THE POETS CALLED IT LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

Well, it's about time we got to the villains of the piece. Page 9, panel 2, pencils:



There's an old image I drew (that is the basis for a later scene in this book), with "mustache man" and the character on the right. I instinctively drew the second fellow as a short, squat man. As placeholder names, I just started referring to them as Stan and Ollie. Well, the placeholer names started ingraining themselves in my head. All my life, I've been fascinated with the way Oliver Hardy would play with his tie. It's a bit of character genious, immediately conveying his characters' poor-man's desire to appear well-bred and fastidious. The idea of Oliver Hardy as a really despicable man made me laugh every time I wrote one of his scenes. I had to keep a bit of that in.

He lacked a distinctive voice, though, and spoke in dull exposition until I became obsessed with the BBC program QI. It's unavailable in the US, so I had to youtube it. This led me to an earlier program, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, starring QI's host, Stephen Fry and Hugh (House) Laurie. It's a sketch comedy show and had one particular running bit that worked splendidly. In it, Fry plays off his reputation for erudition and scholarliness in a portrayal of a guest (on Laurie's talkshow) who tries to describe the beauty of language as it pertains to a simple subject. That doesn't sound even remotely funny, I know, but it is.

That's when, sitting in Union Square, all the pieces fit together, and I fell in love. I'm so happy I'm finally filling him out, as it were, so to speak.

BEEF-MASTER

Well, we see how this works. I finally hooked my scanner up to my laptop. Everything worked fine until I went into Photoshop. It seems the 'save for web' function doesn't on my laptop. I could've sworn I'd done it before, but I guess not.

So, I saved it as a Photoshop jpeg. The preview looks fine. Here's hoping.

This is the penciled 5th panel of page 8. Getting closer to being on schedule. Whoopee!



This whole thing started super dense, and it's getting denser as I work on it. Soon, it will be ultra dense. After that? OMEGA DENSE. Beware the OMEGA DENSITY, for it is coming. For YOU.

MoCCA is now only 7 weeks away, so I really need to pick up the paces, one time.
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I'm reading Nick Bertozzi's The Salon. Only about 20% through it, but I think it's the aces. I'd read a few issues of Rubber Necker ages ago, but I don't remember anything really grabbing me about them. I actually can't remember anything about them at all. And they're buried at the moment, so I can't even refresh my memory. However, I've kept his name in the back of my brain, probably in anticipation. I guess it clicked enough for me to be on the lookout for the next thing he did. And I was impressed enough by the visual element of his Houdini book (with Jason Lutes) that I wasn't deterred. Really, the cartooning and the drawing are the draws for that book (the story, not so much).

But The Salon is, so far, satisfying on every level. I'm so running around the towns, talking like Picasso: "Always my mother make piss before a fight."

Visually, it's scrumptious. Lively brush strokes, character designs full of... well, character, and wonderful depth to the compositions. It's pretty inspiring work, as well. His panels are just a bit wider than mine and about the same height, so it's nice to see someone pushing in that direction.

Maybe I'll write more when I'm done with it. Here's a good, short interview with Bertozzi.

I'm also plowing through the first Fantastic Four Omnibus. It took me a while to dig into it, partially because the book ends right before the title really exploded into awesomeness. Still, I'm glad I resolved to start reading it. The stories are pretty sparse and sometimes questionable, but it's a lot of fun watching Lee and Kirby discover the rules they were inventing on the spot. They clearly had no idea what they were doing from issue to issue. Sometimes it seems like they didn't know what they were doing from panel to panel. There's been a couple pages where some MacGuffin device of Doctor Doom's has been described as three completely different things. It's also obvious that Doctor Doom himself was more a work in progress than a fully formed idea. I do wish he used that shark-faced helicopter more often, though.

But some of the brilliant touches were in there right from the start, and just kept getting better. The interpersonal relationships and small character details that fill most of these stories are where all the fun is at. The Thing with the teacup is my favorite, so far. Just a perfect little image you know was done just because it made Kirby laugh to do so, but that spelled volumes about what it was they were on about. And the famous letters pages are some of the best examples of fan interaction I've ever seen.
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Okay, enough from me. It's time to crack some wine and finish watching a Bret Hart/Ted DiBiase match from 1989 before heading to bed. Man, I wish I had some more DiBiasse to watch. He was really good. I wonder if he'll ever get a dvd.

STOP DOING YOUR YOGAS IN MY FACE

Must be all the rain and unseasonably cold temperatures, because people sure do seem to be getting cabin fever.

Okay, just because you can stand on one foot while putting your other foot behind your head and then kick straight up and then jackknife the whole works doesn't mean you should do it when you're standing next to the printer in the office, because that's where I keep my face. And then, suddenly, there you are, spread and contorted where I keep my face. That's no good. It's just no good. 'Cause sooner or later you're going to get all creeped out, and I'll only be doing what comes naturally. Let a man be, please.

Here's the felt-tip overlay layouts of the first four panels of the second page of the fifth chapter of the second part of Kaiju Jugoruma in the upcoming ninth issue of Earth Minds Are Weak. See? I do all my contortions at home.






I'll be incorporating a variation of the woodland scene (seen in previous posts) in the background.

SLOW ACCRETION OF LINES

Adding more ink to the background panel. Trying to get it just right. Some spots are pretty much untouched, while others are still building. The hardest part is getting it so it reduces properly. This is going to print at about 3" wide, and I don't want the details lost. Also, the smaller it is, the harder it is going to be to convey depth. But hey, why should anything be easy?



Worked out all the figure placements and came upon the actual dialog for this page. While the majority of the book has dialog firmly loosely in place, my notes for the first two pages amounted to: "6 months ago, Somewhere deep in the 'Sprawl', 2, 4, 8, 12, exposition, then do it."

It's like my very own U2 song.

I had a feeling it would be easy to throw word down though. The scene features Erik and Sylvia from the first chapter in EMAW #8, and those two just have a wonderful inner life to them and a relationship that seems more nailed down every time I use them. I also wanted to hold off on writing their words here until I'd written the rest of the issue. It's a gambit that payed off, since I wasn't thinking about glaciers or human migration when I started writing this issue. But, now that I've written it, it might seem like I was thinking about them the whole time. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Or not.

BEEFY PENCILS

Pencils on the bristol. Light tabled the marker drawing from the last post and did a final pencil drawing in 9H pencil. The scan is super-beefed contrast.



Next step is inky inky inky.

STARTING EMAW 09

The first two pages of EMAW #9 will be taking place against a more-or-less static background. Since that what going to be the case, I really need to nail that background. It was also important that the scene looked particularly New Jersey. This takes place out in "The Sprawl": land outside the city that's been abandoned somewhat but still maintains some of the markers of suburban/rural life.

I grew up in Morris County, New Jersey, near the Great Swamp and Jockey Hollow and less than an hours drive away from the Meadowlands, the Delaware Water Gap and maybe a little further away from the Pine Barrens. So, I sort of know what the North Jersey woods look like and maybe have a better idea of what makes them distinctive from other woodland areas. North Jersey is made up of land cut and shaped by a glacier and it has it's own particular brand of foliage. I'm not a botanical expert, but we have a lot of pine, maple and oak. And these trees have there own way of growing and shaping the foliage around them. And that's what I'm trying to capture.

Anyway, after the thumbnail, I photoshopped some images of Morris County woods together in a way that I thought looked authentic. I then figured out the approximate scale that I wanted everything to appear. I printed out the altered image and lightboxed it onto scrap paper with a felt tip marker to find the shapes I wanted and to add in a stone wall.

I then took that image to my drawing table and traced and refined it a bit (the paper is thin enough that I don't need to lightbox it, especially since there were few actual detail to transcribe. I kept the original photoshopped image handy to reference.

Then I produced this image with felt tip marker and 6B pencil:



I'm kind of proud to say that I actually have quite a bit more work to do on it, but the nice thing about it is that I can almost treat it as the background on a animated feature for the 12 panels it will be appearing on. I think it will be a cool effect, if I can get it right.

The secret is to not make it look like some crap comic that reuses the same images over and over again like some lousy photo-reference artists you might find working for DC, Marvel or Image. It's important that each panel remains somewhat distinct and alive and various elements all work well together. Hopefully, I can do that. It's an exciting challenge, at least.

EARTH MINDS ARE WEAK #8

The cover and first three pages of Earth Minds Are Weak #8: Kaiju Jugoruma. A 15-page preview is up here. It's not live at the store yet. But if you actually want it, order something else for a total of $3, include a message in your order that you wanted #8, and we'll send you both. It's like a buy-one-get-one-free sale!

Begining in issue 8, it's a brand-new serial: Kaiju Jugoruma!

It's about 100 years in the future and things are much the same as they are now. Except the buildings are much taller. And some of the cars can fly. It's while flying in one of those cars, among those tall buildings, that a man has his day interrupted by another man falling out of the sky and car-jacking him. Featuring transvestite drag racing, robot road vacuums, rubber-masked secret police, excessive pet ownership, a night club chanteuse, psychedelic ingestion, shady club owners, geriatric street gangs and an aggressive ad campaign featuring a giant bullfrog.

Contains the first four chapters of Kaiju Jugoruma. 44 B&W pages and full-color covers. 7"x8.5". $3.00