Wednesday Update

No 'Missing Ink' piece for today. I'm in the middle of a comic for the local branch of the ACLU and that's where my energy's going. Fun stuff. Well, I don't know that fun is the word, but it's reallky interesting to work on something, as an artist where the majority of what I'm doing is conveying information. Stuff's supposed to look "cool" of course, but that's a distant second to the necessity of the instructions, information and contacts being provided.

Here's a peak:



See you tomorrow! We'll see if I don't have something a little more 'kewl'. Haha...

New Gods Update! (The Missing Ink)

So, here's an update on the New Gods page I've been working on. (The roughs for this bit of it can be found here )

The lettering turned out great, if I can be so bold; you can tell by the roughs that, for this page, I really considered it a crucial part of the layout. The 'fun' of this has been the roughs (a lot of quirky storytelling challenges, many self-imposed) and the lettering (which helps overcome some storytelling problems and is just plain entertaining). It's a bit of work now to get to the finish line with this one, but I really want to see this done (not always a given) so rest assured true believer...done it will be!

Soon.

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Stuck In The Middle (Here I Am)

[Updated: I'm on schedule!]

So, starting a new page featuring Wolverine fighting Mystique (more on that to come) I realized that the last panel, one of the biggest on the page, wasn't really working

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It's a tricky thing, in that the panel or image looks fine, but that's all it looks. There's two purposes in a panel, to 'inform' (communicate effectively the information, i.e. that guy's got a gun, or "Damn, she's anatomically perfect!") or to 'entertain' ( make something look good or give the reader their money's worth).



This panel was doing the former fine (she just beat up Wolverine and is now standing there looking victorious) but just wasn't cutting it for me in the later category. She's kinda just standing there.

I've decided to lean a bit more towards entertainment. We'll see how it goes.

Stayed tuned!

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UPDATE:

So, I managed to get the revision in today and decided I'd post it before polishing it up. Here ya go!



It's interesting. There's not too much that's different. I did shift the hips a bit and of course adjust the head and arm, but more than anything else it's a commit to pushing the decision I've made. Going with a kind of pin-up within a page means pushing it.

I think it works, but we'll see tomorrow. Artists are a cowardly and superstitious lot.

New Gods Page

So, the Green Lantern page that I started last week was taking a bit long. Which isn't, in and of itself, a problem, except for the fact that I'm trying to go a little quicker with these one-off pages. So... we're putting that one aside and moving on for now. I'll get back to it, sooner rather than later I'm sure. It's been fun so far, and I'll make sure to post it once it's done.

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The new page I'm starting on is taken from a random DC comic from the early eighties, "Super Team Family". Catchy title, right? The cover is really what drew me in (no pun intended). Here it is, by artist extraodinaire Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez:



Great, right? It's actually way better than the art inside. The story is pretty basic. Orion of the New Gods is growing really, really big, and that's apparently really, really bad. Couple characters are trying to save him.

It's a serviceable plot, but the art is journeyman and doesn't bring much to the script. That's not a criticism of the art as such, just an observation that there's a lot of room in the work for more energy and individual artistic style.

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The next step was finding a page to work with. I chose one of the early ones. Two superheroes standing on an ever-expanding version of a third? I'm there!



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It's been a lot of fun so far. Here's a sample of the roughs (or some of them, at least). I've decided to go ahead and letter this one. I'll explain why as I wrap it up, some time in 2012.

Joking, joking...



You can see all the panels from the original reflected in these roughs. There's some experimentation going on right now, so I've added stuff, taken out stuff and moved other stuff around.

Stuff.

See you tomorrow!

Sandman Page! (Wacky Week of April 4th)

[Updated]

Man, this was a beast!

I mentioned a couple weeks ago my intention to do a different comic page a week, just to keep different art muscles in shape. For my first one I selected a page from an issue of Sandman, Neil Gaiman's excellent and indispensable series. He worked with a host of collaborators on the book, and the arc that I drew (no pun intended) this page from was originally drawn by Kelly Jones, an excellent artist.

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I found the actual script for this page online, and so I was able to avoid 'starting' from where Jones had left off. It can be difficult, in the case of a very strong artist, determining your own blueprint. It can seem so natural, the storytelling choices that've already been made, and you run the risk of just reinterpreting the printed page, rather than drawing your own version of it. It's a fairly thin distinction but I believe it's a crucial one.

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I am happy with how this turned out. The pencils are incredibly tight, but I wanted something that looked 'done'. I got to get a little Art Nouveau and P. Craig Russell (there's a large overlap between those two, really) in the art. It was a lot of fun.

Hope you like it. See you Monday!

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Update

Here's a link to the Comic Script archives. Look for Neil Gaiman, and the Sandman script's the only one listed for him. It's a Word doc; I used page 24, which is the very last one.