Lowlife: Creation Part Three: So Was That It?

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

Lowlife: Creation Part Three has been out for a week now, but this post has been held up by my scurrying to finish the final episode (part eight). It's part of the experience of being a comic creator that you find your involvement with a project ends well ahead of publication; comic projects often take months, sometimes years to complete, and if you add delays caused by publishers going under, that can stretch to decades.

Left: publication of the colour version of Kingdom Of The Wicked was held up for 13 years.

My record to date is for the graphic novel Kingdom of the Wicked, which I drew for Tundra UK between 1992-3, but which didn't see print in colour until Dark Horse put out the current edition in 2004. I think I finally sat down and read the thing through for the first time in 2007.

On that scale of things, working for 2000AD counts almost as simultaneous publication. It takes me about two weeks to draw each 5-page episode of a 2000AD story, and the comic has to go to print about four weeks ahead of the publication date. Thus the deadline for the first episode of a series will be scheduled months ahead of time, but the last episode is usually completed while the series is already in print. This can have drawbacks; if for some reason you're not happy with the way the work looks in print, it can be a powerful blow to motivation at a time when you're normally struggling against fatigue to beat that final deadline. Don't forget, even for the experienced artist, comics are a trial of stamina; I've spoken to a number of fellow artists about this over the years, and the consensus is that every project starts in a blaze of enthusiasm, and ends in a grim determination to Bloody Get It Done.

Another facet of this business that I'm still getting used to is the discrepancy between the amount of time it takes me to draw a strip and the amount of time it takes to read it. The average black & white page will be the product of two eight-hour working days, but on a first reading you're likely to zip through it in a few seconds. Even if I plant loads of background detail to draw you back, the time spent re-reading a page probably won't ever amount to more than a few minutes.

Left: a page of my pencils from Mister X, 1990. Pity my poor inker, Ken Holewczynski.

That, I think, was what struck me most forcibly when I first saw my own comics in print; my first regular job, Mister X, came in twenty-two page episodes that took me 2-3 weeks to pencil; light on dialogue, even I could zip through a whole issue in a couple of minutes. The feeling of "was that it?" was almost palpable, though not off-putting; I draw comics mostly because I enjoy the comic artist lifestyle. Having the published work has always been a bonus, not an end in itself.

These days I rarely read my own work in any depth; usually, when I get the printed object, I'll quickly check through for mistakes and printing errors, then set it aside. That's not to say that I'm not happy with or proud of what I’ve done - but for me, it's more important to focus on the next thing rather than what came before.

Twenty years on, I'm still having fun doing the thing I love, for which I'm deeply grateful. Hope you're enjoying the ride as much as I am - even if your ride's a bit shorter :-)

See you in the funny pages.

Lowlife: Creation Part One: Borrowed Plumage

Cover to 2000AD Prog by me.
Dirty Frank © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Dirty Frank created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint,
this version of the character based on designs by Simon Coleby.

The new 2000AD is out, featuring the first episode of Lowlife: Creation, by Rob Williams and myself, plus a cover by me (slightly to my surprise, as the "milky beard" thing happens in a later episode of the story). Much to my relief and delight, both cover and interior have printed exactly as I envisaged (note that "relief" comes before "delight" there; with two weeks' hard slog ahead of me to finish the last episode of Lowlife: Creation, finding that I'd messed up the repro on the seven previous episodes would have been a serious blow to morale).

I've talked before about how working in comics sometimes gives you a chance to play with favourite concepts and/or characters (or reasonable facsimiles thereof). Being an art droid for 2000AD means I'm sometimes let loose upon the stuff of my childhood dreams; Judge Dredd is the only character I've worked on that I also read regularly as a child.

Old Stoney Face can be a bit of a challenge, though; he's one of the few flagship licensed characters where you're positively encluraged to come up with your own version. Finding my feet with him has taken a while (and, ironically, since I felt I got a handle on the character, I've been so busy doing other stuff that I've only managed one Dredd story, and he wasn't in that one overmuch.) To date, I think that I've done better with Mega-City One than Dredd himself.

Pencils for Page 5 of Part 1 of Lowlife:Creation,
showing how my version of Dirty Frank is closely based on Simon Coleby's.
Lowlife © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Lowlife has been a treat in that regard; I get to play around with the city without having to grapple with Dredd (and all issues of interpretation aside, not having to draw all those bloody eagles is nice;-). There's the question of Dirty Frank of course; in some ways he's a more complex character to interpret (he has more than one facial expression for a start), but after some playing around I decided to stick pretty closely to Simon Coleby's version. There were two good reasons for this; first, Simon's really made the character his own, and I wanted the readership to be drawn straight into Lowlife: Creation without spending the first couple of episodes adjusting to a new version of the character. Second, all my attempts to change the look of Frank ended up looking like degenerate versions of Ian Culbard.

Whenever I draw Mega-City One, thoughts of Carlos Ezquerra are never far behind. Carlos is of course the founding father of Mega-City One (more on this in a later post), and he was an major early influence on me. When I was eleven or so, I wanted to be Carlos Ezquerra in the way that other boys wanted to be rock stars or football players. Although I learned to counterfeit his rounded, organic style of design, it's so distinctive that I never felt able to pastiche it in my own projects, but working on Mega-City stories gives me the perfect excuse the borrow the Ezquerra "plumage" - so my Mega-City One always follows that tradition of bubbly shapes and gritty surfaces.

Carlos Ezquerra's classic stripey H-Wagons from mega-epic The Apocalypse War.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.

This time ~~I went one step further: inspired by Dave Taylor's recycling of the good old-fashioned stripey Ezquerra H-Wagons from The Apocalypse War for his Judge Anderson story Big Robots (Judge Dredd Megazine #257-261, 2007) I decided I'd also use them in the flashback sequence in the first episode of Lowlife: Creation.

My 3D model of the classic Carlos Ezquerra H-Wagon, made in Carrara 3D 6.
I faffed away ages building the rear booster, but in the final strip you don't even see the ship from behind.

Being me, I couldn't resist seeing if I could make a 3D model of the thing, even though it only appears in one panel. I was quite pleased with the result - by sheer fluke I got the little upward tilt of the nose section right on the first try; I'm sure I couldn't have done it deliberately. I've added a few tweaks to my version (external cannons, another eagle on the nose, and extra pods on the "wings"), but it's fundamentally Carlos' design.

The rendering of the 3D model (top) versus the finished art (bottom)

Since I needed reference for the H-Wagon, I ended up re-reading The Apocalypse War. It's a remarkable achievement - in 1982, after an absence of five years, Carlos Ezquerra returned to the character he'd created by drawing 25 episodes straight in real time (ie one per week; these days we art droids get at least a fortnight per episode). There's the odd dodgy bit here and there of course, but 25 episodes straight - I mean, I once drew four episodes of Dredd on fortnightly deadlines and I nearly died of it.

A flashback scene by Carlos Ezquerra from The Apocalypse War.
Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.

Anyway, re-reading The Apocalypse War, I was reminded of a neat technique Carlos used for flashback sequences. Where other artists tended to muck with panel borders to show flashbacks, Carlos "faded down" flashback panels by replacing black areas with chunks of mid-grey hatching. A useful effect, thunk I, and one well worth nicking for my own flashback sequence.

Left: the "blacks" are defined in mid grey.
Middle: less than a dozen strokes of my "Carlos hatching brush" generates all this hatching (the red outlines show the area that needs to be covered).
Right: the "blacks" are used to mask out the hatching.

I built an Illustrator brush that produces a cluster of short "Carlos hatching" lines, so I could lay down dense hatching really quickly. I then masked out these blocks of hatching to give hard-edged areas of shading, similar to the effect seen in The Apocalypse War. Since my flashback sequence takes place in a blizzard, I lined the shading up with the direction of the wind and blown snow to add dynamism. A modified version of the hatching brush let me quickly add myriad flecks of blown snow to the backgrounds.

The funny thing is, I've joked for years about drawing a strip that was just one man in a blizzard - as a relaxing antidote to all that detailed architectural stuff I usually do - but when I finally got the chance, I spent so long making 3D models and custom brushes that in the end the pages were no quicker or easier than usual.

Still, the getting there was fun.