What'll I Do When You Are Far Away, And I Am Blue?

I discovered today, with some sadness, that Vladimir Tretchikoff, painter of The Chinese Girl, the best-selling print that adorned so many 70's lounge walls, has popped his clogs. A slightly odd admission, perhaps, as I'd not heard of Tretchikoff till I saw his obituary - in fact it wasn't till yesterday it ocurred to me that such a mass production icon was actually painted by a known person (as opposed to, say, a team of kitschnologists in a plant in Taiwan somewhere).
Tretchikoff joins that pantheon of anonymous creators whose work somehow strikes a chord with millions - the other obvious example is Alberto Korda, the Cuban photographer whose photograph of Che Guevara was the basis of the poster that was almost mandatory decoration for student bedsits in the late 60's, and who died in 2001.
I wonder how Tretchikoff saw The Chinese Girl - did he think of it as his best work, or did it eclipse the paintings he was really proud of? Either way, I'll always have a grudging fondness for it, if only because it gives the lie to what my secondary-school art teacher was always telling us - you can go far without learning to mix flesh tones.

Now, Just You Back Up There A Moment, Young Fella...

With a big project like The Great Game just completed, a young man's fancy turns to backup strategies. At 7.5 gigs a pop, I don't want to keep more than one episode of The Great Game on my Mac's 60 gig hard drive at any one time; I leave low-resolution copies of the pages for reference, and the rest get shunted off onto a variety of external disks.

I have a short-term and a long-term strategy; day-to-day (in fact, any time I get up from my desk for more than a couple of minutes) I back up onto 60 gig Smartdisk Firelite firewire hard disks; I have one dedicated to each of my two Macs. They contain backups of my current projects, software, resources like fonts, plus a bootable copy of each Mac’s system folder made with the handy freeware app Carbon Copy Cloner. I can boot from the external disks to repair the Mac's own hard disk; at a pinch I could even use them to keep going in the face of a total hard drive failure.
My long-term strategy is twofold; backups onto CDs or DVDs and onto larger (320 & 500 gig) mains-powered Formac hard drives. The CDs and DVDs have the advantage of simplicity; there's little to go wrong with them mechanically and files written on them can't become infected by viruses. The hard disks are more convenient to back up to and are intended for long-term future-proofing; when CDs or DVDs start becoming obsolete it would be a pain to transfer the contents of hundreds of backup disks to some new medium; in comparison, it should hopefully be quite easy to dump the contents of one or two big hard disks onto whatever the brave new format is.

Software-wise I rely on three apps; two backup programs and a CD burning app.
Intego's Personal Backup X is my favourite backup program for day-to-day use as it will simply copy the contents of one named folder into another without compressing the backed-up files into some weird format. This means I can just access the backed-up files from whatever disc they're on without having to go through a restoration procedure first. Personal Backup X is Mac-only, simple to set up and use, and fairly cheap (£50-ish). It won't back up directly to CD/DVD, but you can back up to a disk image and then burn it afterwards.
Apple's own Backup software does save files to a compressed archive, but it has automatic pre-sets that let you easily back up normally awkward-to-get-at stuff like mail messages and application preferences. Useful for backups against that nightmare computer failure. Mac-only (requires a .Mac account), will save to CD/DVD*, FireWire hard disk, and iDisk.
Until recently, the only CD-writing option for Mac users (apart from the slightly limited option of the Finder) was Roxio Toast. However, while trying to find out if you could write multi-session DVDs, I stumbled on an application called NTI Dragon Burn, which I now use all the time. Originally a PC application, Dragon Burn isn't guaranteed to work on all Macs; it's notorious for breaking down when users upgrade their system software, though NTI are apparently pretty good at issuing free upgrades to get the show back on the road. My copy has worked fine with Mac OS 10.2.8-10.3.9, though I would recommend downloading the free trial version to check it works with your machine before buying.
What sold me on Dragon Burn was the number of useful extra features that Toast can't match. Once Roxio perfected disc-burning in the background under OS X (Toast 5), they seemed to run out of ideas and concentrated on turning Toast into an all-singing media conversion package ("Turn your nuisance viagra spam emails into a professional-quality Quicktime slideshow on DVD using drag-and-drop alone!"). NTI, on the other hand, kept adding simple-but-useful extra features, like simultaneous burning to multiple recorders, disc spanning (writing large chunks of data to more than one disc) and multiple sessions on DVD (though only DVD +RW, so you'll need an external burner). Unlike the spreading octopus of Toast 6, Dragon Burn is small and cheap ($20 for download version).

Finally, if you did want something to replace Toast's sound-recording facilities, I thoroughly recommend a little app called Audio Hijack Pro by the wonderfully-named Rogue Amoeba. This will let you record sound from any source coming into the Mac, or any program that plays sound - so you could digitize your old LPs by running a line from your stereo to your Mac's sound-in port, or (as I do) record digital radio programmes from the Internet or even theme music from DVDs. The unscrupulous might even choose to re-record tracks downloaded from iTunes to MP3 format. allowing them to be used in a wider variety of players (not that I could ever recommend such a thing).
Audio Hijack will record directly to AIFF, MP3 and AAC in a variety of quality settings. It has a large number of filters, most of which I don't know how to use (though I do use "Double Gain" for boosting the volume of DVDs played through my older Mac). It also usefully stops recording when a stream cuts off, so I can leave it recording a half hour programme, safe in the knowledge that if I forget it for three hours I won't come back to find my hard disk filled with a vast MP3 file, most of which is the sound of silence.

*Like most Apple software, it normally only works with the Mac's built-in CD or DVD drive, though my LaCie DVD writer came with a software plug-in that makes it compatible.

I Have Often Walked Down This Street Before...

My Wacom stylae cool in the morning air...

That's it. Done.

There'll be the odd correction and tweak still to do I've no doubt, but nevertheless, as of 8.50 this morning, Scarlet Traces: The Great Game is finished.

I wondered how I'd feel on reaching this point; it's two years since I first started The Great Game, and given that War Of The Worlds was written by the same writer and drawn in the same style and format for the same editorial team, I've effectively been working on the same thing for all that time.It's been a real rollercoaster ride too; Ian, Dave de Dark Horse and I planned it so that we could turn out the book on a long schedule, giving me plenty of time to do a good job and even the odd other project on the side. As things turned out, various hold-ups and the last-minute decision to do War Of The Worlds have meant a two-year sprint to keep on top of deadlines in the face of house moves, computer collapses, exploding central heating systems and a wedding. Add to that the fact that the dollar rate has collapsed since we signed our contracts in 2004 and it's not been an easy ride at all. It should really feel like the end of an era.

Except, as the amnesiac said for the umpteenth time, it's deja vu all over again. If The Great Game has been a rollercoaster ride, the original Scarlet Traces was like tobogganing down the Matterhorn on a tin tray while being strafed by Stukas armed with bullets full of poo.
It took Ian eight years from coming up with the concept of Scarlet Traces, to placing it with web comics publisher Cool Beans Productions. Eighteen months later, when Cool Beans folded, we had a comic which was only 75% complete and which was still owned by the defunct publisher - a situation of nightmare complexity which Ian managed to resolve using a combination of fast talking, inspired deal-making and (I presume) black magic. Having retrieved the property, Ian then managed to license our previously-unpublished comic to Rebellion's Judge Dredd Megazine as a reprint - thus giving us the funds to complete the story while retaining ownership.
For me, it meant re-formatting a load of (mostly) landscape-format web comic pages into portrait-format print comic pages, re-drawing a few existing panels and completing sixteen new pages in the space of about six weeks. By the end of October 2002, the thing was in the can, a mere ten years after Ian first discussed the idea with me over the phone.

That's it, I thought. Done.

But then, in early 2003, came the Dark Horse reprint, in a slightly different format, with extra pages, so I ended up re-configuring about eight pages of the conclusion, adding new panels, extending and re-drawing others, doing a cover. By April 2003, the Scarlet Traces graphic novel was in the can.

That's it, I thought. Done.

I mean, it's not as if we could do a sequel or anything...

So here we are again; Scarlet Traces is finished once more. Given that we now have a complete story arc from the Martian invasion in War Of The Worlds through the British invasion of Mars in Scarlet Traces to the conclusion of that war in The Great Game, I don't see that there's anything more to be added. Ian says he has one more short story about Robert Autumn in him, but even if we get to do it, that'll only be a few pages.

So really, I think it is safe, this time, to say...

That's it. Done.

(Thanks to everyone for hanging on during my deadline-beating absence. Normal service will now be resumed.)

Lightning Sketch

Just taking an enforced break due to a violent thunderstorm - I do have surge protection, but I'm not betting my computers against it working in the face of a direct lightning strike.

Birmingham New Street... this train terminates here.

Anyway, thought I'd take a moment to show you this panel I did today, because it's funny what turns out to be most pleasing to draw. The past few pages I've been working on vast, apocalyptic space battles (all the stuff I've really wanted to put in a comic since I first saw Star Wars, in fact), but in the end, it's the real-world stuff that's often most satisfying, perhaps because it takes that little bit more effort to make it convincing - and indeed interesting. I got a similar frisson from doing the tea-pouring panel with Robert Autumn back in issue 2.

Tea & sympathy in St.Mary Mead

I'm pleased with the railway scene because everything looks as if it's occupying 3D space, and I think I did a bit better than usual with the body language - though I'm going to tidy up those guardsmen on the left when I ink them.

Ho hum, rain's stopped... better get back to the grind.
See you in the funny pages.

Extras

Only this afternoon, I have posted off a CD full of concept sketches and extras for Leviathan to Rebellion (or rather, my belovèd, the obliging Dr. F has, as I'm confined to my room for deadline reasons, so don't fret, Dave de Dark Horse). This means that after many delays and reschedulings, the Leviathan collection is finally going to happen; I believe they go to press sometime in September so I'm guessing a release date sometime in October(?). The book will contain the original story, plus the three Tales of the Leviathan, plus, if they use all the extras I sent, at least one amusing photograph of me posing as Hastur the demon.
I also received news last week that the first print run of Dark Horse's Scarlet Traces collection has sold out; we're pushing to get a new edition out pronto to coincide with the collecting of The Great Game. As a result of selling out, Ian and I received royalty cheques; I'm investing mine in copies of War of the Worlds :-)
As if a trend had started, I then had notice that Lazarus Churchyard: The Final Cut has sold out, and we're in discussion with Image about getting that re-printed.
Finally, spare a thought for me over the next few days, as my final deadline for The Great Game #4 is this weekend, so sleep may well soon be an extra that's not on the menu :-)

Only Human...

Thought you might get a laugh out of this... parts of issue 2 of The Great Game were drawn at such speed that I forgot to submit pencils and inks for approval to my gallant editor, Dave de Dark Horse. The result was that on page 10, we ended up with a Robert Autumn who'd grown his lost arm back, Gecko-fashion...

If you ever wondered what an editor was for...
Robert Autumn with miraculously re-grown arm.

The solution... I flipped the bottom two panels to make
redrawing the missing arm in panel 5 easier.

Countdown Continues...

I'm down to the last three pages of The Great Game. Ian's only just keeping pace with me on script, so I didn't get pages 20-22 until today; call me a big ol' softy but I nearly blubbed when I read them. He'd told me roughly what to expect, but even so... I think he's managed to end Scarlet Traces both with a bang, and his characteristic human touch.

Now all I have to do is draw the b*st*rd.

*a

Scarlet Traces: The Great Game #2 Spotted!

Regular commenter of this parish Dankell has picked up issue 2 in the UK, so I'm guessing it's safe to say it's out here (and, presumably, the US).
By the end of today, I'll be down to the last 5 pages of issue 4, but the deadlines are really starting to bite, so my posts may become a bit more sparse for a couple of weeks...

Draw The World Together Auction Is Go!

Part of my lot for the Draw The World Together Auction:
a signed A2 (594 x 420mm) photo print from Leviathan.

The Draw The World Together charity auction is up and running. 2000AD contributors including Alan Grant, John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra, Dave Gibbons, Boo Cook, Henry Flint, Bryan Talbot, Frazer Irving, Dom Reardon, David Lloyd, Steve Yeowell and my good self have all donated work to help raise money for the Everychild charity, helping underpriveliged children across the world.

(Update from 16th August, 2 days after auction closed; have been travelling and so missed end of auction; will post totals for all bids & my lot once I get them.)

The second part of my lot; an A4 sketch of Hastur the demon from Leviathan.

My lot is in two bits; a signed A2 (594x420mm) photo-print of a double page spread from the last episode of Leviathan, plus an A4 hand-drawn sketch in ink and Tipp-Ex on coloured paper. Both items count as one lot and must be bid for together.

Finally, big thanks to 2000AD's Boo Cook (who supplied the smashing cover to Prog 1500) for cracking the whip in an incredibly amiable way and making the whole thing happen.

Keeping It Under My Hat...

The funny thing is, the more interesting a job gets, the less you can talk about it. What I mean is this; the early stages of a story are usually the set-up, so you can show more bits from them without giving anything away. In the case of The Great Game #1, I could have shown you practically all the episode, sans lettering and excepting the reveal on the last page, without spoiling the story overall; on the other hand, most of that episode involved people riding about in taxi-cabs or standing around talking in bars, which is pretty undramatic stuff.
By the time we get to issue four, the whole thing's really got into gear, and I'm having more fun stuff to draw than you can shake a stick at, but out of the final ten pages I won't really be able to preview anything without it being a massive spoiler. It's like having big news at last but not being able to tell anyone...
Instead I've decided to show off some stuff from issue two; I've already talked about the fun I'd had designing the rocket trip to Mars, and showed some preview images. This is a step-by-step showing how one of those was put together.

Original scribble thumbnail sketch of the panel from my layout book;
the only part of the process I do with paper and ink.
You may just be able to make out a rocket taking off in the
background with another in the extreme foreground.

From the sketchbook drawing I build the models in CGI; at this point I've
decided to pull back a bit so you can see more of the foreground ship.

I decided to alter the page layout, so the proportions of the panel have
changed. On computer (using Adobe Illustrator) I then traced off a
quick rough to show Ian the writer and our editor, Dave de Dark Horse.
Lettering has already been added.

Intermediate inks showing how I trace from the CGI (and how much
I add by hand.) The chequer pattern on the models helps me add hand-
drawn detail in perspective.

Finished inks, showing spot blacks. I've also added the red trim
on the rocket at this stage as it's hard edged and easier to draw
in using Illustrator than "paint" in at the colouring stage.
The pink lines are for elements (in this case smoke) that will be
painted in later. These lines will be deleted when done with.

The drawing is exported from Illustrator into Adobe Photoshop for colouring.
Colouring is done with a mixture of Photoshop and Corel Painter. Note how
the "painted" smoke follows the pink lines from the previous image.

Scarlet Traces: The Great Game #2 Heads Up!

Cover design by Amy Arendts.
Scarlet Traces © 2006 Ian Edginton & D'Israeli.
Dark Horse logo is a trademark of Dark Horse Comics, Inc.

On returning from Scotland, I found a preview copy of Scarlet Traces: The Great Game #2 waiting for me. I'll be interested to see if people notice a shift in style between this issue and the last; they were done eight months apart, and I’d drawn the whole of War of the Worlds in between.

Last time I got my preview copy about a week before the issue hit the shops, so keep an eye out from next Monday...

I'd like to apologise in advance for the cover; despite carefully planning it from the beginning not to be too busy, and spending ages fiddling with the colouring so it wouldn't be too dark, it's - you guessed it - too busy and too dark. Cover art is simply not one of my strengths...

It's also an example of how the needs of the distribution system drive production... because Previews needs covers months in advance for solicitation, I had to do this cover well before issue 2 was written; Ian and I put our heads together and came up with this, since it's the episode where Charlotte heads to Mars, but in fact the significant part of this issue ended up being about Autumn and what had happened to him since Scarlet Traces (thus the back cover). Dravott Jr. here doesn't really take the stage until the very end of issue 3, so this image would have fitted issue 4 better than issue 2. If we use these covers as chapter headings in the collection, I may see if we can swap 'em round...

One final thing: as of last night, there are only six pages of issue 4 left to complete.

The Bells Are Ringing...

Fig A: I (left) have better legs than Dave (right).
(Photograph by my belovèd, the panchromatic Dr. F.)

If you were a regular part of the scene at the UKCAC and Bristol comic conventions in the mid-to-late 1990's, you may well remember the human dynamo that is my good friend David Moyes. The networker supreme, Dave once managed the astonishing feat of wangling me a regular colouring job at 2000AD, although he wasn't himself working in the comics industry at the time!
Even more astonishing was the bravery of his decision to have me as his best man (my knack for both forgetting and losing things is legendary, I could tell you some tales if I hadn't mislaid the bit of paper I had them written down on). When he rang me to ask me, I could almost hear the gleam in his eye when he said "oh, and by the way, you'll have to wear... a kilt!" Not that I was fazed... I've shared a hotel room with the man, and I know which of us has the better legs (See fig A, above).
Prior to the big day, I'd only worn a kilt for ten minutes or so during the fitting, but even so found it almost disturbingly liberating; after some agonizing over whether to "go commando" or not, I eventually settled on the halfway-house of wearing an old pair of shorts with big holes in them. Still, the first stiff breeze in the right direction proved a revelation; I finally understand what all those little hairs on my legs are for. There’s a considerable danger that by this time next year I'll be going by the name "Margaret" at weekends.
Worse by far than the kilt (and even the ordeal of having to hold on to the rings for a whole 45 minutes without losing them) was having to make the best man's speech, though I think I earned a degree of audience sympathy by realising that everybody was starving, and keeping my bit (the last speech before the meal) as short as possible.

Myself and the boogie-licious Dr. F dance the Gay Gordons
(photograph by Laurence Campbell).

Still, the food was excellent, and later there was dancing (The Gay Gordons plus the odd thing you could Rhumba or Salsa to, I'm less fond of Random Bopping, though I did a bit). Fellow 2000AD stalwart Laurence Campbell and his wife Natalie were there, so it was an excellent opportunity to catch up; I like Laurence muchly, but, possibly because he's very modest and self-effacing, we don't tend to get as much time as I'd like in the social melee of the typical comic convention. It turns out he's working on Something Big that he wasn't prepared to talk about, so keep your eyes peeled; to date Laurence hasn't really been given a vehicle that brings out the best in him, but once he does the sky will be limit.
I can also reveal that, despite his many protests that he has no sense of rhythm, Laurence turned out to be quite a mean dancer. I shall evermore think of him as "Snakehips..."

Laurence "Snakehips" Campbell dances so hard his legs enter another dimension.
(I'm gonna get such a kicking the next time he sees me ;-)

So this morning Dr. F and I packed up and headed home, bleary-eyed and muzzy-headed (I really should not have had that half-glass of wine with the meal yesterday). I did manage to get a bit of colouring done on the train home, though.

Proof for my long-suffering editor, Dave de Dark Horse,
that I didn't fritter away the whole of the last two days...

CAPTION-tide

Preparations for the Kochalka Puppet Theatre at CAPTION 05, Oxford.

As I remarked on Monday, it's CAPTION this weekend; to celebrate, I've finally posted my photos from last year's event.

Photos from CAPTION 05 on Flickr.

caption.org

"D'Israeli makes the meanest salad in Beeston!"*

Just finished being interviewed by Matthew Badham for the Megazine (as with Ian Edginton last month.) I don't know what issue it'll be in yet, though as the deadline's not till the end of August, October seems more likely than September. I'll keep you posted.
It's a pity we can't publish our non-recorded conversations, which, ranging through de-Nazification and oppressive regimes in the Germanic countries via the slow maturation of Alberto Brecchia to the effects of new technology on the practise of art from Toulouse-Lautrec to Tom Gauld, were probably much more interesting than my banging on about "komiks wot I drored." An erudite chap, that Badham.

The encounter led me to discover a previously unnoticed side-effect of keeping this blog; Matthew, like all good journos, had done his research, which meant that every time I tried to mention a bit of recent news, he'd say, "oh, yes, read that in your blog" and recite the post back to me. Up to now I'd worried about coming up with enough things to post, now I wonder if I've not been publicly decommissioning my limited stocks of small talk without realizing it. I don't suppose it'll prove a problem among the classicist crowds I mostly associate with (colleagues of my belovèd, the ever-fragrant Dr.F), but it'll be interesting to see how much conversational depletion there is the next time I do a signing.
Still, I'd only complain if no-one was reading...

*As a result of my new-found healthy-eating regime, I was stocked with sufficient vegetables to feed the Vegan Mr. B: however, I strenuously deny any allegations of a sleazy salad-for-questions deal.

Dull Admin Stuff

Following minor problems with spambots leaving adverts in the comments for some posts, I've activated word verification to block posts by automated systems. I hope this won't cause any inconvenience.