How I Procrastinate
By Making a 32 page Comic inside of 59 days.
At the turn of the new year I found myself at the completion of both of the main story comics that will be making up the meat of Screw Comics! 5. All I have left to do is whip up a cover, back cover, some inside cover art, and a few pages of mini-comics, and then hand the book in for printing. After that I can focus on these other comic projects as much as I please. But I ran into a tiny roadblock: I still wasn’t sure what was to be the cover.
I have many sketches but no particular composition was jumping out at me as the definitive cover, unlike book 4. So, I was at an impasse. Funny thing about me is that I’m most productive on stuff when I have other stuff that needs to be worked on. Is this a common thing or is it just me? So, while my brain was thinking about how I’m stuck, one hand was grabbing the next script, and the other was pulling out some fresh paper. Next thing I knew I was transcribing that script into my trademark rough pencils. And I couldn’t stop. Seriously, I didn’t until all 32 pages of this next story was complete.
A few weeks later I came up for air and realized I wasn’t any closer to solving my dilemma of the Screw Comics! 5 cover. So then while my brain mulled over that, one hand grabbed a t-square, and the other grabbed a medium fine-point pen, and I began lining out the panels. After a day or two of doing that I found myself doing the principle inks of the comic. I marveled at how well it was turning out, considering that half of my brain felt like it was on autopilot while I was working. I pushed through all 32 pages, then sidled up next to a small trash can (to collect the crumbs) and proceeded to clean up all the pencil work. After another day or two, the pages are transfered to my flat, standing desk where I lay down the heavy inks.
Heavy inks are the large swaths of black fill-ins on the pages, denoted with little x’s. Laying down heavy inks can be very meditative, as all the “thinking” has been done in the principle inks. I like the Deleter #4 manga ink but I find the Deleter brand inks tend to dry up in the bottle very quickly. This Deleter ink bottle has been used before so I found it kinda sludgy at first. I dumped in some of the Super Black 60 sumi ink and stirred it around to make it liquidy again and went to work with a medium brush. The result is a nice, deep, dark black sheen on the surface of the paper, one that stands out from the fill-ins made by chemical markers. And almost as quickly as I started, the principle art was complete.
All this was done within the months of January and February, a span of 59 days. Granted, I didn’t work on this comic every day, but it was my focal point whenver I went into the studio and it was a week night. Now, in this story, it’s the first episode and so I went all out and did a full 32 pages for it. For the rest of the script (and all my other scripts, at that) each “issue” or chapter is 24 pages. If I can keep up this momentum I’ll easily have 4 or 5 issues in the can by the end of the year, if not more.
After the principle art was complete, it’s time for scanning, digital greys and letters. As of this post, all 32 pages are loaded into my iPad for the grey treatment.
In prepartion for this new book I thought I’d take a crack at turning my handwritten letters into a digital font. For the first iteration I filled out the provided alphabet sheet glyph by glyph. Here’s how that resulted:
Not too shabby, but still lacking the character that I find in the hand-lettered words in my comics. So I set out to try another way; I painstakingly pulled letters from my existing comics to craft this next iteration. Here’s how that one looks:
Not too bad, I’m getting somehwere, right? Well, it’s still a work in progress. These things take time, it’s gotta be damn-near perfect so it can be used without the distracting visual discrepancies, like varying line thickness or uneven heights and spacing. Back to it!
In the meantime, I think I’m making progress on the cover…
