I really need to update this site more often! 🙂

One other thing I’ve needed to do for months is add the new comic Thrilling Tales of Vistas Unknown to the store. I’ve had a number of people ask how to buy it now that the Kickstarter is over and fulfilled. I’ve been either too distracted or working on other things. Soon!

Anyway.

Prior to going on vacation in October I drew a Variant cover for a friends comic series, coming to Kickstarter soon (but I don’t know when)! I’ll show it as soon as the Kickstarter launches.

I’ve also been working on getting the Kickstarter page built for the upcoming Sîan campaign, coming in January! I’ve been saying that it would launch this fall, but fall is almost over and I didn’t quite get things done in time, and I’m not quite done yet!

One thing that slowed me down is that I wanted a subtitle for the logo: like Conan “the Barbarian” or Xena “warrior princess”, or, you get the idea.

The first thing that popped into my head was Sîan: Queen of Thieves… but, there is a semi-current fantasy comic by someone I know with the same subtitle so that gave me pause. Also, at this point in time in her career, Sîan is a young woman who grew up on the streets in an organized pack of child pickpockets and beggars, and as she aged out, she graduated to more mature forms of thieving and is in the beginnings of her career as a cat burglar and thief for hire. So “Queen of Thieves” doesn’t feel right, and I can’t say that thief will always be her vocation as her adventures continue.

I figured “Thief of… (enter city/country name here)” and that is where I got stuck. I made up a random name I liked, added it to the logo, made cover mockups and put them on the Kickstarter page, then my wife came home and told me she absolutely hated the name, and there I got stuck. We left on vacation shortly after, but even once we got home I was completely paralyzed.

Monday I got semi-unstuck and came up with a few options, and while my wife didn’t love the one I’ve picked, she hated it less than the others! LOL!

This is such an inconsequential detail, so it’s ridiculous that it has taken up so much of my thought and time. It’s not like I can’t change the subtitle every story arc.

Anyhoo…

Here’s the three covers with the current trade dress. Let me know what you think!

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.

Here’s some in-progress art!

I started this piece a few months back but it got put on hold while I worked on Books Of Magic.

I need a new convention banner, so this started out with that in mind but I expanded the canvas dimensions so it could do double duty as a print for the next Kickstarter campaign or an eventual cover.

With conventions on hold, the urgency of finishing disappeared so the piece is also on hold for the moment. I’ll finish it eventually, but I’ve got other things I want to get done first.

I’m not ready to show anything from the short story I’m inking right now so, here’s something to look at in the meantime!