Happy New Year!

The Lowlife "Hokusai" Cover for 2000AD Prog 1752
Dirty Frank © 2012 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Dirty Frank/Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

I was delighted to discover that the Dirty Frank "Hokusai" cover for 2000AD Prog 1752 has won Cover of the Year 2011 on the 2000AD Covers Uncovered blog. Thanks to everyone from Covers Uncovered, ECBT2000AD and the 2000AD messageboards who voted. It's been a corking year for 2000AD, so competition was stiff, and I'm proud to have placed in a field that included Greg Staples, Cliff Robertson and Henry Flint (no less than 3 times!)

Thanks where thanks are due: Tharg-in-Residence Matt Smith came up with the idea of basing a cover on a Hokusai print, and also approved what is a very radical take on Dirty Frank. 2000AD design stalwart Simon Parr also deserves thanks for his ever-sensitive design work. Thanks, gentlemen.

Finally, and at the risk of turning into Richard Attenborough, thanks to Pete Wells of 2000AD Covers Uncovered for his ongoing work showing the time and effort that goes into the cover art for the Galaxy's Greatest every week.

Lowlife The Deal Part Eight: My Hand Nearly Dropped Off

Lowlife: The Deal part eight pages three and four. A flashback scene rendered with lots of hatching as a tribute to the works of Carlos Ezquerra and Henry Flint.

Lowlife and associated characters © 2011 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Pages three and four of the current Lowlife episode gave me a new appreciation for my fellow 2000AD art droids. Although I like to pack loads of detail into my pages, I've always used a relatively simplified art style that made drawing all those details fairly quick and easy (even the seemingly-elaborate faux "paint 'n collage" technique of Stickleback is a kind of sleight-of-hand in terms of effort put in for detail on the page.) 

But for this particular flashback sequence, I thought it would be nice to borrow a trick from 2000AD titan Carlos Ezquerra, who used to drop out the solid blacks in favour of blocks of hatching to indicate a flashback sequence:

A flashback scene by Carlos Ezquerra from Judge Dredd: The Apocalypse War.
Note the use of hatching to replace solid blacks.
Judge Dredd © 2011 Rebellion Developments/2000AD.
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. 

I'd not really been intending it, but with some of the darker areas (such as Frank's coat on page three panel four) I ended up using a sort of denser scribble that is closer to what Henry Flint was doing in his early Lowlife work:

Henry Flint draws Big Frank's first appearance in Lowlife: Paranoia.

Lowlife  © 2011 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

I've got to say, it's the first time I've ever done a page, looked at the result, been really pleased , and straightaway said, "Never again!" Why? Because my bloody hand nearly dropped off doing all that hatching, that's why. It took ages. Full kudos to Messrs. Ezquerra and Flint; guys, you are hardcore and I but a mere lightweight. I don't know how you did it, you must have wrist muscles like a bull's neck.

Respect due.

Lowlife: The Deal Parts Four to Six - If You Knew Kaiju Like I Knew Kaiju

Some crave superbly crafted stories, for others it's wonderful acting or beautiful cinematography. But when I sit down for a bit of cinematic entertainment what I'm really looking for is two Japanese stuntmen bashing into each other at random while a load of fireworks go off around them. Yes, I'm a devotee of Kaiju, Japanese rubber-suit monsters, and the last few episodes of Lowlife: The Deal have given me the chance to scratch that particular itch in public. 

Frank's avatar, based loosely on Hedorah, the Smog Monster (from Godzilla vs the Smog Monster, Toho studios 1971). I described this creature to Rob Williams as "a giant ambulatory turd," which seemed a perfect alter ego for Dirty Frank. The little doodles top left are me working out his rough body shape.

The two monsters from the initial sparring session in part three. The one on the left is based on regular Godzilla bit-part player Anguiris (a name that derives from the Japanese difficulty with saying Ankyllosaurus, first appearance Godzilla Raids Again, Toho 1955)). The one on the right is half-Godzilla, half Spinosaurus Egypticus (the crocodilian head), half jigsaw set (in the strip, I extended the jigsaw pieces all over the body too, making me glad I only had to draw him for one episode).

 This guy is based on non-Toho star player Gamera the giant turtle (first appearance Gamera The Giant Monster, Daiei 1965, most notable appearances in three revival films Gamera Guardian of the Universe, Gamera II: Attack of Legion, Gamera III: Revenge of Iris, Daiei 1995-1999) . His burning claws are a kaiju-nerd reference to the "flame hand" used by Gamera to kill the monster Iris at the end of Gamera III: Revenge of Iris (Daiei, 1999). But why the little glasses, moustache, white loincloth and (in the finished version) spinning wheel symbol on his chest? Because he's Ghandi'd Gamera, that's why.

No giant monster slug-fest would be complete without the prettiest monster of them all - giant three-headed golden dragon King Ghidorah (First appearance Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, Toho 1964, most notable appearances Invasion of the Astro Monster, Toho 1965, Destroy All Monsters, Toho 1968, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, Toho 1991, Godzilla: Final Wars, Toho  2004). KG is a difficult one to pastiche because his profile (three heads, bat wings, no front legs) is so distinctive. My eventual solution was to turn him into a Chinese dragon - which then gave me the idea of him using the 'pearl' (Chinese dragons are traditionally shown chasing a pearl) as an emitter for his death-ray.

 This guy appears briefly in the background of a couple of panels in episode 6 (he's really just there to make up the numbers). Why a robot dinosaur with a cup of coffee for a head? Because he's Mochagodzilla, naturally (see Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Toho 1974).

This final one isn't from Lowlife at all - it's an old sketch from 2001 showing my long standing love of giant monster puns. Behold - Rodin the flying monster!

Lowlife: The Deal Part Three: After Hokusai

Cover to 2000AD Prog 1752, based on a print by Hokusai
© 2011 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Dirty Frank Created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint 

I didn't have that much so say about this week's episode of Lowlife: The Deal, but, luckily, Prog 1752 is the one that gets my Hokusai-derived Dirty Frank cover, which has been getting a lot of nice feedback, so I'll blat on about that instead.

Tharg-in-Residience Matt Smith sent me a very loose brief - a shot of Dirty Frank "done in a Japanese, Hokusai-style." Luckily, as a fan of the graphic works of Japanese print-master Katsushika Hokusai, I already had plenty of reference for his work to hand, so I set about searching for compositions with figures who were bowing, bending or otherwise inclining - ones that could easily be adapted to make a slump-postured Dirty Frank.

"Musahshi Goro Sadayo Dies in Battle at the Age of Fifteen" (right)
was the source for the figure of Dirty Frank.
From the Illustrated Book of Heroes of China and Japan in the Style of Katsushika.

To give you an idea of what I was looking for, here's the source material for the final cover, from the Illustrated Book of Heroes of China and Japan in the Style of Katsushika. I realized that the dying Samurai on the right-hand page could be easily turned into Dirty Frank striding along holding a staff.

I came up with three main possibilities, which I worked up as roughs on a 2000AD cover grid:

Three cover roughs - in the end, I only submitted the centre one.

The first is Dirty Frank and a stylized Aimee Nixon (the symbol of Frank's quest in Japan). The second is Frank on his travels, striding towards Hondo-Cit . The third is a Warrior Frank looking out over the city.

After thinking on it a while, I decided the second image was so much stronger than the others that I'd just submit that one, keeping the others in reserve. Luckily Tharg-in-Residence Matt Smith liked it, so away we went.

I wanted the backgrounds to have the correct flavour, so I borrowed the countryside portion of the background from this print, Aoigaoka Waterfall at Edo from A Tour of Japanese Waterfalls. I flipped the image left-for right to fit the composition, omitting the figures to focus attention on Dirty Frank.

There being no Hokusai prints of Hondo-Cit skyscrapers, I just made that bit up, using a sort of rough orthographic projection to match the not-quite-but-nearly perspective that Hokusai employed in his drawings.

A close-up of the lines in Dirty Frank's
coat, showing the lines created by
Manga Studio's brush tool.

The Samurai I was using for reference was wearing armour, and I wanted a "Hokusai-i-fied" version of Frank's normal outfit, so I copied the folds in the cloth from other Hokusai prints. I also noticed that Hokusai was using a brush for his cloth folds - the lines are more irregular that the ones on, say faces and hands, which I'm guessing are drawn with a bamboo pen - luckily I was drawing this in Manga Studio, a Japanese program which has analogues for the sort of Sumi-E brushes you'd need to get this effect. I can't say I controlled the lines all that well (see left), but it helped to give verisimilitude* to the drawing.
*I've always wanted to say that, "give verisimilitude."

The final stage was to export the drawing to Photoshop for colouring. Since I was imitating the effect of woodblock printing, I used flat colour with no modelling or shading, just a couple of gradients (an effect Hokusai produced by mixing inks on the printing blocks). I opened the file in Corel Painter and "mussed up" the gradients a little using a blender brush to stop them looking too mechanical.

Hokusai printed his work in lovely bright colours, which have subtly faded over time. To get the character of the colouring right, I sampled most of the key colours from scans of Hokusai's prints, filling in with a few colours of my own as needed. The final stage was to add a subtle texture over the whole image - appropriately enough, one I made myself from a photo of the weathered paint on the back door of our local Chinese grocers. This gave the impression of paper texture and helped to break up the too-perfect flat Photoshop colouring a little.

So, after all that effort, do you have anything more than a big cold swipe? Well, I made sure to sign the cover "After Hokusai," the standard artist's way of crediting the person who's work is being quoted (thanks to the guys at 2000AD for including this in the cover credit). For those who already know Hokusai's work, it'll hopefully be an amusing pastiche, a fun way of summing up the themes of this series of Lowlife. For those who haven't heard of Hokusai before, hopefully it'll be a way of spreading the word; and if you'd like to know more, his Wikipedia page and this Google search aren't a bad place to start.

Lowlife: The Deal Part 2: Details, Details

My version of Hondo Cit  from Lowlife: The Deal Part Two.
Lowlife/Hondo Cit © 2011 Rebellion/2000AD
Hondo City Created by Robbie Morrisson and Frank Quitely
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

No workee
No eatee
No pay mortgage
Sleep on streetee 

-The Freelancer’s Lament

So, the problem with making comics - one of the many problems with making comics - is time.

I spent most of 2010 living in Greece, which is a lovely place, friendly people, terrific climate, but a bastion of the Protestant Work Ethic it is not. Where the Spanish are famous for saying “Mañana,” (wait till tomorrow), the Greeks say “Theftera,” (wait till Monday). And while I find it hard to decry a philosophy that always gives you the weekend off, it did make it hard to concentrate on the distant Anglo-Saxon notion of deadlines, especially when there were so many nice cafés to try within a one-mile radius of our apartment. At the time I was working on Lowlife: Hostile Takeover, which I’d been told needed to be done by October 2010, with no intervening deadlines set. A blissful state of affairs, I thought at the time, except it turns out I need the Fortnightly Fear to keep me motivated.

Coming back to the UK in August last year to find myself tight on time and low on funds, I settled down and started dragging myself back onto the fortnightly schedule usually allowed for 2000AD episodes. All went pretty well until the start of December, when I was meant to start work on SVK. A whole set of unfortunate circumstances - schedule clashes, Warren being unwell, me being unwell - plagued production, and a deadline that had been pencilled in for mid-February ended up being pushed back till early April.* Aside from the loss of income that involved, I also received my biggest-ever tax demand, based on the year I’d received a big wodge of royalties for the Absolute Sandman: Kindly Ones.

*Thus causing series 4 of Stickleback to be delayed, if you were wondering where that had gone.

So, when I started Lowlife: The Deal, I was climbing back once again onto the episode-a-fortnight wagon, and financially running on empty, so I pretty much just had to get down to it. The result is that the first few episodes of Lowlife: The Deal were done in, not exactly a rush, but at the limit of my recovering stamina. And under those circumstances, something has to give.

What usually goes first is not drawing quality, but thinking time; that extra half-day to mull on an idea, find the best angle on it, the spare hour in the schedule to re-draw a panel or add some neat extra detail you’ve just thought of. When I look at Part Two of Lowlife: The Deal, that’s what I see; the missed opportunities.

Mick McMahon's double-page splash panel of Texas City from Judge Dredd: The Judge Child
Judge Dredd © 2011 Rebellion/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Sanchez Ezquerra

Take that big splash panel of Hondo-Cit on page two; in a lot of ways I’m pretty pleased with it. I wanted to come up with a singular vision of Hondo; my solution was to swipe an idea from Mick McMahon’s* classic double-page spread of Texas City from the Judge Child saga; incorporate symbols of the culture into the architecture. So my Hondo-Cit has buildings in the shape of Samurai warriors, Geisha girls and Samurai swords; a buddhist temple and pagoda-shaped towers. I also recycled my unused Christmas-tree style VTOL airport design from Lowlife: Hostile Takeover. I think the drawing does a fairly good job of getting across the scale of the city, and the fact that it’s not Mega-City One. Where it falls down a bit is on what I call significant detail.

*To be fair, McMahon drew it, but I don't know if he or writer John Wagner came up with the idea.

A densely-detailed cityscape from Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira
© 1988 Katsuhiro Otomo/Akira Committee

What’s the difference between significant and non-significant detail? The easy way to explain is by showing. Take a look at this first panel, from Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo. It’s a beautiful piece of work, densely packed with detail, but the detail is all impersonal; buildings, windows, no people, no signage. Manga is designed to be read quickly; the idea is to give you a strong impression of dense urban clutter and the on to the next panel. This detail isn't intended to slow down the eye or be studied in itself -  therefore it’s non-significant.

From Geof Darrow's Comics and Stories
© 1986 Aedena & Geof Darrow

Now take a look at this panel from Comics and Stories by Geof Darrow; although Darrow is an American, this book comes from the Franco-Belgian storytelling tradition, one in which the stories are generally much shorter (and/or slighter) than in Manga, but the pace of reading is meant to be slower. Here the detail is on a human scale, more personal, with lots of figures, each one an individual and remarkable character with their own actions going on, legible posters on the wall, and in-jokes such as the train with the front-end of a 1950's American automobile. Detail is used to make the eye linger, with rewards for those readers who return for a second look. This is significant detail.

I did manage a bit of significant detail on that Hondo-Cit splash; there’s a little tribute to Osamu Tezuka’s Tetsuwan Atomu (Astroboy) in the advertising figure atop the building bottom left, and down at the bottom panel you can see a Godzilla-style monster chained to a truck on the highway. But I didn’t have time to go through my Manga collection and collect cool buildings from the worlds of Katsuhiro Otomo and Masamune Shirow to drop into the backgrounds. I’m still kicking myself for not having the Phoenix from Science Ninja Team Gatchaman/Battle of the Planets or Battleship Yamamoto landing at the airport. And most of all, I lacked the time to contact any of my Japanese-speaking friends to supply joke text for the Hondo-Cit signage. As it is, all the Japanese text in the first five episodes is taken from Basho’s famous Haiku The Frog:

An ancient pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water


But I didn’t come up with that particular wheeze till after I’d finished the page.

And that’s the nature of the beast, as a comic artist; do the page then let it go, there’ll be another one along in a minute. Not that I wouldn’t backtrack to fix a major error (like the time I forgot my main character had lost an arm), but overall? Let it go. Living with a certain level of disappointment comes with the job; I think of the great comic artists who’ve influenced me, and it’s true for them, just as much. I once read an interview where Mike McMahon dismissed his classic Judge Dredd stories as cluttered and difficult to read; in another, Euro-Comics titan Jean “Mœbius” Giraud could find nothing better to say about his strip-that-literally-changed-my-life Les Yeux du Chat than “there was some good architecture in it, I suppose.” I have heard stories of the great John M Burns sorting through piles of his gold-standard comics pages, despairing of finding anything good enough to put in his portfolio.

Baggage retrieval at Hondo-Cit
Airport: I was quite pleased
with this panel.

If you’re going to make a living in commercial art, the ability to draw is just part of the story. If you’re to have any sort of peace of mind in the world of regular deadlines, you have to have the confidence to believe that the odd failure is part of the mix and won’t matter in the end (and sometimes the thing you’re embarrassed about is someone else’s favourite bit). There’s no relationship between actual talent and the level of self-belief; if anything, the better an artist, the more likely they are to be tortured by self-doubt. This explains two phenomena common in the world of comics; the brilliant artist who only churns out an issue once every three months, and the apparently dreadful artist who inexplicably gets tons of work - the latter because he can always hit his deadlines. To all brilliant guys who are held back by self doubt, I can only say how thankful I am; I’d never have established a career in comics if you’d been able to churn it out.

If this is all starting to sound a bit grim, I’d like to end on a positive note; when I was looking back over episode two for this blog there were a few pleasant surprises; the facial expressions on page one, the scribbly flashback effect on pages three and four (which worked better in print than on screen) and the robotic luggage carousel (and porter robots) on page three. It’s just very difficult to judge your own work per se, more so when you’re still so close to it.

Ask me in a couple of years, I’ll probably give you a different opinion.

See you in the funny pages.

Lowlife: The Deal Part One - So What’s The Deal with Dirty Frank?

Dirty Frank in Uniform in part one of Lowlife: The Deal
Dirty Frank/Judge uniforms © 2011 Rebellion/2000AD
Judge uniforms created by Carlos Sanchez Ezquerra
Dirty Frank Created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint 

I’ll never be rich and here’s why; the big money in comics lies in drawing handsome muscular guys and cute muscular girls in Lycra, and that just nain’t my strong point, not nohow. Sure, I’ve drawn characters like Judge Dredd and Batman, but with questionable success; where I’m really at home is at the less glamorous and more outlandish end of the character spectrum. Think Lazarus Churchyard (depressed stinking plastic junkie), think Lament from Leviathan (sagging middle-aged bloke with drink problem), think Stickleback (venomous 70-year-old with atypical spine placement choices).

Think Dirty Frank.

Dirty Frank looking
surprisingly restrained
(From Lowlife: Hostile Takeover)

I was lucky to be offered the chance to draw Frank at a pivotal point in his career. In his previous solo appearances (drawn by the estimable Simon Coleby) he’d mostly been a bit of comic relief, a way of doing Lowlife as a palate-cleanser from the seediness and corruption of the Aimee Nixon stories. But my first series, Lowlife: Creation, delved into Frank’s back story, turning him from a lovable but rather stinky cartoon character into a more rounded personality, a man whose flights of madness sprang from a deep past trauma. As the tone darkened further in Lowlife: Hostile Takeover, I found myself working harder and harder to capture the different sides of a character who was a babbling street-bum one minute and a steely-hearted Mega-City Judge the next.

One effect of drawing this back story was that it subtly changed the way I drew the present-day Dirty Frank. My concept sketches for Frank were based very closely on Simon Coleby’s version, and my first episode reflects this; but as I thought more about the young, handsome Judge Frank we see in the flashbacks, the more I toned down the caricature elements; my Frank ends up quite good-looking under all that hair and grot.

Dirty Frank looking
unsurprisingly unrestrained
(From Lowlife: Hostile Takeover)

With each new series I undertake, I try to find some area of my work to change, improve, or approach differently. This is partly for my own sanity (I’ve been drawing comics more-or-less six days a week for the past ten years, so I need some way of ringing the changes every now and again) but also as a bulwark against staleness, which creeps in unnoticed if you sink too deeply into comfortable habits. In the case of Lowlife: Creation, I made some radical changes to the way I constructed my figures at the preliminary drawing stage. This was part of a process that had started with me bringing the characters more to the fore in the first series of Stickleback.

By happy coincidence, this change to my basic drawing made it much easier for me to give the characters’ body language a greater range and subtlety. Put simply: their “acting” improved. When Rob Williams came back to me to do Lowlife: Hostile Takeover, I assumed it was for my big-scale portrayals of the city; I was happily shocked when he said what he most valued was the degree of expression I could get into the characters. From then on, I really started concentrating on character “performance” (years ago, when I was a tiny wannabee artist-thing, Gary Leach once told me that a comic artist is the director, cameraman and entire cast of a movie all rolled into one; I’ve thought of drawing character expression as “acting” ever since). I think Hostile Takeover contains some of my best “acting” to date.

This new series provides new challenges. We start with Frank back in uniform - cleaned up, hair trimmed, stooped straightened to the best of his ability; wild behaviour reined in, so no extreme expressions. Finding a way to hold on to the essential “Frank-ness” with most of his props gone made this one a fascinating episode to draw. I don’t suppose it’s too much of a spoiler to say we’ll soon be dirtying Frank up again - though the new Frank won’t quite look the same as the old one…

Frank's Long Walk parade is supervised by Judge Lola, from the
 Judge Dredd time traveller stories I did with Ian Edginton.
Lowlife/Judge uniforms/Judge Lola © 2011 Rebellion/2000AD
Judge uniforms created by Carlos Sanchez Ezquerra
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint
Judge Lola created by Ian Edginton & Me 

The cover to Timularo Edtion 45 for Page 45 comic shop, Nottingham

Following the ripping success of last month's signed and sketched Page 45 Special Edition of Timularo, those fine folk at the Page 45 comic shop in Nottingham have come back for more with  Timularo Edition 45, a limited run of 45 copies, each signed and sketched-in with a special cover (above) and additional interior plate (left) to frame the sketch.

This edition is strictly limited and available on from Page 45 in Nottingham, and also available through their website at page45.com. Don't hang about, though -  the first edition sold out within one minute of going on sale!