Stickleback: Number of the Beast Part Two References

Pages 1 & 2

 

Pages 1 & 2 - Camera Obscura

Based on a real pre-photographic projection device, in which an image of the outside world is projected into a darkened room through a tiny pinhole (“camera obscura” is Italian for “dark room,” and is where the English word “camera” comes from.) Later versions employed a rotating turret containing a lens and mirrors which projected a circular image down onto a flat viewing table, as with our design, which is loosely based on the camera obscura on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, round the corner from the flat where I was living while drawing the first series of Stickleback in 2006. 

The 3D projection aspect owes more to Star Wars than any real technology, though. It’s interesting that even retro-futuristic technology has to have this extra level to it now; I suspect ten years ago we might have limited the capabilities of such a devise precisely to show that we were in the past. I think of this as “super-duperness inflation.” 

Page 2

Page 2 Panels 1&2 - The Lost World

The original home of the Sorrys obviously draws inspiration from the dinosaur-filled plateau of Maple White Land from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1925 Professor Challenger novel The Lost World. Our Professor Challenger is based loosely on actor, explorer and national institution Brian Blessed, whose real life exploits were inspired by the character, and who played a parody of him, Sir Basil Champion, in BBC Radio 4 Extra’s The Scarifyers.

Project Gutenburg free ebook download: The Lost World.



 

Page 2 Panel 6 - Factory Farming

While obviously playing on modern anxieties about the factory farming of animals (chickens in particular), the batch breeding of a sentient but compliant workforce also has echoes of Aldous Huxley’s 1931 social parody, Brave New World.

Read Brave New World online.

Page 4

Page 4 Panel 1 - Oriental Tropes

This panel was an absolute bitch to draw; there are as many references dumped in here as the next two episodes put together. Also, due to my limited talent at producing likenesses, there’d be no reason to recognize most of them without this handy-dandy guide. From left to right:

Li H’sen Chang and Mister Sin from the 1977 Tom Baker-era Dr. Who story The Talons of Weng Chiang (itself a play upon Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories). 

The Three Storms versus a Victorian-ified version of Kurt Russell’s Jack Burton from John Landis’ Big Trouble in Little China (1986).

(Background) O-Ren Ishii and her bodyguards, the Crazy 88’s (their costumes a reference to Bruce Lee’s costume in the television series The Green Hornet), from Quentin Tarantino’s 2003 gore-fest Kill Bill.

(Midground) John Carradine twice, once as Kwai Chang Kaine from the 1972 television series Kung Fu, and once as Bill from Kill Bill.

(Foreground) Lone Wolf and Cub, from the Manga of the same name (Japanese: Kozure Ōkami) by Kazuo Koike. A total of seven live action Lone Wolf and Cub films were made in Japan during the 1970's, two of which were cut together to make the English-dubbed Shogun Assassin (1980).

Page 4 Panel 2 - Sonny Chiba

The multi-skilled Japanese actor here reprising his role from Kill Bill, this time making Sushi from a baby Cthulhu (therefore referring obliquily to Stickleback: England’s Glory.)

 

Page 4 Panel 4 onwards - Miss Scarlet’s Make-Over

Miss Scarlet has always been woefully under-used (the penalty of a large ensemble cast is finding them all something to do) but with this new series Ian was determined to bring her to the fore and give her more to do. Her new, orientalised look gave us the chance to give her a more modern, “flapper”-style vibe, suggesting someone looking towards the 1920’s and 30’s rather than back to the Victorian Era. For myself, I kept in mind Shanghai Lil from Hugo Pratt’s wonderful Corto Maltese in Siberia when drawing her.

Page 5

Page 5 Panel 2 - The Court of the White Lotus Empress

Introduced in the last episode of Stickleback: England’s Glory, the Empress is a female analogue for Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu. A detailed breakdown of the characters in the Lotus Empress’s court can be found here.

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: Hostile Takeover Part Two

Aimee gives Frank a lift
Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part two, page four
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD 

Part two of Lowlife: Hostile Takeover was where my now well-documented dissatisfaction with Adobe Illustrator came to a head. While I'd been drawing part one I'd become more and more aware of how slow Illustrator was; it really was choking on all the little Carlos Ezquerra-style rendering lines I was putting into my pages. Illustrator stores every line as a separate, adjustable object, which means that rendering or hatching really does clog it up pretty quickly.

I hadn't got to grips with Manga Studio at this point, so I decided the try laying out and pencilling the pages in Illustrator, then see if inking them in Photoshop would be faster. Illustrator's various geometric vector tools allowed me to lay out panel borders, lettering and building perspective grids with much more flexibility than Photoshop permitted, but since I keep my roughs and pencils as simple as possible, Illustrator would still run pretty quickly for me.

Casino scene from page one of
Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part two
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD 

So I jumped in at the deep end with this big panel - starting with the solid blacks and adding outlines afterwards. The solid black stage was already proven - I use Photoshop to add those when I'm drawing Stickleback - but inking the outlines proved trickier than I expected.

The problem was the pressure-sensitivity of the Photoshop brushes - with the default settings on my Wacom tablet, they tended to suffer from a "jump point" where the lines would suddenly jump from thin to thick when a certain level of pressure was reached, something that fiddling with the controls in both Photoshop and the Wacom preferences could improve but not fix.

Worse still was that all the brushes were what I call "heavy" - they'd produce their thickest line unless the stylus was held off the tablet all the time. I'd expect to have to do this for Photoshop brushes that were mimicking real-world brushes, but the effect prevented me from ever mimicking the feel of working with a dip-pen, which is springy but which can be allowed to rest on the paper. Again, fiddling with Wacom and Photoshop settings didn't solve the problem.

On the plus side, having a page rotate tool was a big relief, and being able to straightforwardly erase things was lovely (I know Illustrator now has an eraser tool, but using it on variably-stroked lines can cause some weird effects). Being able to subtract via selection was handy, and having layer masks which allow me to reversibly erase into black areas was superb - something I wish Manga Studio could emulate.

But, in the end, it came down to this; the "heaviness" of the brushes meant I couldn't draw any quicker in  Photoshop than in Illustrator. For the next few episodes I hit on the compromise solution of doing the bulk of the inking in Illustrator and then adding rendering (and, as I always have, texture) in Photoshop afterwards.

I'll be interested to see if anyone can see a difference in the appearance of this episode.

A quick word about the bikes in this episode: for Aimee's bike I wanted something a bit different and futuristic. Inspired by the bodywork of a BMW prototype, I came up with the idea of a fly-by-wire racing bike with a saddle, fairing and control assembly that floated clear of the engine and wheels. This allows for computer controlled stabilization and steering override to help the rider cope with Mega-City One's 200mph+ traffic speeds.*

The Samurai assasins' monocycles were inspired by Ben Gulak's Uno bike.

*Source, Judge Dredd episode 1, 2000AD prog 2.

Finally, here are a couple of panels I was quite pleased with that mostly got covered in lettering. I knew they would too; I just have too much fun drawing backgrounds.

The back alleys of the Lowlife
Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part two, page four
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD 

Stickleback: London's Burning Part Two References

Page One: Mister Peepers and Mister Lug Suddenly Appear

In my previous post I described how I'd forgotten to include Peepers and Lug with the rest of the gang - this episode they suddenly appear in the pit with everyone else. But what Tharg doesn't notice won't hurt him.






Page Two: Hardenbrook The Notary

Is named after the character played by veteran British actor Michael Gough in Tim Burton's 1999 film Sleepy Hollow. Ian asked me to make the character look like Michael Gough, but I'm not very good at likenesses, and luckily the demands of page layout meant the panel he appeared in was so small you couldn't make out his face anyway.






Page Three: "Hargreave"

Mr. Tickle's Christian name is a nod to Roger Hargreaves, creator of the Mister Men and Little Miss books.








Stickleback's Revolver

This unlikely-looking weapon is a LeMat revolver, an American Civil War side-arm that features a standard .42 or .36 revolver mechanism with a secondary 16 gauge barrel capable of firing buckshot (in other words, it's a big pistol with a small shotgun built into it).






The Countess's Boudoir

Since we wanted it to look futuristic (for the 19th century) the Countess's boudoir borrows from the design aesthetic of German Expressionist movies such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

The skull-shaped stand for her masks was inspired by the work of early 2000AD stalwart and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen artist Kev O'Neill.




The Countess's Mask

Surprisingly (since it appears more beautiful than monstrous) the Countess's mask here is based on the Medusa Rondanini, a famous marble sculpture of the Medusa's head. It is probably a Roman copy of a Greek work dating from the 5th Century BCE .

Lowlife: Creation Part Two: Old Dogs, New Tricks

Page three of Lowlife: Creation part two.
Lowlife and associated characters © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams & Henry Flint

The fundamental part of being a commercial artist is earning enough to cover the mortgage each month, but mere survival doth not an interesting career make. So each time I start a new project, I look for some part of my work that needs change or improvement. What could I do better? What can I try next? Some projects answer that for themselves. Adapting my computer-based art techniques to black & white comics (Leviathan), making talking dinosaurs emote (XTNCT) and building a skanky Victorian London out of found textures (Stickleback: Mother London) each filled up weeks of work with new and entertaining challenges.

With Lowlife: Creation, I knew I wasn't going to be doing anything technically radical (I wanted a bit of grimy texture in with the line drawing, but the technical challenges of that sorted themselves out in a couple of pages), so I was free to pick an area for development.

Something that's bothered me about my own work for some time has been my figure drawing. I always feel it's too stiff and clumsy; somehow I can never get the characters to "act" convincingly in quite the way I'd like to. I've been thinking on the problem for a while, but the solution came from an unexpected quarter.

Half as a joke, my belovèd, the bibliophilic Dr. F, bought me a copy of How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way.

First published in 1978, How To Draw Comics... is one of those books I've been half-meaning to buy since I first became seriously interested in drawing comics. It's based on a course on drawing comics put together by John Buscema in 1975; Stan Lee later wrote up Buscema's notes in his own inimitable style. The florid tone of the text is probably what put me off buying the thing for thirty years, but once you push past that, it's a goldmine of information on everything from basic drawing and page planning, right through to inking techniques.

Left: How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way by Stan Lee & John Buscema.

The section on figure construction was exactly what I'd been looking for.

Above left: my old "skeleton" for constructing figures. Note the one-piece torso.
Above centre: John Buscema's figure construction "skeleton" sub-divides the torso into "rib-cage," "spine" and "pelvis."
Above right: This gives more points of reference for constructing figures in active poses.

In that chapter, Buscema shows how to build up a figure from a stick-figure "skeleton." All this was familiar enough to me in principle, but it turned out that Buscema's "skeleton" was just a bit more sophisticated than the one I'd been using in my own drawings. My "skeleton" used one section for the whole torso; his included a rough "ribcage" and "pelvis" connected by a "spine." This makes it much easier to draw the torso twisting or bending.

The first three panels of page four with the figures laid in using Buscema "skeletons." It was a lot easier to capture Aimee's casual slouch and Frank's hunch using this system.

Rough pencils stage: the figure drawing is a little more expressive than my usual, I think. It was certainly easy to do. I just wish I'd stuck with the folded arms on Aimee in the first panel.

Pencils stage: Even at this relatively late stage I sometimes faff with the drawing - in this case I thought it better to have Aimee hide her feelings by turning her head away from Frank in panel three. Pre-planned doesn't mean inflexible.

As a result of using this new system, figure drawing's become much easier, and I think the results are a bit better too. I'll never be Neal Adams, but I do have a clear idea of how to make my figure drawing still more expressive and convincing in future. A bit of me wishes I had picked up a copy of How To Draw Comics... when I was eleven; the wiser part of me remembers you couldn't tell my eleven-year-old self anything :-)

I'm also going to have a look at my composition in the next job, although I always find those diagrams where they overlay drawings with geometrical shapes a bit hard to believe in. Still, per ardua ad astra and all that.

How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way is available from most comic shops, or dirt cheap from amazon.co.uk right now. Many libraries also stock a copy.

The Vort Part 2: Naughty Bits

Menaced by the Frogs... cover to 2000AD Prog 1590
The Vort © Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Created by G. Powell & Me.

The Vort part 2 is upon us, with my 5th cover for 2000AD (shown above, in all its unlettered glory). This episode also contains two further minor landmarks for me. Though they're "blink-and-you'll-miss-them" small, those pages contain my first drawings of bare breasts and someone weeing in a mainstream comic (see below). If my mentioning this seems a bit like a vicar's giggly virginal middle-aged daughter congratulating herself on daringly using the word "bum," well… I suppose you're right.

Naughty bits: top: page one, panel one, bottom: page three, panel four
The Vort © Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Created by G. Powell & Me.

Of course, I drew naked folks and all sorts of nastiness in Lazarus Churchyard, waaayy back in 1991, but a) Warren made me do it and b) doing this stuff in 2000AD feels like a bigger deal, because I can't help but think of it as the comic I read as a child. In fact, I've always referred to the IPC/Fleetway/Egmont/Rebellion (pick an era) hands-off editing style as "scanning for tits and willies" (since you'd often get no feedback at all unless there was something objectionable to be changed). It usually was "tits and willies" too, since while 2000AD has pushed the boundaries in a number of ways over the years, like all mainstream British comics it tends to be happier dealing with violence than sex. Before the introduction of female judges in the early 80's, even significant female characters were next to unknown in British action (aka "Boy's") comics; Professor Jocelyn Peabody from Dan Dare is the only one I can think of. Alan Moore really broke through with The Ballad of Halo Jones in 1986 (especially book 3, a war story with a predominantly female cast that even fits in an elliptical reference to menstruation). John Smith, too, has to be credited with introducing sexually liberated female characters (Tyranny Rex and Pussyfoot Five) along with allusions to all kinds of sexual themes.
And most recently, of course, we've had Simon B Davis's "big purple willy" episode of Stone Island. Got to admit, that was a line I didn't expect to see crossed. Mind you, neither did Ian Edginton, who hadn't put it in the script (when he saw it, he rang me in a state of shock, wailing "there's a big purple willy right in the middle of my strip!" in a quavering voice. And him a married man, too.)

So, rather naïvely, I was slightly surprised to see such open references to Bless sleeping with Veldt in the scripts for The Vort. I mean, given the age of the average Earthlet these days, it's only right for us to admit that men and women engage in - let's not mince words here - horizontal interpersonal man-woman wibbly-wobbliness. For myself, I'm torn between sticking with visual solutions that allude to naughtiness without showing it (just because it's a fun game), and going full ahead to see if I can be the first artist to cross that final barrier and slip a spurting stiffie into 2000AD (pardon my French, vicar).
(After all, we're well behind Johnny Foreigner on this one; Jean "Mœbius" Giraud managed that trick back in 1977 in the Blade Runner-inspiring detective story The Long Tomorrow, which somehow even made it into Epic Comics' US editions without being censored).

It does make you wonder a little as to why images of willies have been so thoroughly banned for so long; after all, half of us come with them built in and the other half are probably going to find out what they look like sooner or later. Willies aren't especially pretty, but it's not as if the world will come to an end if we see the odd picture of one now and again, surely.

Except... since that last episode of Stone Island, the world economy has gone into a spin, there have been catastrophic natural disasters in Burma and China, food and petrol prices have soared, and violent youth crime has gone spiralling out of control. Coincidence? All I can say is, if, in ten years from now, you find yourself living in a landscape of shattered rubble and burnt-out cars, wearing a mohican and Mad Max-style bondage gear, and dividing your time between bizarre gladiatorial games and roasting dead dogs on a spit, you'll know who to blame, wont you?