Make a business card(last time I did this was 15 years ago and honestly, I overprinted by a few hundred and gave away … like six… comics as an industry doesn’t bother itself too much with business cards) Print Business card (online service of some sort) Finish page 24(colours) and 25 (inks and colours) of Terran Omega. Edit Terran Omega issue 1 for typos Send it to Mixam for print. (why mixam? I’ve used it before and know how it works and time is a big factor)
Right now largely going through the final version of Terran Omega and correcting/editing. Thanks to Scott Ferguson and Ron Abernathy for editorial notes.
Should get this to mixam this afternoon.
I went with Vistaprint for business cards which somehow will arrive after my comic will. Weird eh.
250 cards. I’ll need 20. But they shouldn’t change much in next 20 years so maybe I’ll keep using them for ever.
Here’s the introduction text for this issue of Terran Omega
Terran Omega is the last human in the galaxy.
Given godlike powers to fight in mankind’s battle against an alien universe, she was placed in suspended animation to be woken when humanity needed her most.
The call never came.
Ten millennia later, mankind has vanished.
She is alone.
Faced with the existential crises of being a weapon built for a long forgotten war, she makes a different choice:
She chooses life.
Now she travels the galaxy trying to right mankind’s wrongs, collecting the destructive remnants humanity’s final war. A war that, like her, has passed from history into myth.
At the edge of the galaxy, she is about to encounter one such relic.
A weapon abandoned for ten thousand years, left to fester, grow stranger, and become far more powerful than ever intended.
Now I’ve gotta go, still got a lot of editing/exporting to do!
I have a note with a suggestion for today’s blog, it simply says “haircut”. Why it says that, I’ve no idea. I know that I got a haircut yesterday and I know I had something I’d intended to say about it – what that was I don’t know?
I’ve already talked about haircuts before, I even wrote a comic strip, but do I have anything new to say on the topic? Probably not. I’ve been getting a haircut once per month every year since I was 14. With the exception of the covid lockdowns – which means I’ve spent in the region of £5k in that time on hair.
I complain endlessly about my hair, it’s a thick matt of animal rug, slightly receded at the front, but not so you’d notice. There’s a little bit of grey, again not a lot, and what is there is usually less visible when I’ve recently had a hair cut. It comes to a widow’s peak. When I was younger, I’d get a flat top hair cut and two odd little side tufts would look like the little bits of an owl that look like ears. Twit twoo.
Unsolicited writing advice, no. 21456: There are two kinds of writer: the ones who write for love, and the ones who do it to get results. In a world in which writers are paid less and less, results are often uncertain. But if you really love what you do, you'll keep going.
I mean, the horrible reality is doing it for what you love is also going to pay less. But at least you’ll starve doing the thing you love.
Yesterday was trailertastic day on youtube
Here’s the New He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Trailer.
Honestly, I missed He-Man, it came out just as I’d aged out of playing with toys (I mean I was 11, what did I think I was gonna do?) I think I’d gotten in to comics and He-Man just seemed a bit silly. Even his name, for gawd’s sake.
My youngest brother at the time (another brother would come along much much later) was well in to it though. I think when I was his age we were quite a poor family, but in the meantime my dad was doing much better and now he had everything – He Man, Castlegreyskull and I’m sure all of the figures. He’d also gotten every single star wars thing you could get, death star, millenium falcon, everything.
Though to be fair I’d never felt like I didn’t get the kind of toys I wanted as a kid – largely anything Action Man related.
Anyway, longtime friend Ross pointed me towards a trailer for another movie, Death Stalker.
Every bit as silly, and much lower budget and yet this looks more fun.
My mate Rob has a new creator owned comic out from Dark Horse, I’ve read the first issue, it’s enormous fun (and gorgeous)
It’s up to a van full of washed-up retirees to save a baby kaiju before its powers are used to destroy the world in @robwilliams71.bsky.social and @nilvendrell.bsky.social new comic series Hidden Springs, kicking off on May 13! @comicbook.com shared the details: https://bit.ly/4pRr5V0
I dunno if it’s obvious but I’m trying to ignore the state of the world, and the news in the blog. There’s enough of that out there. This is a place for imagination and happiness and joy, and oh sod it, ok, one little thing (and I’ll explain why in a second)
Musk, at Davos:
“My prediction is there’ll be more robots than people… everyone on Earth is going to have one and going to want one… who wouldn’t want a robot to… watch over your kids, take care of your pets… we are in the most interesting time in history.”
Isn't this a telling aspiration? To want robots to look after your kids, so you can do stuff, rather than robots to do stuff, so you can spend time with your kids? The darkness inside these shrivelled men must be like a gaping unfillable void.
To me, this is the bleakest possible 2000ad Futureshock, a clever four pager by Alan Moore with dark broody artwork by Jesus Redondo – a kind of inversion of the One Christmas in Eternity (where humanity has invented immortality, and so never die, but conseuqentially, no one is ever born and there are no children, except the little artifical boy you get to have at christmas to open presents with)
So, this lead me to thinking that actually the future shock format is a wonderful short story format that I don’t think enough people play with. It can be quite formulaic, but once you crack it you can pretty much write it indefinitely – Alan Moore certainly did. If you want to write (and I say to this to myself) you could do worse than scour the news (and focus magazine, and new scientist, and any journals you spot – all available in the libby app or your local library) for a a couple of articles that you can tweak in to a future shock style story. Biting irony, twist in the tale. Doesn’t have to be good, just do it for a while and see where it leaves you.
Ther rhythm of a four page future shock to me is setup, escalate, ironic twist. There’s not room to do much more than that.
Set up :
A world where robots can do every job.
Escalate:
But there’s one job they can’t do, we see the world the robots have made.
We see children running around and robots doing everything to help them they love the kids. No adults anywhere.
Escalate: We see the adults, they are in lock step, walking towards some giant factory. Wearing Robes. Maybe a younger male is talking to an older man “First time, huh. Just turned 18? It’s not so bad. They feed you”
Escalate/twist: the robots talk, they love children, it is entirely the purpose of their existence to look after them, they love them.
Which is why it’s so important that they maintain a good breeding stock of humans to keep the children coming.
That’s it. (Is it good? maybe, certainly you’d want to polish it more and more, and maybe throw in some wilder twist? maybe an adult escaping from the breeding farms and seeing life, which he remembers.= – maybe the children on reaching adolescence get their minds wiped, and one man remembers it as a dream?)
I’m starting to mull over my kickstart options and so I phoned Matt Garvey, since there’s few people know more about publishing comics on Kickstarter than matt (who, coincidentally, has a new kickstarter about to launch – The Skim, a casino heist comic with some amazing artwork – great big juicy double page spreads that you’ll want to see in print)
So here’s the shape of it, it’s nebulous and foggy and I’m doing some thinking on the page as I type it, but the more I concentrate the more I can see it forming up…
I’m going to do a kickstarter for Terran Omega The Ghosts of War. Single issue comics for part one and part two.
Issue One, right now, I’m looking at March launch date. Soon, right! TERRIFYINGLY SOON! (so it might move)
Launch issue 1 on kickstarter, with some tiers:
PDF File / colour & B&W&Green
B&W Copy (why no green, you ask? Price, I reply!)
Full Colour
Full Colour with Alt Cover
Pages 1-25 with front and back cover, should come to 32 pages in total.
There will also be add ons to get PDFs of the Artist Edition – same comic with big super high res versions of the images!
I think the comic price will be about £8? (pricer than I’d like, but I am really figuring things out here and don’t want to go too low and burn my fingers) and I’m two minds about doing an alt cover. I suspect some people might want both copies and there’s a part of me hates that for them (maybe I can work out a two edition price?)
I anticipate there being 100 printed and sales hitting 50 or so. Maybe.
Haven’t looked in to postage yet, but will do.
Then when issue 2 is complete, I’ll do the same (or similar, or take all the lessons I’ve learned and try and apply them and so it may be completely different).
Issue 2 will have a slightly different page count, which could mean a slightly different page count for the comic (there’s two pages less, which means you can nearly print four pages less of book, but I could also just use that for fun backwater, so probably the same page count – I told you I’m thinking this through as I do it!)
THIS WILL ALL BE A PRELUDE TO A HARDBACK/PAPERBACK edition. I have no idea what they will be priced like. But certainly, I’ll be limiting the hardback numbers because oh boy does that look expensive to do! (I mean I might limit them to ONE copy for me…)
My ideal hardback is oversized, and stuffed with two versions of the comic (colour and black / white / green ) and maybe an artist edition at the back. That is wildly unlikely – because it would push the page count to uhm … 148+ pages and er.. yes. That gets costly quickly. I mean if the kickstarters go well, who knows maybe…
I think you’ll not see the hard back until about a year after the kickstarter of issue 2 but it’ll contain new material(I hope!) and sketches and all sorts that I can fit in.
Anyway, news of this as I build up what I’m doing.
One of the dullest and yet something you do multiple times per page job is drawing panel borders.
There’s no right or wrong on any of this, it’s all entirely subjective, and I’d argue all that’s important is consistency (in terms of style rather than say line width)
So panel1 borders (the black lines that go around panels) are a very established part of comics grammar. Even if people don’t really know what they are or contain.
When I started drawing comics, aged 18 – long before I had any chance of a freelance career, I started drawing with Rotring Rapidograph pens. A mechanical pen the draws lines in a fixed width with the caveat you have to hold them in a very particular way (pretty much vertically straight). I used .25 for drawing and 1.4 for lovely thick panel borders. It stood me very well. For a bit.
I inked panel borders like that, using the rapidograph for decades. Until I figured out I could actually get away with drawing the panel borders on computer. Then my process changed, sometime around a decade or more ago… I’d loosely pencil the panel borders, scan the pencils in, draw panel borders in Clip Studio and then convert the pencils to blue line, print the resulting page out – blue line pencils with black panel borders and then just ink! no more panel rules!
Such a relief.
The rapidograph is perfect except… it’s so fiddly… so bloody fiddly. And needs constant care and attention (see the featured image – every time I use it now, I have to wash it out, because the ink dries in it’s channels causing it to block)
After deciding, last year, that I wanted to make a break from the computer a bit (at this point I was pencilling and inking on the computer, and had put away all the tools of the trade) I didn’t want to start up with the rapidograph. I’d added some new tools to my arsenal, namely posca markers – black and white. The black at various thicknesses were great for doing panel borders! nice solid blacks. But a little inconsistent and a bit of a pain to use against a ruler (never a problem with the rapidograph) in exchange they were extremely low maintenance- I mean, open them and they worked – and importantly they were water proof, a thing the rapidograh ink never was, which meant using acrylic white paint to correct mistakes would often result in a smear of grey when the rapidograph ink mixed with the white acrylic. Such a pain.
BUT … the black poscas would often leave ink on the ruler when used and that would inevitably transfer to my arm which would then find its way back to the page, leaving more smears.
Just… ugh. Look my love of digital comes down to just how clean it all is. Ink and me, we never managed to get through a day without clashing with each other and the resulting mess being left on the page somewhere.
The posca ink transfer problem proved insourmantable, so I moved back to the rapidograph, at this point it had spent a good 10 years unused and the ink had gone … very … very bad. It smelt, weirdly, of vanilla. So a thorough cleaning later and the slightly sickly vanilla smell still present at least it worked.
But again the white+black = grey. Gah,
So I moved again to using a rule and a brush – not a bad idea, the brush is almost the perfect tool for inking lines, it’s useable instantly, easy to clean, doesn’t transfer if you’re careful, and you can use standard black ink, so waterproof! Ah, but now the problem is… holding a ruler in the right way to get the line perfect is a pain.
You hold the ruler at about 30-45deg from the page and using the raised edge you draw the brush along it creating a simple smooth line. A bit of practice and this line proves to be both lively, and interesting even when you’re trying to give a perfectly straight dull line.
But it’s still bloody fiddly, and my hand and eye aren’t the steady laser like stillness of my youth, so I think I’m going to have to clean the gunk out of the old inkjet and go back to drawing panel borders on the computer. Nothing else. Just borders. And honestly, I think that might be the right decision.
Clip Studio calls them frames, I call them panels, and I’ve heard them referred to as Cells. There may be more names, but for simplicity I’ll refer to them as Panels. ↩︎
One of my many (many) drawing difficulties is the dead body lying on floor syndrome. This pushes one thing I think I’m good at (the human body) against another thing I really struggle with (perspective). Perspective isn’t hard, per se, and often my most successful perspective drawings are where I try not to get too rigid with it, but inevitably (especially as I’ve gone digital) I tend to fall in to the everything-is-a-box and can be drawn in perspective. And since the human body is extra hard to draw, that means extra boxes and extra hard perspective.
And that’s sort of useful, but it really steals a lot of fluidity away from the human form. Plus, and I dunno if this is a feature of my brain but it tends to lead to a lot of floating boxes. These notional boxes taking up head, torso, arms and legs, still sort of follow the placement of wherever I put them – rather than, as with the human body – sagging int other space that’s there.
When stuck on this problem I start looking at Geoff Darrow, who’s Hard Boiled is a bible for bodies lying on the ground.
I mean, look at that. Every body is painful reminder of the fact we’re only human flesh bags.
Anyway, staring at this, it seemed to me, the boxes where my problem, and if I could think of another metaphor (it’s not the right word, for what I’m trying to do – a drawing anology?) that might help it might be worth considering and staring and staring and it occurred to me if I thought of the torso as a sack of spuds, that would give me much of the flexibility of a real human body –
I feel the weight of a sack like this, much more than I do a box, and it has a bend to it that the body does that none of my box drawings ever do.
And if I extend the metaphor so instead of a box human we end with a person made of bags of spuds (or other less-norn-irish stuff) we can have a better way to think about the body in perspective, something that can keep the all of the relative lengths of the body parts the same while also making me think about weight and giving me the flexibility to move the body.
Anyway, this has JUST occured to me, so maybe it’s a bad idea, but sometimes I think you need to question your assumptions so you can rethink stuff, especially stuff you’re stuck on.
The Rotring Isograph is a pretty old school architectural drawing pen. It comes in a bunch of sizes, and it was my tool of choice before any professional work came knocking. I’ve had to dig one of the old pens out, actually, because I’ve been digital so long I’ve had to remove some mothballs on this one.
This is the 1.4mm sized pen. Up until going fully digital in the last decade, this was my tool of choice for drawing panel borders and why, even now, my default panel border width is 1.4mm. I think I’ve owned this pen since the late 80s.
I’ve exploded it out here so you can see its workings. It’s a refillable pen, and you’re better just using rotring ink (which to the best of my memory isn’t waterfast)
I’ve always loved the chunky line it makes and though it requires a little too much cleaning and care (it’s been sat upright for at least a year and unused and needed a bit of a cleaning, though I didn’t do as thorough a job as I could) but once cleaned it’s pretty rock solid.
If you want the 1.4 line you’ve got to hold it at 90° from the paper to guarantee a steady ink flow. On the other hand if you start playing around you can get a nice chunky ink line with some body to it.
Anyway, I’m digging it out because I want to go and use some old school tools. Many of the tools I use have deteriorated (and look, let’s be honest – so have I) in particular by lovely black erasers that where brilliant for erasing and never leaving smears, somehow the chemicals in them, it turns out, are just not that stable and they’ve sort of melted in to many plastic surfaces they’ve been sat near. Very odd.
Hello chums, I’m going to recap a thing I’ve touched on here before, the idea of the two things plan.
Prior to covid I started this new process where I would chop my day up into doing two things. I mean not small things, not like take-a-bin-out, but things I consider cognitively hard; two pages of inks, two pages of pencils, two chunks of layouts (a chunk being roughly 12 pages, so two chunks is layouts for an entire issue).
Of course, it’s a tiny amount of things, but if you can do it consistently, literally every day of the week, every week of the year, you’ll end up – if the two things are pencils/inks of a page – drawing 365 pages of comics. Obviously, it’ll not always work out like that, so I try and aim for 25 pages per month. You’ll need down days of course, and sometimes one of the things will be pay the tax man (because man, that is a cognitive load just filling that form in and hitting send on the tax)
The reason for doing this is because I can be over productive sometimes, and find, even as I draw three, four, five pages (of pencils or inks) in a day that I end the day frustrated that I haven’t done enough. That somehow, drawing twice as much as an average artist just isn’t going to cut it. So I have to set myself a hard limit.
Once I hit those two things, fair enough if I’ve time I can start doing other stuff. And, again, prior to covid, I managed to find the time to write, blog and draw for fun (my sketch books can be pretty shallow things because I save my drawing for work)
Anyway, along comes covid and all plans hit the fans and suddenly I’m trying to do as much work as is humanly possible. An entirely unsustainable thing. Part of the problem with being fast is you miss a day or two (because the world gets in your way) and suddenly you go from being on time to 8 pages behind.
Now, this week, owing to the fact that my wife and youngest son are heading off to Disneyland Paris, I was looking forward to getting caught up on a serious amount of work. I’d be staying at home. BUT disaster struck and my wife came down with vertigo, necessitating a change of plans on my part – so now I’m also heading to Paris to ride the many many rides my son assures me he wants to go on.
So I needed to rethink my work and so I decided, counter intuitively it was no use just ploughing through it and trying to hurry it up and see where I landed, I needed to break it down day by day. Initially I figured I could chop it up in to two pages a day, and somewhere in that time draw the extra left over two pages (so some days would be a three pager) and that started well, until I discovered that I’d accidentally calculated the time left as one day longer because I forgot there wasn’t a 31st of June. Recalibrated, it turned out ok, because I’d started and already done three pages a day for most of it. But doing so really made me sit down and start thinking; two is the way to go.
The past year I’ve really sort of relaxed the reigns when it comes to knowing what work I’m doing, nothing has had deadlines which has meant I’ve just been doing work as and when I can. Didn’t work today? doesn’t matter. No deadlines.
But, of course, it does matter, because no one is paying me for my days off.
So, work scheduled up to the 30th the on hols for a a week, where, of course, I will be working. Nothing too hard though. Probably two pages of very very rough pencils per day…
NOTE: This was sitting in my draft blog folder, since uhm 2020ish, so you’re getting it now because it’s got art in it.
Well, there’s been enough time, so here’s a few bits of art, for fun!
It’s been great fun drawing Chimpsky and seeing how much people have enjoyed a nice fun Dredd story.
Before I start every script, I sit and read it, then I fire up clip studio, create a new document with a couple of extra pages at the end (so a 6 page story gets about 8 pages of documents) and in those extra I do character design or layouts. So here’s all the layouts along with a shrunk version of the art so you can see where I diverged. Generally I stick pretty close to the layouts, but sometimes I totally change it – sometimes there’s something else needed, ep 1 page 6 of Chimpsky was like that, I had Dredd facing the reader but it felt like not enough. If I saw Dredd’s face, I wanted to see more of Dredd. So I flipped him. Seeing his back, meant we know it’s Dredd (who else would it be?) but he sits on that page like a ominous for-shadowing of what’s to come.
There are panels I lean on a lot, panel shapes, compositions, etc, and honestly, I’ll do them without thinking because they work for me, but I’m trying to rethink some of these choices and make more interesting (or at least, more thoughtful choices).
Take this panel:
Panel 1
Absoloutly fine. Dredd gets to a door, door gets open. Not terribly interesting, but largely doesn’t need to be, this isn’t high drama. But the next panel, is an almost identical composition and so I needed to rethink it. Initially I went for this:
Redrawn Step 1
This is a bit better, I think. Pulled out more it’s an establishing shot, much easier to see we’re outside at a doorway. But still, that old habit of mine of keeping everything on an eye/just below eye level. What if we wanna move up higher (giving us a little more distance, a little more of the location?)
Third go…
SO I think this is better from an angle, though the danger with panels at these angles is they feel voyeuristic, like you’re standing beside someone watching the proceedings, I mean if I added a window frame it would feel even creepier…
Creepy much..Too creepy..
Anyway, that’s not what we’re after (I mean it COULD be, and if it was, it’d be great… but it’s not…)
Since a panel isn’t alone in it’s composition, it’s judged by what went before and what comes after, I check the previous panel and find – OF COURSE – I’d gone for an almost identical angle on the previous page (last panel) and this (the first panel on this page) feels a bit… like the time gap between them is immediate… I want it to feel like more time has elapsed, so a cheaty way of doing that is to flip the horizontal of the panel…
Still works!
And in context, this flipped panel feels better (you’ll have to take my word) but I feel like I’ve lost a little of the atmosphere of that second attempt, so I’ll take another swipe at it…
rejected
I think what I’m losing here is some sky, and at this angle (birds eye view) I’m not gonna get it, so time to go low… really really low…
AH-HA!
This has enough in it that I think this could be the one, so a quick refinement later and…
YES!
One thing that I’ve started thinking about on this new Dredd strip is… how much does this bit look like a scifi book cover (and how little does this look like something I’ve drawn before?) and this scores it on both counts. We’ve take a functional but dull panel (in my drawing of it, at least) and turned it into its own little sci-fi tale. Pleased with myself now, let the self loathing recommence in 10 … 9 …
We’ve been in this house for around a year and there’s still a fortune worth of work to do. Outside of the studio we started by adding a new fence to the outside drive, so we could have private space in the backgarden which was a godsend over the summer (otherwise you can see our backyard from across the road) but it cost a fair bit. And we changed the stair case (money) and then updated the kitchen (more money) which, combined with buying the place has left me sort of broke. But we have a house on a ground floor with an outside which meant I got to do nine barbecues this summer (and if the bloody weather had been more dependable it would’ve been a lot more) including one just as my son finished secondary and him and his mates got their university acceptances and we had a big barbecue with him and nine mates, and the family and my wife’s cousin and her family and one of our friends and one of my brothers and there was twenty people in total. Was great. Worth it.
