Hello, here's yesterday's Exciting Tales! strip, which I sincerely believe is one of my absolute best comics yet:
After doing the Professor Bear strip? I HAD to do one about Professor Waterbear. It also gave me the opportunity to do a figure drawing gag I had been wanting to do from the beginning.
Man, Harold just can't catch a break...
As mentioned before, Thursday's Distinguished Gentlemen will be pretty amazing, and Monday's Halloween strip will be even more amazing.
A friend sent me this video on Facebook. See if you can figure out why:
I think I like this guy. "MAY THE POWER OF THE COSMOS BE WITH YOU!!"
So I mentioned before that I'm working on a new action comic that I'm taking my time on. Since then, much progress has been made. I've been writing and thumbnailing simultaneously, which seems to be the best way to work, considering that I always get bogged down if I just try to sit and type out a script. I finished laying out the first chapter, which at 16 pages is longer than anything I've done before, but a bit short for even a single-issue thing. Still, it is what it is, and I may do a bonus supplementary chapter to squeeze in a few more pages. I started the second chapter today, with three pages thumbed out so far.
The guy on the far right is introduced in the second chapter, explaining how he bought an isolation chamber that he never uses.
I keep referring to this as my "dumb action comic," but it's hardly that at the moment. The fight scene in the first chapter takes up about 5 or 6 pages, and the rest is just two characters talking. No idea if there'll be much action in the second chapter, because I'm finding that it's more fun to develop the characters and the setting, but at the same time, I have to fight and keep myself from making it all just a big, boring exposition dump, so I have to figure out how much info to let out and when. There's a lot of questions between the two main characters, and figuring out what they are, when to ask and when to answer is a big chore.
There's a lot of designing to do too. In trying to give the town the comic takes place in a life of its own, there's a lot of defining to do. For instance, the hotel itself needs look as though it's been around quite a while, but the TV, furniture, and other little bits need to look new and different, like they've replaced the old furniture but left the room itself as is. Does that make sense? It's a science fiction future, but the town itself hasn't quite caught up just yet. And it's doubly difficult because I've never really drawn any real interior spaces before, my backgrounds are always light, and I'm going to try and break that with this comic. Also, a scene with a car. I'm going to hate myself when I start to REALLY draw this.
And compared, to the other comics I've done, there's not really any super weird and random crap. Not yet, anyways. I want things to slowly get more and more ludicrous as time passes, so maybe later on it'll become what it was originally intended to be. I realized I can't just make a comic that's a bunch of fighting and make it compelling or interesting if the characters don't do much else and the setting is ambiguous.
I mentioned No More Heroes and Old City Blues last time as influences, but I realized there's more going into it than that. Akira, the Woman Trap, King City, Ronin, and hell, I quote David Lynch's Lost Highway in one panel and in another do a scene similar to a Batman panel from the only Justice League comic I own. It's coming from all over the place, which is totally a good thing.
I probably won't start drawing the actual pages until December at the earliest, once the semester and my job doing comics for the East Tennessean is done.
Also, unlike previous Big Ambitious Projects I've come up with, hopefully this one won't get scrapped so quickly, especially after having written about it here.
[Brett]