Month: February 2024

It happens. It’s not a great feeling. And you’ll struggle and go through several cycles of “I can’t do this” “Why can’t I do this” “I’m crap at this”

You may even find something else to do that – be it something radically different (for me programming or acting) or possibly only just a little bit different (writing or drawing something else) and you’ll be able to do that fine.

But you come back to the thing you’re stuck on and it’s still… stuck.

I’ve wasted days and days on panels (weeks sometimes) that have utterly defeated me, and what I’ve found is that … well… sometimes you just have to accept defeat. You’re going to draw/write something that‘s a little bit crap. 

Certainly crap compared to what you had in mind.

But that’s fine. Do it. Move on.

Maybe you’ll get a do over. Maybe you’ll fix it in inks. Maybe it’ll always be a bit crap.

But honestly, it’s more likely it’s not that crap – it’s just you‘ve hit one of those things where instead of being surprised* by what you’re doing you’re not able to get to what it is you’re trying to do.

The relentess ticking of a deadline means though what ever it is that’s stalled you out well, you’re going to have to get over it.

Get it done. Done is better than perfect. Every time.

-pj

*I am frequently surprised by my drawings, occasionally pleasently. I don’t Sit back and think “Ah, that‘s exactly what I imagined” because I’m imagining it as I’m drawing it – I’m always slightly frustrated though when a writer says ”Wow! You drew that exactly as I imagined it”. DID I? WELL WHAT THE HELL DID I SPEND SO LONG FRETTING OVER IT FOR THEN???

These are not the microns you’re looking for. Top is a genuine. Below that all fake.

Differences seem to be the quality of the non just isn’t as good and the ink isn’t as water resistant as the proper microns.

As an aside, after months of all digital drawing it’s lovely to do something on paper with ink.

I used to love doing single page stories. Could spend a few hours and do a complete goofball story. I slightly regret the language in this on the other hand it’s so barmy it doesn’t feel like I’m making fun of the actual characters (and boy do people get precious about that!)

(The script by a 2000AD message boarder “Kelt” I’m… I’m not sure if I ever knew his real name).

Anyway, this is the only time I’ve ever drawn Johnny Alpha and Wulf.

I’ve pitched many things to 2000AD and had zero success with any of them. On the other hand, often when an artist ditches, the series has come to me. Whereupon I (unintentionally) kill it.

RIP Samizdat Squad.

It’s probably by who you’re thinking. But it’ll be five months of war… You’ll get the inside dope, I’m sure. Including how do I get those tanks so dead-on accurate, and “is war really hell?”

(As long as you keep it all a secret) 

So here we go again. Had the first of the six week creating comics class at the Irish writers centre in Dublin. I enjoyed it, hopefully others did too.

Week 1 was about creating stories. Specifically Future Shocks. 2000ad’s short sci fi stories with a twist.

The basic format of a future shock is pretty simple – four pages. One twist (though the more twisty the better). The twist really needs to come out of the story though, no “suddenly they all became aliens!” It helps if it’s an ironic result of the protagonist’s actions. 

There are lots of ways to come up with ideas for stories, anything should be able to inspire, the trick is to tease a story out of that inspiration. 

During class we used a bunch of words to suggest stories, here’s one such:

The word scar. This suggest a scar in the landscape. From that we talked about a planet that’s ripping itself apart. The visual of a giant planet starting to gape with a scar across its entirety suggested the idea of two factions who believed that that the other side was the cause of this. And what if those sides fought and had a battle, only for the planet to fully split because it’s giving birth to giant indifferent God-creature.

(Look, it was made up on the hoof).

We talked about theme, and figuring out what the theme of the story is/was – is the story about how God is indifferent to suffering, or is the story about how two sides can disagree over stuff that’s utterly immaterial. (Trump leading on faction, Ian Paisley the other suggested some nice visual humour – always good in 2000ad)

Irony, humour are very important to future shocks.

We then burned through a half a dozen different ideas for stories, taking each and teasing out bits that felt unimportant – is this really a sci-fi story? If that laser was a Tommy Gun would it change anything at all? 

Identify whether you’ve written a future shock (sci fi story with twist) or a horror story or time twister. Depending on what you’ve written you’ve got to go back and start pulling it more into that shape.

The four page format of a future shock is interesting too. Each page will have, roughly, 4-5 panels, and the last panel of each page will be a little cliff hanger (or a twist or at least something to hook the reader, a reason for them to turn the page)

Broadly speaking the four pages become:

Page 1/ Setup 

Page 2/establish the stakes/escalate

Page 3/escalate

Page 4/ironic twist

Using that four page format to fill the sorry out – if the idea isn’t big enough, expand it, if it’s too large start to figure out how to cut it short.

We don’t have a word count, but we have a page count.

We want to build world, introduce characters we’re interested in and make sure our ideas have visual hooks – a disease that leaves characters with sense of melancholic ennui isn’t as good as a disease that gives characters giant spines poking randomly from their bodies.

One of the suggested story ideas came from “witness”

A child taken in to an interrogation room to be interrogated about his parents murder,only for it to be revealed the child to reveal he’s the murderer and kills the cops.

We taking this idea, visually it’s weak – and for a horror story (which is it’s closes fit) it’s not really horrific.

So what if the child is actually some sort of monster? We get to see the child describing the monster eating the parents and then the cops are killed by the monster.

Better. But still a little obvious.

But what if, instead, the make the good cop the monster. Bad cop interrogates the child, child describes seeing the monster. Bad cop isn’t having any of this shit. Good cop turns up to placate the child. Good cop leaves. Bad cop turns into monster eats child (or, at the very least we see bad cop running out, saying the 10 year old just had a heart attack)

Ramp up and ramp up again. Figure out your theme and embed it in the story. If it’s horror what’s the most horrific it can be.

Anyway, there was more, but that was week 1.

Next week script writing!

Tomorrow I start teaching my six week course on creating comics (in Dublin). It’s all built around creating future shocks, but filled, I hope, with interesting/useful observations (and really it’s about any sort of short story writing). Each class is two hours long, and, with the exception of week 5, it’s really a 2 hour lecture and q&as sessions.

This is my second go at teaching this course, and it was interesting to see how it evolved from my first ideas. 

My initial pitch looked like this:

Week 1: Coming up with ideas (what makes a future shock, mining ideas, turning those into stories with a twist)

Week 2: Writing a script.

Week 3: Thumbnails

Week 4: Pencils

Week 5: Inking Comics.

Week 6: Cram lettering/colouring in to one week.

Not being exactly sure who would attend such a class, it turned into a “how to write stories for artists” class. While touching on broad drawing techniques (which were heavier on storytelling than actually drawing).

I maintain you don’t need to be a “good” artist to be a good storyteller. You can tell some pretty good stories with stick figures (or just cutting out  collages).

I blogged the course as I did it week by week and I intend to do so again. Those blogs will remain free (I’m not a monster!) but I will encourage you to sign up to patreon for any extras!

Tomorrow, week 1, will be about coming up with story ideas, and types of futureshocks/stories and why short stories are the best place to learn. Using some simple word-seeds (I pluck a bunch of nice random words and we start burning through story ideas) the class is pretty packed though so it’s going to be a learning experience for me too.

So, here’s something I’ve literally just finished – it should be spoiler free, you’ll see it in 2000AD eventually.

Page 1, panel 1 (I’ll paraphrase the script here) Opening page. Establishing shot of the exterior of a large refinery (smoking chimneys, filthy) in the middle of a snowy landscape , bad guys 1 have breached a wall in the side of the factory, they have a pair of giant ballistas (for hurling massive sticks like crossbows) Gunfire from inside the refinery as they engage in battle.

All comic drawing is about problem solving. Some writers will have a very clear vision of what they’ve written, some will just know they have stuff they want happening. Sometimes the writers with a clear vision are actually harder – because they’re describing what they see  and you’re reconstructing that picture for them (like those puzzles you get where you have to describe the shape you’ve just made to someone who has the same pieces but no idea what you’re looking for).

Breaking this down: 

1. 2 x Ballistas (important)

2. Exterior of the filthy refinery, with wall removed.

3. Armies engage.

4. Wall removed.

First thing is, the best way to show this ALL is to get some distance, but with distance it can be hard to show armies (you just can’t draw physically distinct little soldier men) luckily gunfire, s/fx and a general melieu will probably do this job for us.

We want the readers to focus on the battle, while noticing everything around them, and suddenly a solution seems obvious. Sketching it out as a thumb it looks like this:

We’ll put the ballistas either side, drop low to the ground (making it feel like we’re involved, despite the fact the action is happening in the distance) and centre all the action.

Pencils look like this

(digital pencils, thank god for Clip Studio’s perspective rulers, too!)

Inks look like this…

And the draw over (for fans of that kind of thing) looks like this:

The ballistas – at the script reading stage – were a headache, but suddenly they’re doing the job of directing attention in to the battle scene. 

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing today. Hope you like it! (and I remind you: shhh! secret!)

(Looking at this again, I suspect the skys behind the mountains really need to be black to help pop focus, but hey ho!)

Page 1! This strip has only appeared in the irish language, despite the fact it was written in English and stuffed to the gills with puns.

In about a year I think I get the rights back and I can do an english translation. This was cowritten by my sometimes co-writer Scott Ferguson, hopefully the visuals carried enough of an idea that the dialogue didn’t need all the puns.

Page 1: , yo yo and kid yoyo are here to see the man frozen in a block of ice. YoYo demonstrates how stupid the frozen man is, and how much superior he is with his yoyos.

Page 2 Professor time and his time-lards (they’re made of lard!) turn up, they intend to steal the frozen man’s dna to create an army of cavemen! 

YoYo isn’t going to let that happen!

Page 3-yoyo and kid yoyo defeat the various timelards (who are all historically accurate recreations of histories greatest warriors … and Albert Enstien) BUT! Prof Time zaps Yoyo back in time! OH NOES!

Page 4: Back in the past, Yoyo is confronted by the ICE AGE! (it’s freezing everything in it’s past) and he finds himself frozen solid, we cut back to Prof Time cutting into the block of ice, ONLY TO DISCOVER THE ICE MAN WAS YOYO the entire time! HURRAH!

And we all agree, that yoyos are the very pinnacle of human civilisation!

Hope you enjoyed that!

More tanks.

Books like this are probably better for writers than artists though. I have a couple of big difficulties with drawing tanks (beyond all the normal difficulties of actually drawing). They are:

How big are people in relation to the tank (3d tank reference objects are brilliantly useful for what the vehicles look like, but useless at giving you a sense of scale) and what the hell is going on inside the tank. As it happens there are some pretty good videos of people exploring the inside of (some) tanks – some of the more well known vehicles have videos touring the crew components. But give me a well drawn diagram everytime.

Anyway, this is gonna take up a fair bit of the next six months… hope you like tanks!