Leviathan At Last!

Leviathan Copyright © 2006 Rebellion/2000AD
Created by Ian Edginton & Me
This image is my rough design; actual title text and layout may differ.

Ian's had copies of the Leviathan collection at last - Titan Books have also apparently said it's available, so there should be copies at the Asylum signing on December 2nd (this Saturday!)

Rebellion have really gone to town on the printing, with an embossed cover - from what I can gather, they were keen to match the lovely job Dark Horse did on our books.

We've had enquiries from American readers about getting hold of copies; Ian and I usually try to purchase stock of our collections to sell on, and Leviathan will be no exception; watch this space for details.

Ian Edginton: this man is known to be at large with copies of the Leviathan GN.
If you see him, do approach, as he's a lovely chap.

Finally Ian (but not I) will be at the Birmingham International Comics Show on 9th & 10th December (a week on Saturday). He should have copies of Leviathan to sign, and we're doing our usual deal of including a special signed bookplate with any book you buy from us.

Deadlines Biting, Among Other Things

Sorry for the lack of posts - I've been beavering away to make sure I could get the next episode of Stickleback done in time to go away for my signing in Aberdeen... in apology, I enclose a nice drawing of a man shooting the crap out of a werwolf.

Stickleback copyright © 2006 Rebellion/2000AD
Created by Ian Edginton and Me.

Additionally on Aberdeen... I'm going to try and make it up for the Asylum party on the Friday, but if I make it, I'll be "off-duty" regarding sketching that night... I'm having to watch my hands and wrists at the moment.

Blast From The Past: Twikker

I was recently contacted by a chap called Ewen MacLaughlin who was writing the Wikipedia entry for the Sheffield Students Union Rag Magazine, The Twikker (which turns out to be the oldest rag mag in the UK; for more information, have a gander at the entry itself).

In 1991, I was invited to provide the cover for The Twikker; something I relished, as it's an old Sheffield institution. Time was tight (I had to bash the cover off between episodes of Timulo and Lazarus Churchyard) so it's not my greatest piece of work, but I'm proud of it as the one occasion I really got to use the knowledge of printing they dinned into me at college.
They'd decided to go all out for a four-colour cover, but the problem with full colour printing (especially in pre-digital days) was the separations - the process of turning a piece of full-colour artwork into four printing plates - which was prohibitively expensive. I managed to create my own separations by drawing the cover in black & white and then making three overlays on tracing paper, one for each of the colours magenta, cyan and yellow. Where you needed a solid colour (like the yellow on the bridge), I'd colour in solid black. Where you needed a tint (like the pale blue of the sky), I'd stick down patches of Letratone dot screen.*

This meant that, when I'd finished, I had a black & white drawing covered by three sheets of paper with black and grey splodges on them, along with the fair hope that when these were assembled by the printer, they'd come out looking like the little hand-coloured rough I'd done to show the Student's Union guys what they should be getting.

And, half to my surprise, it did.

*for you Americans, pretty much the same stuff as Zip-a-tone.

Accidental Prettiness

Panel in progress from Stickleback, for 2000AD
Stickleback was created by Ian Edginton and me, and is copyright © 2006 Rebellion/2000AD

Stickleback is a black & white strip, but I use colour as part of the production process. I draw everything in Adobe Illustrator in "pencil" first (mid-grey outlines), then add blocks of bright, solid colour behind the "pencil" lines. In Photoshop, I use these blocks of colour to create what are called selections - users of Photoshop or similar applications will be familiar with the concept, but for the uninitiated, these blocks of solid colour can be masked or "fenced off," so I can either fill them with textures or paint inside them without going outside the lines.

I hardly think about these "false colour" images - to me they're just a stage in the process, a means to an end - so it took my belovèd, the eagle-eyed Dr.F, to point out how pretty they can be in their own right. Since then, I've taken to doing them in colour combinations that please the eye, but it wasn't till today that I made one where I thought, "it's a shame this can't see print as it is."

But it can - here, at least.

Update on Painter IX.5

Last month, I mentioned some niggles I'd been having with Painter 9.5, notably a potentially serious problem involving files being corrupted during saving.

Soon after, I located what looked like the cause of the problem, and after a month of steady use, it does seem to be sorted. What I'd done was to allow my hard disk to fill beyond the 85% limit recommended by Apple. Mac OS X uses the remaining 15% of the disk as "scratch space" - a place to temporarily store stuff when the RAM is full (Windows uses the same strategy*, and it's why computers slow right down when dealing with very big files - they're writing data to and from the hard disk, which is much slower than doing everything in RAM). To cut a long story short, I dumped a few gigs of data and not only has the corruption problem not recurred, but the big files are saving a wee bit quicker too.

It's worth making sure you don't overfill your hard disk, as the consequences can be more drastic than a few corrupted files - I found out about this problem the hard way when I overfilled the hard disk of one of the PowerBooks to such an extent that a scratch file encroached on the hard disk catalogue and effectively wiped the contents of the hard disk. Be warned.

*The proportion of the hard disk needed for scratch space isn't the same though - check your manual.

The Corel Painter Hand Logo is a Registered Trademark of the Corel Corporation.

Thought For The Day...

Spekulatius - biscuits with drawings on. They taste good, too.

If you live near a branch of the German supermarket chain Lidl, keep an eye out for these - Spekulatius, spiced ginger biscuits. I happened on them a few years ago when I was living in Vienna. They're absolutely divine, and our branch of Lidl, at least, has them on offer (80p or so for a 600g bag). They are a purely Christmas thing, though, so be sure to get them in the next few weeks. Your tummy will love you forever.*

*I was going to say, "they're better than sex," but actually, you'd have to be pretty bad at sex for that to be true.

Leviathan & XTNCT Progress Report

Leviathan copyright © 2006 Rebellion/2000AD
Created by Ian Edginton & Me.

Ian's had notice from Rebellion that the Leviathan collection has shipped - though if that's from China or Azerbaijan or wherever it was printed, it may still take a while to hit the shops. Review copies have been sent to magazines (hence the recent SFX review) but Ian and I haven't received complimentary copies yet.

Amazon now lists the XTNCT collection (named, in a stroke of genius, XNTCT: CM ND HV G F Y THNK YR HRD NGH!) but lists shipping times of 2-4 weeks, which suggests they don't yet have copies. Leviathan isn't listed.

Steady Progress

Just wrapping up part 4 of Stickleback today; I hardly feel as if I've started, yet by the end of the next episode I'll be past the halfway point.

I feel as if I'm really getting a handle on the new technique; when drawing comics it's not enough just to be able to do something, it's important to do it in the quickest and most efficient way, since you're effectively working on hundreds of individual drawings (c0mic panels) in a short time. Stickleback will contain somewhere between 300 and 350 panels by the time it's done; a figure that took me aback, as I tend to think in whole pages. Not bad for four months' work.

With its textures and tendency to favour dramatic lighting, the new technique certainly makes it easier to keep pages that consist of nothing but conversation looking interesting; I wondered if it would be more difficult to render facial expressions, but if anything it seems to help a bit. It's also encouraging me to play off simplicity against complexity and use design a bit more. I produced a few non-spoily panels that I was quite pleased with, so I thought I'd share.

Both illustrations from Stickleback for 2000AD
Created By Ian Edginton & Me
Copyright © 2006 Rebellion Developments Ltd.

Apologies

I've been trying the new "improved" Blogger formatting tools, with the result that I've lost the cartoon in the title box and some of the pictures in the posts aren't showing up. Apologies for any other weird effects, I'll try and get it sorted out ASAP.

Nigel Kneale Dies

Sad news today that the Nigel Kneale has died.

An unacknowledged national treasure, Kneale shaped the nightmares of television viewers during the 1950's and 60's with The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass 2, and Quatermass And The Pit. The series charted the adventures of Professor Bernard Quatermass, head of the imaginary British Rocket Group, as he battled against a variety of outlandish alien threats. The power of the stories lay in the way they played on deep-seated human anxieties (fear of infection, fear of loss of identity, fear of something evil within oneself). All of the series were later adapted for the cinema by Hammer films.
In 1984, a final series, called simply Quatermass, starring Sir John Mills, featured the ageing professor attempting to find his niece in a collapsing near-future society, while a disembodied alien force harvested the human race for its life essence via stone circles.
Other notable work includes the ghost story The Stone Tapes and the television series Beasts. He will be sadly missed.

From Scarlet Traces: The Great Game #1

Quatermass was one of the inspirations for Scarlet Traces: The Great Game. The double-page spread of the crashed ship from issue one was inspired by an image from The Quatermass Experiment, and I incorporated the lunar base from Quatermass 2 into the design for Copernicus Sound in issues 2 and 4.

All the TV series and films mentioned above are available on DVD: for those who don't know Kneale's work, the Hammer film of Quatermass and the Pit, starring Andrew Keir, is recommended as a good starting point. For aficionados, The Quatermass Memoirs, a radio production in which fictional interviews with Professor Quatermass are intercut with Nigel Kneale talking about the inspirations for his stories, is available on CD, and is often repeated on BBC7 digital radio.