I found myself with a few days before Christmas with nothing to work on, and I didn’t really have the brainpower to start something new.

Now, I like to have a procrastination project on the go at all times so if I’m frustrated with whatever I’m supposed to be working on I can procrastinate with something semi-practical. And, a few years ago I scanned in a bunch of old unfinished short stories and set them up in Clip Studio for this purpose. I’ve finished three of them over the past few years, so I opened up the two remaining (that are ready in CSP) to see if I could get into either one.

One is an 8 page Wahoo Morris short that was written to be the backup in the Image version of Wahoo Morris. It’s only layouts and lettering, so requires a complete pencil job, which wasn’t what I had the brain power for.

The other one is a 12 pager I wrote and drew summer of ’93 as samples to try and get work. I’d rededicated myself to art and comics mid ’92 and was determined to get better and break in! I drew 3 original short comics between February and August (instead of X-men and Hulk pages which I did plenty of in ’92) and mid-way through the second story something clicked and my anatomy and drawing made a huge leap and crossed a line into what is recognizable as my semi-ready to be professional style. Still lots of flaws, but I was starting to get there! It’s not much of a story, opening at a house party populated by people I know (including an overly idealized version of myself) when superbeings smash through the window, smash up the place and leave. I was basically trying to prove I could draw real people doing real things AND superhero fights.

I inked the first 4 pages, tightly pencilled 2, and there rest was in various stages of unfinished pencils and some inks on page 12. had to stop working on it as I took a second day job in September that was a term contract, with the intention of using the money to head to conventions and meet editors, but, by the time the term job ended and I could get back to the story it was Christmas, then I was on my way to Poughkeepsie and a year of working on Elfquest comics.

I pulled out the pages in ’94, but by the time I started sending out samples again in ’95, I was a lot better, so it sat unfinished.Every once in a while I would pull it out with the intention of finishing it for publishing, but again, there’s not much story to it, and some of the “plot” of the frame is inside jokes that only a certain handful of friends would have found funny 30 years ago.

And the superhero action is rather claustrophobic, being done in mid-shots the whole way through, never pulling back to show the action and where it took place. Given that the fight is in the living room of an apartment building I think that’s sem-appropriate, but there were a few spots where things are a little unclear, and one transition that was very unclear.

Anyway… all that to say, just before Christmas I opened it up and started inking a bit, not really intending to get very far, but I inked some more, then some more, then in a day or two I found I’d run out of fully pencilled figures to ink and had to pull out a pencil and fill in the backgrounds, background characters (party goers trying to get out of the way of the action), and one or two panels of the main action I had to pencil fully from scribbles.

Next thing I knew, I was done the existing pages, then got the idea of adding a splash page to help with the one potentially confusing transition. It didn’t fully fix things, but again, it was fun to do which is the important thing!

In conclusion it was fun inking super-heroes (something I haven’t tried in 20 plus years) and it was interesting inking my 30 year younger self. There was plenty of iffy anatomy, especially with the muscle-bound super-beings (which I’m still not that great at drawing), but nothing that a more experienced inker couldn’t fix or polish up on the fly. Now I have to figure out what I’m going to do with this thing now that it’s done!

It took a ridiculously long time in between other projects, but I finished the inks to the new Sîan story this week.

All I need is to draw a cover and this story is ready for release.

Work is progressing on the Sîan story. It’s going a little slower than I’d like, but as I’ve said before, I haven’t done a full comic from scratch in a long time.

But, I’ve taken the thumbnails and fleshed them out onto the “full size” art “pages” and done a first pass of the pencils. Some pages are pretty rough, but the final pages are starting to take shape including a first pass of the lettering, which includes fleshing out the dialogue as my script was borderline “Marvel Method” with limited dialogue written out. I also ended up expanding a few pages that were feeling a little cramped. I think I wasn’t thinking as visually as I needed to when writing an action script instead of my usual talking heads stuff. In the end I expanded from 24 pages to a 28 page story. At a later date I will possibly do a post showing that transformation.

I also had a bit of a crisis of confidence last week, feeling the work was sub par. I think part of the problem is that I’m doing something (a Sword & Sorcery story) where I’m comparing myself to other artists of the genre. As an example, I’m not influenced by anything in particular when drawing something like Wahoo Morris or comparing myself to other “slice of life” artists, so there isn’t as much of a “this doesn’t measure up to” feeling with it. Drawing a S&S action story, I have John Buscema inked by Alfredo Alcala in my head and it’s hard not to feel like I’m coming up short!

But, after a few days of procrastination I sat down Monday morning and started working on doing tight pencils of the first page… and it’s starting to look okay. Of all of my talk of mental blocks over the last few years, taking rough pencils and turning them into finished pages is the stage I know I can do!

More soon!

It doesn’t look like much, but I just finished breaking down the thumbnail layouts to a 24 page comic, a one-shot revival of my Sword & Sorcery thief character Sîan.

I wrote the script a long time ago and I’ve been carrying it around with me whenever I travel or have some time off for years, figuring I might get a chance to get some personal work done in my down time, but it never ends up happening.

I’ll admit that I’ve developed a bit of a mental block around comic book layouts, that I wasn’t going to be able to do it anymore. I’ve done a lot of finishing of comic art, from tightening up existing layouts and pencils to a lot of inking, but I haven’t thumbnailed a comic story from scratch in over a decade. Not since I started the unpublished Lemon Drop Kid in September of 2011. It’s a bit of a silly block as I spent that decade doing storyboards for TV animation, which is basically doing clean thumbnails day in day out without the fun of doing pretty finished art. Thumbnailing is the hardest part of comics for me, which probably explains why I came to hate storyboarding so much, and why I’ve feared trying comics layouts again after so long.

But I digress…

This comic has been the planned “next project” for awhile, so I decided to block out January through March to get the comic completely done: layouts, pencils, inks, letters and colours.

I sat down to work the first week of January, and it was a bit of a struggle, partially because I discovered that the script I had been carrying around for years was little more than a beat sheet with basic action descriptions and a handful of bits of the snarkier dialogue written. So I had to flesh out the script, which has been an ongoing process as I thumbnailed as I went. I also got a bit distracted playing with a script writing template and somehow ended up writing the outline to a new Wahoo Morris book including writing the first draft to the first chapter. More on the that later. The hardest part of the process was adjusting from my “for film” thumb nailing process and back into a “for comic book page” mentality. I had to cut a lot of what I first drew and get back into choosing the essential shots, but I slowly got there. It’s still pretty rough, and no one but me could possibly make sense of them, but they are done. One more mental block broken!

Next up is the rough layouts and pencils.

It’s hard to show my process, as I tend to build pages in stages, starting inking figures before all the elements have been drawn.

I took a snapshot of my progress every few hours, and I thought it would be fun to create a gallery of the steps so you could see a page build from my layouts to finished page.

In general, once the layout is tight enough, I ink the panel borders and do a first draft of the lettering before I start inking.

In the case of this page, I inked the main figures before starting to build the backgrounds, so pencils tighten up halfway through, and the first inset panel didn’t get tightened up in pencil until the rest of the page was inked and toned. If you look closely, you’ll see the size of the ship get scaled up about halfway through!