Salligadoola Mitchigaboola Pluggety-Bloggety Boo

Review of the collection of Leviathan by Charlie Hodge in SFX #150.
© 2006 Future Publishing Ltd, reproduced here for review purposes under the
Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

Apologies if you're getting a bit sick of this self-referential stuff, but I've not been a media darling before and I suspect it's not going to last.
Ian rang me last week in a state of great excitement to tell me that the Leviathan collection had a full-page review in SFX #150. I nipped out to get a copy and sure enough, there we were - occupying a full page of the magazine's 2.5 pages of comics reviews, and not only did they call it "the best story (2000AD) has published in the last ten years," but they even used one of my favourite panels as a half-page splash. Absolute bliss, though I'm still wracking my brains to try and remember the day I pulled a thorn out of Charlie Hodge's paw...
It also led me to thinking about the value of reviews. For the creator, that is - obviously a good review in a newsstand magazine like this should help sales (as Ian put it, "real people will see this one!"*) - but there's a danger as a creator in paying too much attention to reviews of any kind. Working in a commercial arena like comics is a bit like walking a narrow causeway between two abysses; on the one side is the pitfall of overconfidence, on the other excessive preciousness. Whatever happens, you always have to balance the need to maintain quality against the need to bash out your week's quota of pages, and regardless of how well or badly a job has gone, you have to see it through to the end.
Drawing a comic swallows up so much of your life that it's very difficult to see anything bad said against your darling; I have one friend who was plunged into gloom over the three negative reviews of his work, when there had been twenty good ones (though he cheered up a bit when I pointed out how he lucky was to get twenty-three reviews, good or bad). When the first issue of The Great Game came out, the thing that worried me most was it attracting seriously negative comment, as I was going to have to stay awake for a week to finish issue four regardless.
For actual feedback I rely on a few old friends whose opinions I know I can trust, and particularly, who I can trust to tell me when I'm going astray. Compliments are wonderful, but they don't teach you very much**, and as a professional artist, I'm judged by the worst work that I turn out each year.
So I maintain that lofty old-thesp-style stance of "I never look at my reviews, dahling" which is, of course, horribly disingenuous, as I have Ian and other friends to ring me up and let me know when someone's said something nice about me. And let's face it, it "the best story (2000AD) has published in the last ten years," is pretty damn cool.

(Though the pie chart ratings kinda put me in my place - 20% for "gorgeous art" but 25% for "no Celine Dion." You've got to hand it to Charlie, he's got his priorities straight.)


*Ian wishes me to point out to members of the comic-reading fraternity that he does love you all really.
**please don't let it stop you though.

Another Shameless Plug

Opening spread; drawing from the Tharg's Future Shock Metamorphic Invaders!
Thanks to Bolt-01 of this parish for the scans.
Copyright © 2000AD/Rebellion Developments Ltd.

My interview with Matthew Badham is published in the current (October 2006) issue of The Megazine - readers of this blog will know exactly how much my witterings are worth, but it does include a nice preview image of Stickleback.

Cover to the XTNCT TPB and a preview image of Stickleback.
Thanks to Bolt-01 of this parish for the scans.
Copyright © 2000AD/Rebellion Developments Ltd.

Given that I've got a series coming up for 2000AD (Stickleback) and a couple of TPBs coming out soon (Leviathan & XTNCT), I was surprised and not a little touched at the prominence given to the Tharg's Future Shocks I wrote and drew back in the year 200o. I thought the juxtaposition of the panel (from the Future Shock Metamorphic Invaders!) of a man transforming into an alien alongside the title "Odd Man Out" was particularly well judged.

Eccentric Behaviour...

Sometimes slatternliness pays off; Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin,
I got a new texture for Stickleback (from the plate on the right.)

Artistic endeavours can inspire the strangest behaviour. Since adopting my new faux-Breccia technique for Stickleback, I've been keeping an eye out for groovy textures to add to my library of effects.
At nine this morning, as I was clearing away last night's dishes to lay out breakfast*, I spotted just the sort of marbling pattern I was looking for in the dried vinaigrette on one of the plates; out came the camera and flashgun... what anyone looking out of the building opposite would have thought of the view through our kitchen window - a middle aged man in jim-jams sticking a camera into his washing up - I've no idea.


Anyway, it was worth the effort; after a bit of cloning and tidying up in Photoshop, it's come out pretty well, and is making its debut in part 3 of Stickleback, as a general decayed-surface pattern.

*yes, I know, I'm a slattern.

Appeal

Following my appeal, thanks to Bolt-01 for supplying scans for my shameless plug of my Megazine interview, which appears above.

New Downloads

The tank and the RAM Cruiser; now available for download
(Note that the surface textures may not be preserved in other 3D programs.)

To celebrate the last issue of Scarlet Traces: The Great Game, I'm making two of the 3D models I used for the strip available as downloads.

The models are the tank used on Mars, and the RAM cruiser, as seen crashed in issue one. They're available in 3DS and DXF formats* from D'Freebies of 'Israeli. They're in zip archives, so you'll need a utility that can open those.

*I'm afraid my rather primitive 3D program (Carrara 3D basics) can only export in 3DS and DXF, so it's no good asking me for other formats (except Carrara native format I suppose). If anyone wants to convert the models to other formats, I'd be happy to host them...

Done And Done Again!

Part 2 of Stickleback is complete - the hours are long, but the new black & white technique is surprisingly fast given that it involves collage and painting. I did five pages in eight days, which I'd have been pushed to do using the more conventional pen-and-ink-type technique I used on Leviathan.

Testing the limits of the human finger joint -
Duncan Fegredo (centre) and Shane Oakley (right).

I actually managed to have most of today off - spent the bulk of the afternoon in a café, winnowing the last of the thousand-plus photographs Dr. F and I took at Mark Buckingham's wedding back in August. Mobile computing is a wonderful thing.

Tomorrow The World!

The Jolly Cripple Pub, from Red Seas, drawn by Steve Yeowell

I wonder if Ian's starting to secretly build an "Edginton-verse" at 2000AD - in part two of Stickleback the characters visit a pub called The Jolly Cripple (known as the regular haunt of the crew from Red Seas).

I emailed Steve Yeowell who very kindly sent me ref for the pub (I don't think it's meant to be exactly the same one, but I like the idea of there being a chain of them). Due to the number of panels on the pages, I couldn't fit any big establishing shots in, but I took Steve's exterior layout and added additional buildings (given Stickleback must be about a century on from Red Seas, I assumed you'd get a bit of urban development).

Keeping Up

With the past couple of years taken up with work for Dark Horse, I'd forgotten that turning out five pages every two weeks is a very different matter, in terms of what it does to your free time, to producing twenty-two pages every two months.

With the hurly-burly of turning out Stickleback, I've almost lost track of the fact that The Great Game is finally out; to quote myself, I can believe it's real because I've finished it, it's out, and I've cashed the cheque. I've checked it over for mistakes, and with the exception of one page where I accidentally used an over-saturated blue, it's come out well; such things can be fixed for the collection, anyway. I daren't try reading it yet, though; this close to the finish, it's too dispiriting to realize you've spent ten months of your life on something that can be absorbed in less than half an hour.

Back in July, I posted the above photo from when I'd been doing layouts for Great Game part 4 in a cafe one afternoon; I deliberately used a small picture so the drawings in the sketchbook wouldn't be legible. If you've bought issue 4, have a look at the enlargement below, and see if you can work out which page I was roughing out.

Pages from Issue 4 of The Great Game; sadly, the old Rotring Art Pen shown here "died" a month or so later.

Keeping It Fresh

One of my rough drawings - it ain't correct, but it sure is "bouncy"

It must be a good six years ago now, that I was visiting Gary Erskine, and showed him the work I'd done on my personal project, City of Night (still in progress, for those of you who remember it!). At the time I had the whole 32 pages laid out as lettered rough drawings; Gary briefly flicked through it and then said, "you should publish it like this."

I can kind of see what he meant; though I'd not be happy asking anyone to pay money for my rough pencils, there is a spontaneity, a sort of "bounciness" present in my roughs that gets lost in the finished work. It set me thinking on ways to preserve that life; thoughts that didn't really start to bear fruit until I was working on War Of The Worlds, when pages had to be bashed out at such a rate that I could no longer be precious about what I was doing. The streamlined inking process I developed late in The Great Game took me one step closer to my goal.

Another influence has been seeing the proper version of Kingdom Of The Wicked in print at last; though some of the drawing in that is really too careless, it comes from a period when I wasn't using rigid perspective, and my work had that sort of "bounce" to it that isn't present in the later stuff...

So with that in mind, I've let go of the tight perspective grids I've been using these last ten years, and am "winging it" - trusting that my natural perspective will carry me through, and a little but of incorrectness will just add life to the mix. It all feels a wee bit scary, but it's also great fun...

Heads Up - Great Game #4

Cover for Scarlet Traces: The Great Game #4, design by Amy Arendts.
The Dark Horse logo is a trademark of Dark Horse Comics.

Given it's the 9th already, I guess it's a good time to post a heads-up for The Great Game (I usually think I'm posting the covers ages in advance and then discover that someone's already spotted that issue at their local comic shop).

The back cover isn't included in the layout as I got it in very late... but here's a copy of my artwork file, without text. It's going to be really odd seeing the whole thing in print at last...

Bit Of A Change...

Spent the weekend in Glasgow with my belovèd, the Glaswegian Dr.F and her folks; possibly the first full weekend I've had off since my trip to Spain in August. Makes me late starting the next episode of Stickleback, of course, but what th' heck...
I spent most of an afternoon wandering about Glasgow city centre in a slight daze, catching up with odd bits of shopping; I finally managed to buy a watch (my old one died the day we got here and I've not had time to replace it) and I also visited the excellent Miller's Art Shop, one of the few places I know that still sell Neocolor crayons individually. Neocolor is very opaque, so sometimes when I do sketches at signings and conventions, I draw on coloured paper and use it to add highlights. Miller's were out of the nice coloured paper pads they had last time (2005) though.


There was evidently a big match on, as the streets were full of big burly blokes in kilts wearing flags for capes and with Crosses of St.Andrew painted on their faces. Makes a change...

Did it!

I had to work through two nights, but I got Stickleback part one in only one day late. Triumph. Go sleep now.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt, Or On A Wing And A Prayer

The finished version of the panel from Monday's post; saved from doom by my suspicion of Painter.

The current work binge is really putting a dent in my regard for Corel Painter 9.5; though I've been using version 9 for about two years, it's mostly been for finishing off colouring done in Photoshop. To get the organic look I want for Stickleback, an awful lot of the work has to be done in Painter, and it's a bit like spending a couple of weeks on holiday with a mate; you get to see the way they pick their teeth over breakfast and leave their smelly socks all over the floor.

I have two main gripes with Painter 9, one a niggle, one really serious.

The niggle is to do with the rather primitive way Painter deals with colour. Stickleback is a black & white comic, so the most efficient option would be to work with greyscale files (which only contain "space" for shades of grey, so they don't use up as much memory as files that contain "space" for colours). Photoshop certainly lets me do this. Painter, however, deals with only one colour mode; RGB. This colour mode allows an image to contain millions of colours, and represents black & white images perfectly well (you get true, neutral greys), but the trouble is, even when you're not using it for anything, the extra "colour space" still exists and takes up a lot of memory; for the same black & white image, and RGB file will be about three times bigger than a greyscale one.
Since I use a lot of layers, I end up generating huge files* (sometimes in excess of 400mb in RAM), which slows down the computer and means every save takes ages. And of course, the longer you work on a file, the bigger it gets, so the longest saves are always when you're tired and desperate to be done, which makes them seem even longer...

Which leads me to the more serious problem.

When dealing with really big files (above the aforementioned 400mb limit), Painter 9 has developed the alarming habit of crashing during saving; it's only happened a couple of times, but it's worrying enough that I find myself making safety copies via the Finder, which at 70-80mb a pop means I'm filling the hard disk more quickly than I did when I was working on colour. Worse, on the last page I did, Painter somehow scrambled the file on the final save, so it looked fine in the Finder but nothing can open it. Luckily I'd cloned the page and saved a flat copy, so I didn't lose work, but with four more pages to finish off by 8am tomorrow, it doesn't fill me with confidence... (see update regarding a solution to this problem)

*Pages for 2000AD are physically bigger than the US-format pages I was doing for Dark Horse, making these RGB "black & white" pages much bigger in terms of file size than the colour pages for The Great Game.

The Mother Of Invention...

My styli with the new grips; the sheet of card taped to the tablet makes the surface less slippy, aiding drawing.

A couple of hours into my first all-nighter in the new flat and the rubber grips on both my Wacom styli split. These aren't actual components of the styli, mind - since I have a tendency to put The Death Grip on anything I draw with, I squeeze them into foam-rubber sleeves designed to make pencils more comfortable to hold. Since the Wacom styli are much fatter than pencils, the sleeves only last a couple of months before splitting. I have a supply of spares, but - I realize at 3am - they're safely packed in the loft of our little house in Nottingham.
I can order more online, or see if the art shop down the road stocks them, but neither option deals with the fact that, by 3.30am, my thumb is already getting sore from the hard plastic of the stylus; after a little experimenting I find that three sheets of loo roll folded over into a 1 1/2 inch strip, wound tightly around the stylus and secured with masking tape, does the trick nicely; you have to disable the button on the stylus, of course, but I've never been able to control that anyway.

Interpretation In A Squeeze

"Blast it to damnation! Some bugger's stolen the pupils of me eyes!"

Deadlines on part one of Stickleback are biting a bit, due to the time lost because of the move... I'm pencilling the last batch of pages from the first episode (a ten-pager, to go in Prog 2007). Having to draw the hero, Valentine Bey, for the first time in earnest; it's funny, you can do all the character sketches you like, but it's only when you draw a character in action that you really start to get a feel for them. At the moment, though, it's mostly about drawing him so he doesn't look like either Robert Autumn from Scarlet Traces, or Devlin Waugh...