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!

An overview shot of the complete 12 page page story!

It’s always satisfying to see a finished story laid out like this. I think I overworked it a little, but I’m calling it done.

This will be the lead story in a to-be-published someday soon-ish 48 page one-shot comic compiling some older short stories of a fantasy/sci-fi theme, some previously published, some unpublished. I’ve got to get back into the mindset of crowdfunding and publishing, but I haven’t felt much urgency of getting this out there as I’m not booked for any conventions yet, and obviously there haven’t been any in a while!

But other than compiling and design details, the main stories are all done. Unless I do something stupid like expand it yet again with something even newer (I do things like that!), I should be announcing it’s impending release in the spring.

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.

Once again I’ve been silent for a long time, with no posts to the website in awhile.

2021 didn’t exactly go to plan, and I wasn’t as productive in comics as I’d hoped going into it. Household stuff kind of took over for much of the year, and a massive house renovation that lasted 4 months had us crammed into about three rooms of the house with stuff and furniture that wouldn’t fit into the storage unit piled everywhere, with limited space to work and a lot of distractions.

I started getting back into the swing of things in September, first inking the majority of the last short story I need for the long planned anthology of my sci-fi and fantasy short stories. I’ve got a few more details left to figure out, including whether or not I use the existing cover for the much shorter existing digital version or do I draw a new one. I’m not quite ready to launch it yet, so I’ve got some time to figure things out, but hopefully it and another new/old short project will be out before my next convention appearances (still on hold for now).

I’ve also done a little bit of brainstorming and have started the outline and script to what may be my next Graphic Novel.

In other work, I was asked by my friend Michael Cohen to draw an alternate cover for the reissues of his 90’s series Strange Attractors. I was a big fan back in the day so I eagerly said yes. It was a lot of fun. I’ll post the coloured cover once it hits Previews. They are being published by It’s Alive Press.

I was also asked to ink Tom Fowler’s pencils on issues 3 and 4 of Refrigerator Full Of Heads from DC/Black Label/Hill House Comics. Isn’t that a mouthful! As usual it was a lot of fun working over Tom’s pencils. It’s pretty gorey stuff, but quite funny as well, and Tom is doing some of the best work of his career. It’s pretty amazing work and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series!

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!