHT AT MY EAR FROM REAL CLOSE BY. Very unpleasant.
Yesterday, I managed to squeeze some work in because I had to. A new Conny van Ehlsing story is due, and though I've yet to write and draw it, I've managed to solve some plot problems. Just in time to be confident enough about the new story to plug it in today's installment. Of course, with nothing drawn, I didn't have anything to layout into the plug, so I went outside instead and took some photos of manholes and stuff, because part of the story is about underground. A quick and messy editing session later, I had myself an update. What I didn't have was time left to clock it in here. But since I spent most of today not Doing The Work anyway, but reconnecting my internet, there's no today's work to compete with it. Also, this is as early as I can write about it.
Another day, more research. Nearly finished with The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind, then I'm diving into the Bob Woodward books. Broke down the first dozen pages, talked to my artist (who is insanely busy right now, so it's lucky I have so much more research to do). I realized that my goal with all the research is to impress Rachel Maddow with my political superhero comic chops. She will be my TV lesbian girlfriend. Oh yes.
Had a lunch meeting with an editor, and sent him some story stuff afterwards.
Resized the lettering — again! — on the Witch Doctor issue.
Talked to Lukas on the phone about various and sundry, including some character designs he sent. Brainstormed some character stuff, and got excited. We're getting into the Museum cast — Abby O'Riley, Wouter Kilwinning, Jenny Haniver, Adam Megannum — and it's really cool to see him taking these character ideas and bring them to life.
Also, Lukas sent me four pages of thumbnails, and they're hysterical. I can't wait to see the finished scene!
I didn't get much creative work done today, but I did some comment-spamming of CaptainMiracle.com on so-called news sites with articles about the tempest-in-a-teapot over Superman renouncing his US citizenship in Action #900. I figure that some of the people who find that story scandalous might mistake Captain Miracle for something they could get behind.
Got the first draft of a nine pager done. It was kind of done Marvel style. It was plotted out first, and then I did captions and dialogue from the artist's roughs.
Last night i didn't do comics work again, but i did get some negatives scanned and posted for the the Italian machine project. getting a late start today, going to go eat some nosh and do the laundry, then try to get down to doing some art, dang it!
Getting back in the comic swing today (and doing laundry). Did some scripting, some editing, and some toning. And I can't stop looking at this cover sketch for Love is in the Blood issue #4 that Elliot sent me while I was on the road last week. Issue #4 release imminent.
May 1st is the third birthday of Love is in the Blood. (Previous incarnations under other names stretch back another 5-ish years, but LiitB is the one that counts.) And Perfect Agent is two years old tomorrow. Not sure why I like to start webcomics on May Day, but I do.
Fell well short of my 100 page goal yesterday. Passed out halfway through and slept for nearly 12 hours. Back to it now and have to make up for yesterday. Still, I'll be thrilled to hit 100 today.
Got Mondays' Angry Faerie page inked. Plus, penciled next Friday's page and inked in the panel borders so there's that under way as well. Will try to work on more AF related stuff tonight, because I'd like to work on some rare non-AF stuff a bit tomorrow if possible.
Last night I worked on tightening up the pencils for "Fountain". I concluded that version 2 of the opening panel still sucked, so I deleted it and redrew it. Version 3 sucks less. All those foreshortened reclining figures in Life Drawing 2 still weren't enough to solve this.
Yesterday, I woke up very early to drop the wife off at the train station so that she could go to New York and hang out with her girlfriends for the weekend at the Fat Girl Flea Market (i told her to pick a good fat girl for us). After a few more hours of restful sleep, I got up and watched Virtuality (a good movie diminished by the lack of Jamiroquai in the soundtrack). And I read the first three books in the Dungeon series to get myself re-acquainted for when I get around to reviewing them.
Then I started making comics. I got the draft copies of Lars Vegas Presents back from Lulu yesterday and discovered that I had one page out of order in one story - which shifted all the pages over one, ruining all of the two page spreads. And, in another story, the pages were all out of order. I revised the pdf and resumbitted the book for proofing. I'll use these copies for myself and my book designer. If you give the editor a book with a big, glaring error, that's what he'll focus on. We use a variation of that principle at work.
I realized that Book 3 of Oceanus Procellarum (aka the under-supported storyline) wrapped up on Friday, so I put up the book cover and credits pages for Book 4. The full content of Book 4 goes live in January of 2012.
I loaded all of the comics that I made on my iPhone last year (and posted on Twitter, which is why i think of them as Twitter Comics) under the Irregular Variables series - 78 comics in 15 rough storylines. Those will run from June through early September.
I also scanned in the second batch of ten scrapbooking pages I made in the class I've been taking. Those still have to be rotated, finalized and uploaded, also to Irregular Variables - probably in late September or October. I got out of the house by running down to Michael's and using a 40% off coupon on a scrapbooking album, which I put all of my scrapbooking pages into, for ease of presentation.
And I discovered that if you scan in an index card at 1200 dpi, you can resize it to 300 dpi and it will still be roughly the size of a comic book page. So I made cartoons on index cards for a 24 page comic I came up with on Friday night when I was thinking about the question of "what, exactly, a great American graphic novel would be about." And then I scanned them in. I still have more work to do on those - I'm planning to print them and add more artwork and verbiage around the edges of the big cartoon in the middle of the page.
My local comic group is meeting tonight, so I've only got a handful of productive hours available today. I'll see what I can do.
Translated tomorrow's GATE CRASH episode. It's p. 1 of the comic I made for the 30 year anniversary issue of German fanzine PLOP. It doesn't have that much dialogue, but finding comic titles that work as sound words that work in the situation I need them in was a bit difficult, which is why I considered this comic untranslateable for a while. Until I remembered more comics titles and decided I really only need that one.
Comments
I'm hurting my brain trying to pace this story in a way that fits into two panel pages but fits into a regular comic size. The artist wants to do big, clear layouts suitable to an iPad or that don't have to jump all over the place on a smaller digital device. I tried reading comics on the iPod Touch and hated it.
Struggle or not it's working my writing muscle.
I had such plans.
not getting as much regular sleep as i should, catching up with me today i crashed and woke with a mild headache. Going to scan some of Lionel's negatives i think, go for a walk, and then get back to sleep.
Yesterday, I managed to squeeze some work in because I had to. A new Conny van Ehlsing story is due, and though I've yet to write and draw it, I've managed to solve some plot problems. Just in time to be confident enough about the new story to plug it in today's installment. Of course, with nothing drawn, I didn't have anything to layout into the plug, so I went outside instead and took some photos of manholes and stuff, because part of the story is about underground. A quick and messy editing session later, I had myself an update. What I didn't have was time left to clock it in here. But since I spent most of today not Doing The Work anyway, but reconnecting my internet, there's no today's work to compete with it. Also, this is as early as I can write about it.
Got the first draft of a nine pager done. It was kind of done Marvel style. It was plotted out first, and then I did captions and dialogue from the artist's roughs.
Then I started making comics. I got the draft copies of Lars Vegas Presents back from Lulu yesterday and discovered that I had one page out of order in one story - which shifted all the pages over one, ruining all of the two page spreads. And, in another story, the pages were all out of order. I revised the pdf and resumbitted the book for proofing. I'll use these copies for myself and my book designer. If you give the editor a book with a big, glaring error, that's what he'll focus on. We use a variation of that principle at work.
I realized that Book 3 of Oceanus Procellarum (aka the under-supported storyline) wrapped up on Friday, so I put up the book cover and credits pages for Book 4. The full content of Book 4 goes live in January of 2012.
I loaded all of the comics that I made on my iPhone last year (and posted on Twitter, which is why i think of them as Twitter Comics) under the Irregular Variables series - 78 comics in 15 rough storylines. Those will run from June through early September.
I also scanned in the second batch of ten scrapbooking pages I made in the class I've been taking. Those still have to be rotated, finalized and uploaded, also to Irregular Variables - probably in late September or October. I got out of the house by running down to Michael's and using a 40% off coupon on a scrapbooking album, which I put all of my scrapbooking pages into, for ease of presentation.
And I discovered that if you scan in an index card at 1200 dpi, you can resize it to 300 dpi and it will still be roughly the size of a comic book page. So I made cartoons on index cards for a 24 page comic I came up with on Friday night when I was thinking about the question of "what, exactly, a great American graphic novel would be about." And then I scanned them in. I still have more work to do on those - I'm planning to print them and add more artwork and verbiage around the edges of the big cartoon in the middle of the page.
My local comic group is meeting tonight, so I've only got a handful of productive hours available today. I'll see what I can do.
It'll make sense.
It looks better in color, but I'll show that later. Cheers!