So, in order to figure out how I’m gonna get Channel Hex moving, I’ve been playing with a lot of ways of working, and wanted to have a cover that I could play with (see what logotypes work, see how branding would look, checkout where credits could go).
Previously, I posted the b&w art for a mock up cover, and Matt John Soffe a damn fine artist and a new colourist for 2000AD offered to colour it, and he did so, so here’s a mock up.
This will have to keep you going. I think my original schedule was optimistic, I’m still at the figuring out with the writer what the story for the first book will be, so this will have to do for the moment!
Book needs a spine design (because it’ll be a thick digest size) and some sort of back cover artwork – even knowing that is useful. I suspect the finished cover will have to basically be drawn as a single image, with those areas marked out. (I haven’t a clue how to do that yet…) but still. Ain’t that colouring nice?
After John Reppion and I did a fun little one pager using a tweet from John as my script for a one page comic we rattled around thinking what we could do next, and we’ve glommed on to #FolkloreThursday on twitter, folklore Thursday is every Thursday people talk about folklore. It’s pretty simple. So we decided to see if we could do this again, and John sent me a ‘script’
It looked like this:
Many old stories tell of sailors landing on mysterious islands, out in the open sea. There they make their camp, and light their fires. Then the island sinks down fast. The drowned become its food. The island is not an island at all. It is the Zaratan – a monstrous sea turtle.
My basic work flow on this is to separate the paragraph into chunks (usually sentences, but sometimes I’ll break them up for the flow of the art and how I picture it in my head)
So this got broken up as follows (along with my thoughts)
” Many old stories tell of sailors landing on mysterious islands” – initially I thought I’d have to make this two bits, but couldn’t figure out a good way to break the sentence up.
“Out in the open sea” this felt like a panel on its own.
“There they make their camp, and light their fires” – single panel, can easily have a lit fire and make it look like a camp is being setup.
“Then the island sinks down fast” that was gonna be hard, showing a sinking island with speed, I ended up making it two panels. You want to show scale, but also speed. Hard to do.
“The drowned become its food.” “the island is not an island at all” “it is Zaratan – a monstrous sea turtle”
One of the rules I’ve sort of set for myself (and may well abandon) is I try and do minimal amount of damage to the words – keep them as they are as best as possible. But, and this may be the sholocky sensibilities in me, I don’t half want to change that last line to “the island is not an island at all. It is a monstrous sea Turtle” “THE ZARATAN!” (and maybe that will happen further down the line)
Here’s scribbled layout.
The final panel was going to be hard, because I wanted the monster and the eating and the way the words happen and the order they happen to reflected in the drawing. In the end the fix was simply to flip the turtle horizontally.
One thing that surprised me was just how cartoony this one was. I can’t deny I was influenced by Johnny Dubble’s amazing pirate art and the book How To Think When you Draw 2 (which has a great page or two on drawing pirate ships) so it could be they leaked out of me, but also, having just finished a fairly serious war story it felt good to let loose a little.
I chopped the sinking into two panels in the pencils, and drew the pirate ship in front of it, but when I inked it the ship was just in the way and it was never clear we were looking at the island sinking, so off it went to the big pirate bay in the sky.
Inking was done by hand, on a blue line print. Drawn at digest size. This is partly for speed – I want to do these quick (how quick? pencilled and inked yesterday, coloured last night and finished this morning, about four hours total?)
With the captions all added there was still something missing – that pirate ship on its own never made sense, it needed something to lead you in to it, and then I hit on the fun idea of having a single line of dialogue here “LAND HO!” to bring you in, and join panel one with panel two.
Strip all pencilled and inked traditionally, then touched up and letter in clip studio on my desktop, I then transferred it to my ipad to colour it in bed (best advantage of csp on the ipad, working while in bed in awesome – while others read, I’m colouring…)
And voila the finished beast!
I’ve been asked a few times “will there be more” and I think “yes” but we’ll have to see. And, weirdly, by a few people “will these be collected” and the answer to that depends on how the answer to the first one goes.
I know this though, we’re not being paid to do this, so our only barometer of success is whether people like it or RT it on twitter, so if you’re keen to see more, that’s the way to do it! (and RT is worth about 100 likes, so keep that in mind!)
-pj
(Oh, and thanks to John, who rose to the occasion magnificently!)
Earlier today, my friend John Reppion posted a little musing on twitter about a local Church being knocked down.
John is a great writer, and the tweet had a lyrical quality that I really responded to. So I thought, as I’m winding down to relax for a holiday (hahah) I’d do a quick drawing of it as I saw it.
Here’s the tweet:
Presented as an image to maintain the historical record!
And I quickly scribbled out a layout and chopped the words up as lettering (drawn in Clip Studio at the digest art size, so I couldn’t get too precious and fiddly)
Tweet as Comic
Took a minute or two. Sent it to John for his approval (I mean he was surprised to see it I’m sure, given it was just me faffing around).
Then I went off and did some paid work and came back to it.
Speed drawing is funny, the trick is to cheat as often and as much as you can.
Cheat one: don’t pencil. Just go straight from the roughs to inks.
Cheat two: photo reference. Just google the hell out of everything and trace it. Google a church. Google a wrecking ball. Google a digger. Using maps to get an overhead shot of some buildings so you can quickly use that to build out a panel. Copy a panel and draw over it. And finally google some birds.
Cheat three: TRACE EVERYTHING. Don’t grab photoreference so you can internalise what a digger looks like, grab photoreference so you can trace the digger. If you’ve any sort of eye at all you’ll introduce enough variety in what you’re doing that it won’t be a problem to describe it as a reinterpretation
Not gonna lie. There’s a lot of tracing in this.
Here’s the black and white:
Now for colour, I skipped the flatting/rendering stage and just stuck with simple colours – but I grabbed a page I liked by an colourist I liked which covered similar colours to what I knew I needed and sampled it for all the colours. That to is big fat cheat.
Got some work done, decided to start playing with logos and layouts for the kickstarter digest idea.
(To recap: a 64 digest comic, it’s actually 68 pages – once you include the covers, drawn while I do other work. Scifi/horror like the old UK Starblazer imprint)
So, in order to start working out layouts for a cover I needed a cover. And I didn’t have one. So I figured, it was time to test my working hypothesis that I could draw an A5 sized comic at A5 sized (which is about a quarter of the size of a traditional comic).
Man, my eyes are not what they once where, it was a little too tiny. So I might scale up – maybe not all the way to A5, but a decent 40% larger, maybe… (So a single page will fit on an A4 page, but it’ll still be smaller than A4)
This cover was a lot of fun to conceptualise and draw. I knew I wanted a sci-fi old school concept, spaceman, fighting monster on new planet. Then I covered his eye with an eyepatch and decided to make the monster blind (and he’s hunting it with some rotten meat).
And then a title just came – Kingdom of the Blind – wasn’t quite on-the-nose enough – good old pulpy sci required it be called Planet of the Blind (he also requires his surname to be King, if I ever wrote it)
Anyway, here’s the cover…
The logo in the bottom right is the Channel Hex logo. Spent some time figuring that out today, tried dozens of variations and ended up … going back to the original logo I designed when I first wanted to do some short channel hex stories a few years ago.
I’m gonna stew over some of these design choices, but it’s been fun doing this. I’ve a promise of a script from a colleague I’ve done loads with in the past, and he’s one of my favourite writers too – so I’m really looking forward to it starting. Gonna be trying “marvel style” (it’s alright for me to go – I’M DOING THIS FOR FREE! but it’s a bit out of order to say “YOU MUST WRITE A FULL SCRIPT FOR ME”)
If you’re interested in where this is all going, definitely sign up for my mailing list – I’ve not sent any posts out in a while, but it’s a sure fire way to know when the kickstart is kicking off. Still lots of research to do on that front, I wanna make sure I’m going in to it with my eyes opened as wide as possible -I’ve had a couple of great chats with people and one of the big things, especially as first kickstarter is KEEP IT SIMPLE – one digital book, one paperback and one hardback and that’s it. Try and keep the posting options tight, so you don’t accidentally push yourself over the edge promising stuff.
Thomas(10) has been writing up and drawing up a storm. He’s written and pencilled a 24 page comic called Why Not?! – which is largely inspired by the Beano and the Phoenix.
One of the struggles of being a professional comic artist dad is knowing just how much help is too much help. When Nathan (now 14) was younger he used to stop drawing and just say “You do it, you’re better than me” – now I’m not sure if he’d say they same about any adult, but I can’t help feeling I was to blame on this one.
With Tom as much as possible I’ve tried to encourage but not overwhelm, but I think we’ve made a happy compromise. Essentially, I’m inking and lettering his comic. (Actually, I think I’ve got a raw deal).
Now, in his defence, he did offer to pay me. 50p. I refused, and he upped it to £2. (I didn’t take it, but there was no back end deal, so again, I’m feeling like I’ve been taken advantage of)
The line up of issue 1 (he has plans, we’ll see how far they go, but I’ve been slightly taken aback at how steadily he’s worked at this, chipping away a page or two a day) includes:
Monkey Arms (the boy with the long arms)
Spacedogs
Galaxy FC (two pager adventure strip!)
Electric Kid
Time Thief
Head Bump Hero
Mean Dean
Tim Teleport
Broken Reality
Element Man
and a page of Dad’s Jokes (which Tom included under protest)
So we’re gonna get this thing printed up and try and price it at £2.50 and I’ll probably point a limited run of about 10 (unless, you know… people ask for copies…) One thing I’ll say, it’s been fun doing it, Thomas is very very funny.
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