PJ Holden's Blog

I’ve been thinking about doing a 64 digest graphic novel for some time, I love the format (if you’re from the UK it’s most commonly known as the commando comics format) and a few years ago I documented how I think such a thing could become an ideal kickstarter format. 

To run down the basics of it:

64 pages, digest sized (one – three panels per page) is actually, probably equivalent to a 16 page comic book. So actually pretty reasonable to get down while doing other work. Then you’ve 64 pages of original art that could be packaged and sold with copies of the book at a premium rate (lets say you split the pages in to A and B groupings, or say Splash and Continuity pages, and then you offer a fixed page price at say, £100 for a splash and £60 for a continuity page) which both include a copy of the comic, and say you have approx 40 continuity pages (a potential total of £2,400) and 24 splash pages (a potential total of £2,400) you’re looking at, at say 64 people being able to fund £ 4,800 of the book (I mean realistically you’re looking at a lot less people than that buying original art, but it’s NOT that outrageous and these are the ceiling figures).

Obviously, you’ve got to factor in production and postage costs too, but actually if you can get 4k out of sales of 60 or so people, then you can afford to print 500 copies, and the rest of the sales become pure profit.

AND — if you can do better than that, well, that’s amazing and actually makes it not only a fun little side project but a viable source of income in your career. Money from that can pay you to do the next one and the next and so on. 

But there’s a few things that have killed it – one has been covid. I was originally mulling this all over pre-covid .The other dampener, oddly has been feature creep and people volunteering to write stuff for me. I have no idea how long a project like this will take, and once you bring someone else in to it, there are expectations of and suddenly it’s not quite yours any more. 

I think, as an artist, I’m pretty good at subsuming myself into the story I’m telling. It’s rare I’ll add story elements unless I’ve talked it over with a writer and suggested things, BEFORE they’ve committed anything to paper. Once they’ve written it, it is locked in as far as I’m concerned. But I could spend two months drawing a writers story between things, and find myself running a kickstarter and getting a handful of backers and now I’ve let down myself and the writer… Anyway, I think in the back of my head I’ve always pictured this as being high risk, low reward, which is the worst kind of project to rope anyone else in to. So I needed to do one for myself, by myself. I mean, if it works and is a rip roaring success, let me tell you I will NOT be long in contacting some writer friends who I’m sure would love to do this (but I‘d only do it if I could pay them something like a page rate first)

Anyway, I’ve plotted a little story for one issue of this, a one off that – I freely admit comes out of love of various things and I’m gonna embrace the cliches, and is probably a little weak and not great and etc, but I’m doing this for me, so if it’s weak I’ll suffer through it  (it will be fun to draw, if nothing else) (I mean I’ve drawn for Rob Williams, Gordon Rennie, Garth Ennis, Kenneth Niemand, and more, so I’m used to working with writers who know what the f they’re doing…. so of COURSE it will look ropy in comparison).

So, the question is, how in to the weeds do you want me to get in this here patreon about this project (which may or may not hit a dead end?) I’ve got today to do some writing, and probably nothing for a few weeks, but then the how of writing might turn out to be an easier task than I thought (I’m writing it in bullet point fashion, each page is one bullet point, each bullet point contains one to three sentences with each sentence being a panel)

The genesis for the story is that moment in Aliens where PFC Hudson asks “Is this gonna be stand up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?” And while this isn’t aliens fan fiction (and isn’t space marine fan fiction either for that matter) we follow a team of Marines, as they encounter something much more horrifying than a bug hunt.

(am I tempted to call it Bug Hunters and ask Jerry Paris for both permission AND a cover? yes. YES I AM)

Attached some art from what I’ve drawn this month, it amounts to one episode of Dredd, two episodes of Leopard from Lime Street, and one 10 page one off by Paul Cornell (no images, sorry!) for Ahoy.

Penciled 28 pages this month, and inked 46 – a number so insane, I’m not sure it’s accurate, but I guess it must be? (certainly the ticks in my weekly diary suggest it is)

Anyway. My prodigious rate has slowed, to a not unreasonable but still a bit bonkers one complete page per day, seven days per week. I think I can afford to slow to about 6 pages per week, and have a day off. Wherein I might … do unpaid comics work (because I am incapable of very little else)

six pages per week, over four weeks is 24 pages, at, say a reasonable page rate (this isn’t my actual page rate, but a good ballpark to work with) around £150 is £3,600 per month (about £43k per year), a third going to the taxman means your take home is £2,400. (Don’t weep for me, I know this is good money)

But that’s never how this stuff goes. Far more likely I hit a couple of months of forty pages then absoloutly nothing at all for a few months. Or I do a graphic novel for £100 per page on the hope the backend will see me right (or because there was literally no other work in the offing).

I love my job but if there was a way to do it and earn a regular fixed salary with sickness and holiday pay, I’d jump at it.

Being ye olde weekly journal as recorded in the annals of comic artist PJ Holden…

I dunno, is this stuff interesting?

This was the week I finally finished Skulduggery Pleasant…

Anyways, lets talk about my week – monday, deadline for leopard – we’ll that hurdle was cleared the previous week. Went up to Newcastle (NI) to see my bruve, ended up inking one page..

Tue caught a bloody mouse, discovered on Wed – when the council arrived – that there was a bloody great big mousehole in the bathroom that let them get in from the walls. So he dropped poison down there…

Finished Skulduggery, started Dredd Poison, me and Rob Williams, 8 weeks. Pretty pleased with how part 1 is shaping up, should be a good un.

So, this week I inked 14 pages and penciled 6. Which isn’t bad at all.

Also, decided to ink Dredd traditionally, I’ll be honest, there’s a horribly mercenery reason behind this – I can sell these pages and they should have a lot of Dredd on them, so worth having. But, also, I haven’t drawn on paper in ages (I want to say a year but I have a horrible suspicion it’s been closer to three) and it’s just nice to see marks on paper again.

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:

<figure>Panel 1</figure>

Absoloutly fine. Dredd gets to a door, door gets opened. 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:

<figure>Redrawn Step 1</figure>

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?)

<figure>Third go…</figure>

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…

<figure>Creepy much..</figure><figure>Too creepy..</figure>

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…

<figure>Still works!</figure>

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…

<figure>rejected</figure>

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…

<figure>AH-HA!</figure>

This has enough in it that I think this could be the one, so a quick refinement later and…

<figure>YES!</figure>

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 …

Yes, I know I should’ve posted this yesterday, but I posted something yesterday and I didn’t want to drown you in notifications.

So, pencils and inks for the week – 7 pages of pencils, 12 pages of inks. Bringing the total for feb to 41 pages of pencils and 21 pages of inks. Not as much as last month, but I DID take a week off.

This week was mostly about getting the next episode of the leopard of Lime street drawn, followed by the start of inking Skulduggery Pleasant, chapter 6 (final chapter).

Also through in some development stuff for a possible image pitch. We’ll see.

Slightly (though I admit this is insane) disappointed in how much stuff I finished compared to last month, but all the same, it’s a complete comic and then some.

March is starting slow, but I’ve planned out every week in it, so we’ll see how that all goes.

Onwards.

Here’s an entirely spoiler free panel (with a spoiler free/vastly redacted thumbnail) to help explain my process as detailed in a previous post.

Stage 0 – draw the thumbnail, I honestly have no idea what physical size it is, but it’s six thumbs per page, so that’s drawn on one of those areas. 

Stage 1 – expand the thumb for the page to take up the whole page, in the old days I’d be redrawing the thumbnail on the page, that cuts out that unnecessary step.

Stage 2 – roughly pencil, it’s pretty simple here cus it’s not too complicated – close up of one dude. Looking for the gesture/emotion of it.

Stage 3 – tighten those pencils, adding shadows where I think they should be, emotional expressiveness and tightening any element that I’ll need tightened.

Stage 4 – comes after I’ve pencilled an entire chapter, here I’d realised I’d given the guy a different coat on an earlier chapter and had to change it and I wanted heavier more dramatic shadows.

And that’s it. Pretty simple, and for me, relatively fast.

Coming towards the end of Bad Magic – 21 pages of ink and then that’s a wrap.

This week I’ve also drawn another episode of the leopard of Lime Street, and talked to a guy about pitching for an image book. I have an appalling track record of pitching and I can’t abide six pages that just go nowhere (the normal expectation is to draw six pages of the story), so instead we’re gonna try doing a 16 page complete story and if it doesn’t land we’ll kickstart it just as a one off. (I dunno what a kickstarter would look like, but I figure it’ll have a lot of process stuff – pencils, inks, script, the whole shebang)

So I’ve also started scheduling ahead. Since everything can be a little chaotic with art, especially the further ahead you attempt to plan (I mean, can you plan for sickness? plan for sudden spurts of activity and speed?) but planning one fully drawn page per actual day drawing seems solid. 

In truth I can probably reliably do one and a half pages per day, so I’ll always, over a long time period get ahead of deadlines.

But, if you’re interested, here’s how I’d LIKE the next few weeks to go:

6 March – 12 March ink 21 Pages Skulduggery Pleasent (this might go over)

13 March – 19 March Judge Dredd 6 pager (this should finish in less time than I’ve allowed)

20 March – 26th Match Leopard ep10 (6 pager ditto)

27th March – 11 April Image Pitch (16 pages) #1

And then, I’ll be on Dredd, the Leopard then Dredd non stop (well, until I’ve done 8 episodes in total)

Start of April I’ll need to reevealuate. I’d like to not have any non working weeks (I mean, apart from holidays, obv)  but that depends on work. Plus an email from DC asking me to do something there will obviously derail this all, but I’ve no expectations on that front.

Plus in that time I may be snuffling around for longer gigs – though, right now, I’m of mind to pour a lot of time into drawing Dredd, assuming Matt will keep asking me. 

Here’s how I get in to the flow. Sit my arse down and draw. I’m in a pretty great position of not having any other job to do but my job, and I find it a lot easier when I have a big chunk of pages to get through. 

That said, here’s how a typical page works – and you’ll see all the steps I take that speed me way up.

Any new project requires a new file, so I create a new document in Clip Studio at exactly the right size for print (actually it’s usually 30% larger than print, because I used to physically print the art out and ink over it – I don’t do that, but habits are habits)

I’ll usually append a few extra pages to the file, a 21 page story gets a 26 page file. On pages 22+ I create thumbnail pages, I have a nice little clip studio action that generate a 3×3 grid on the page. In practice these thumbnails are actually pretty big…

I’ll pencil my thumbs in this page – my thumbs are often crude blocky things, but enough to get a sense of what’s going on and I’ll thumb the entire book in one day. It’s exhausting but necessary.

Once it comes to pencilling, I’ll open the thumbs and select the thumb from the page I’m drawing and copy and paste it into the new page and scale the thumb to fit.

(an unusually detailed set of thumbs)

Then I’ll apply a second action that preps the entire page for me (this will add a few layers that I’ll need to draw on, putting all the pencils into a folder, and adding the frame around the page) reducing a thing that can take 10 minutes into a few seconds.

(this action seems to include a mad amount of “Make Layer above as editing target” I suspect they’re mostly a bit pointless, but when you make an action it records everything you do as you do it, so it was my fault, I probably clicked the same layer a few times, I could tidy it up, but I’ve relied on this action for years now…)

Then I’ll tighten the pencils up a bit, this is an intermediate step, just cleaning up pencils a little and clarifying anything in the thumbs that are too vague.

Next I’ve another action that simply creates a nice clean pencil layer (while making that pencil layer fade in to the background a bit) and then I do a finished pencil on that layer (which is named “finished pencils”)

And then I move on to the next page to pencil. My pencils are rough but detailed enough for me (unless the page is a struggle in which case I’ll usually move on when I’ve done something more detailed)

It can take me 2-4 hours to pencil a page (sometimes a lot less if it’s a big simple splash, sometimes days if it’s a complex crowd scene…)

As long as I’m not interrupted, I’ll break for lunch around 12. Kids get out of school around 3:40 so I’m normally hanging out with them, until after dinner, around 7, then back to work (sometimes don’t get back to work until 9) then bed around 12.

A week of slight frustrations, where I’d genuinely thought I’d lost the ability to get work done at any sort of speed. Felt like a slog some days to even get two pages of crude pencils done. 

BUT! ultimately – 20 pages of pencils done, one final page and that’ll be the last page of the last chapter of bad Magic – the Skulduggery Pleasent graphic novel done and it’s on to inks. Really looking forward to getting it finished (there’s some fun pages to ink too)

Monday I’ll get that last page done, then spend a couple of days doing the leopard from Lime Street. 

We have mice again. Flipping mice. So some amount of time was spent just laying traps and reassuring my wife who is freaking out.

Once Bad Magic is done (I’m planning for it to be finished Mid-March) I have a couple of scripts I can do, but I’m waiting on more things! It’s that time where you start looking around and snuffling for work. It’s hard because you find yourself in a position where your criteria for a project is more than just “can I get paid for this” you have to consider “is this a good use of my time” “does this progress my career in some hard to define, blurry fashion” and also “can I get paid for this”

ANYWAY… I leave you with a silly reference photo…