"cock!"

[egypturnash]

This is a quick size test for that crazy comic Nick and I have been playing with the past month. Nine inches square plus a 1/4" margin all around, or so Illustrator thinks, rendered out at 75dpi. I dunno where it gets 684px square from, exactly, but it's a nice size for the screen.



The actual comic will be better-drawn than this quick size test, and may well even rely on outlines. It will, however, have similar color schemes to this - very stripped-down, mostly monochromatic with the occasional accent color. I probably need to dig up some better textures to lay over it than a plain ol' "mezzotint", too.

And yes, square pages. I was toying with the idea of building it on a golden rectangle; it's pretentious enough that this might make sense. With the size of paper I have handy, though, I'd end up drawing way too small if I went with that. So square it is.

And the Inspector is normally not afflicted with Tourette's.

Comments

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's because I'm still a teenager, but I love the dialogue in your test page. :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It's Nick's fault! I drew the first three panels, and as I was drawing the fourth, he suggested it. He is a Bad Person.

[grimmalkin.livejournal.com]

Are you planning on hand-writing the text, or will you be using a font?

The only reason I ask is because the text here suits the overall comic marvelously.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Definitely hand-written. I was always aware of the lettering in comics; the mass shift to pre-made, invariant fonts feels like a loss to me. Sure, it may go faster, but you lose a lot of possibilities for expression - even without going to the extremes of, say, Deacon Mushrat's gothic type, or P. T. Bridgeport's circus posters, casual change in the lettering can show you a lot about a character's tone of voice.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

ps: this eloquently sums up my attitude towards digital font lettering. part 1, part 2.

I actually noticed good lettering when I was reading comics as a kid. Bob Lappan in the DC stuff. Edward Gorey's distinctive hand. Walt Kelly. And god, some of Dave Sim's lettering is to die for. Any other character does a cross-over and their dialogue balloons match their host - but Cerebus? He's as much Dave Sim's expressive writing as he is that 50% zipatone.

[read-alicia.livejournal.com]

Art by Michelangelo, words by SomethingAwful.com?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Nah, there'd have to be more self-hate if it was from SA. As to Michaelangelo... well, I wouldn't go that far. It's just well-handled cartooning!

[robocoon.livejournal.com]

The expression on the Inspector's face in the last panel is adorable. It's so " <3 " :D

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I came this close to putting a heart in his dialogue balloon - but obviously I got that across in the drawing. Which makes me glad!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

* lettering should be done in the real world because AI just kinda loses the nuances of my writing.
* the imagery, however, is still up in the air. I like the calligraphic quality of my conceptual pen sketches - but I also like the chaotic quality of things like this doodle, or this piece that helped start the whole thing. And this one for that matter.

Maybe my general rule of thumb will be "no use of the pen tool"? It'll keep it quick. And loose. Start with a pencil/pen layout - with the lettering in there! - and work over it in Illustrator. Sometimes keep the rough visible, sometimes not - it depends on my mood?

What about backgrounds? Do they allow the pen tool? I dunno. We'll see. I think the pen tool is verboten on characters for this, as a rule. Maybe not so much on bgs. It depends on the location.

Complex bgs like the initial Wormwood travelogue will probably show the realmedia lines, because otherwise they'd take forfuckingever to do in the computer.

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

Looks pretty damned cool so far, and I like the texture as it has a pulpy paper feel. I also vote for no linework. That's right! NO! You do so well without it. Also, I hope the lettering won't be black? That's the only part I don't like. Scott Morse did some neat graphic novels with a limited palette such as this. Looks good. Go for it and have fun!

[kajarainbow.livejournal.com]

...Yeah. I've never seen an art style like that for a webcomic (like I've never seen any with a style like Fite's, which's only one of the reasons I like it so much). But, seriously? One of the most striking comics I've ever seen, I can only imagine what it would be like with actual better art. And I agree about the lettering color, that seemed to jar with everything else and I noticed.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I like the calligraphic feel of a lot of my pen sketches for this so far. I'm debating! It will come and go, and there will be style shifts as the main character's mood changes. Linework will also fit into the color scheme of the rest of the page - in this case, for instance, it'd probably be the dark purple. I'm aiming for a partially art noveau feel to this thing, overall, and noveau really needs outlines.

I also feel like quick, loose linework on paper will help keep the process of this fast, while having enough detail to keep me happy. I want to have detail in the drawings, but if I let myself do that in AI, I'll get bogged down in tiny, tiny details in every panel, and it'll never get finished.

I hadn't really thought of the lettering being anything but black - lettering, to me, kind of exists on a separate layer from the images. I just tried dropping the dark purple swatch over the black and it might work; I'll have to play with it. Thanks!

I haven't seen any of Morse's work that I can recall, but I know I'm being influenced by Paul Pope's "Heavy Liquid" - I only flipped through it in the store, but his use of nothing but blue and red plates (as I recall) was really striking. Most of the story will be in ultra-limited colors like this, with the palette shifting to show time/mood/etc, and of course there will be breaks into wider schemes, or into b&w, because I get bored!

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

Yah, for me, the black is just too visually jarring and it really points out that it's currently the ONLY linework in the whole thing. Perhaps if it were AI brushed? And a dark purple instead of black? Dunno. :"D

Morse did a spiffy little comic called "Southpaw," which had a (ulp) boxing tiger. I'd say it was an inspiration for fite but I hadn't seen it before I started doing the otters. The whole thing is in oranges only. This is very striking, though! Depending on where you post it, it will likely make a big splash!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Mostly it's just going to be at egypt.urnash.com/Absinthe/ - I'll worry about promotion once I've got more than, I dunno, ten pages or so in the can.

Ultimately the text is going to be written in real media; I find that my handwriting looks pretty bad in AI due to the not-quite-immediate feedback, and it smoothing/abstracting the lines. It'll be a LOT more expressive and legible if it's done on paper.

[kajarainbow.livejournal.com]

And this is coming from someone who's literally seen hundreds of webcomics. Really exceptional among webcomics, believe me. I haven't read quite as many in-paper comics, though, a fair deal but not as many. The whole money thing.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Pretty much every web comic out there is stuck in the shadow of what's gone before, I think. Gotta use thick-and-thin outlines because that's what you do, not because you have to so you can have a bit more slop for bad registration on your printing press. Gotta model it like this because that's what all the tutorials tell you to do.

Or else they're in the shadow of "I really hate drawing and am trying to minimize the work in that arena". Cut-and-paste is the rule of the day!

There's exceptions - and there are good reasons for choosing to work in these well-trodden paths, too. People who want to go for newspaper syndication need to hew to those limits, and practice cranking it out every day. (and hell, I need to juggle a reasonable schedule vs. making this pretty - I want to see it finished sometime, and I don't want to put art policies in place that mean each page takes days!) But really... how many webcomics out there are done by practiced, mature artists? The vast majority are by people learning how to draw, how to tell stories, and how to use Photoshop all at once.

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

Ahhh excellent... now I don't have to try to blackmail you into producing comic art by threatening to scan and post 'Pointless Violence'... (hmmm, or do I?)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

*fear*

It made Chris Ware famous!

[normanrafferty.livejournal.com]

And there's many print-on-demand places that can do 7x9 or 8.5x8.5 books.

Re: It made Chris Ware famous!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

By the time I get this done there'll probably be even more. I don't think this is going to be finished any time this year - there's a decent pile of story here!

[jenkatb4u.livejournal.com]

Spirals are for crazy time. Form a ring. Grab onto your partner's hand and spin, spin, spin! By the time we're done, the metropolitan area will be twisted into a spiral pipe around us. From the outside, it'll look like a pinched-up tower with a downtown facade cemented onto it.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

That has the coolest mental imagery to go with it in my mind.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

One thing that occurs to me as I take a closer, more detailed look at this: you may need to do a little outlining, or to have a color that's darker than Absinthe's 'mask' and stripes. The third frame does not immediately parse for that reason - not enough delineation. I can imagine having her stripes/mask be the same color as the background in a more composed shot, where we can see more of her body, in fact that's a cool idea that you've probably already thought of. :) But in closeups, you may need to do something to define her a little more...

[rhinoscillator.livejournal.com]

Ooh, neato. The texture, the squareness and the solid borders make it so tangible, like it's already in book form on nice heavy paper. And your drawings and lettering sit so naturally together that I can't imagine the one without the other.

[mister-wolf.livejournal.com]

And yes, square pages.

All I can say is thank God. There's enough of this "I'm going to draw in a shape that does not fir on any screen because that is the way I think comics have to be" stuff floating around.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

*shrug* I still kinda like the traditional "book" size and shape of 'vertically-oriented rectangle', somewhere in the area of "letter-sized" - it's familiar. I'm realizing, as I play with little experimental thumbnails, that my whole mental library of Interesting Ways To Break Up A Page is built from examples in that shape, and it's going to be a bit of a challenge to come up with interesting ways to break up a square page.

My template has reference marks for 1/2, 1/4, 1/3, and φ, and this may well be revamped as I learn what works.

I don't want to get into that infinite canvas thing, though. I've seen it done well and I've played with it in some of my single images, but I'm just not that interested in Playing With The Form.

[(Anonymous)]

Infinite canvas is pretty much an idea best left in the dust of history, unless you're drawing spacy art comics. And it is only appropriate in that case 'cause its over faster if you don't have to wait for the pages to load.

[mister-wolf.livejournal.com]

That was meeee, by the way.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hey, you've got a spacy art comic in the planning stages - maybe you'll find a use for infinite canvas!

The worst part of Infinite Canvas is that it's not going to be preserved. It's a solely online trope - how the hell do you replicate it in the real world, and is it worth trying? - and websites vanish. It's going to be a lot harder to find seminal pieces of webcomics that're really using the web, forty years in the future, than it'll be to find stuff caught in paper.

Changing the format suddenly, from a normal-sized page to a five-mile-long one, is potentially pretty powerful. I was amazed when I read "When I Am King" back in '03 or whenever. But how the hell is that gonna survive?