Lowlife: Saudade Part Three: Sharkitecture, or Slaughter Your Darlings

Luna-2 from Lowlife: Saudade part three. The most complex drawing I've done since the end of Leviathan (2003).
Lowlife Saudade copyright Rebellion Developments Ltd/2000AD.
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

I'm very lucky working with Rob Williams, as he's always on time with script. Over the years, I've often been kept waiting (the clock ticking away but my deadlines not shifting…) or received script in dribs and drabs as the writer's working on it (which can be a minefield for continuity). But Rob? Always prompt. While I was working on Lowlife: Saudade part three, he even got me the script for part four in advance, which is very unusual. I hardly ever get to see what will happen next when I'm working on an episode.
What's even more unusual is, this was the only time in my career when getting a script in advance caused me a whole load of extra work… but without it, the double page spread of Luna-2 (above) would have looked very different…

(Before I start this story, I want to say this isn't intended in any way as a criticism of Rob Williams, who really saved my butt by turning out scripts for me at very short notice after I'd had scheduling problems with another project.)

There's no such thing as foolproof. However carefully you specify something, there'll always be someone who can get the wrong end of the stick. And, dear reader, that someone is usually me. Take a look at the description of the double-page spread shown above from Rob's script:

Pages 3 and 4 (Two panels)
Panel One
Double Page Splash, effectively (panel two’s a small indent bottom right). Now we see what’s being built at the bottom of this HUGE moon crater. And it’s LUNA-2. It’s a brand, shiny new GOD CITY. Unsullied by industry or people living in it. If Mega City One and Luna-1 look old and lived in, this looks not yet out of the box. And it looks better and more modern and more hi-tech than any Dreddworld city we’ve ever seen. It looks like an idealised representation of a future city. And the Overdrive Inc logo is very overtly on lots of the city blocks etc. Its scale if simply enormous. Workers are working on it, as you’d imagine. That’s who the people were coming in on the transport we saw last episode. The city’s not quite finished yet. There’s small transports carrying workers whizzing around. In the far left foreground of this shot we can see the viewing window with Frank and Overdrive in it, staring out at this simply extraordinary sight.

Now, that certainly conforms to the image you see above, a big wide shot of the city. Frank, after all, is in a spaceport, which you'd assume would be at the edge of the city. So now take a look at these two panel descriptions from page 6 to see where I went wrong:

Panel One
We’re on the ground of LUNA-2 here looking up at its spires high overhead and, in the sky above, high above the crater, in the distance, we can see the EARTH.

Panel Two
Frank now, in a viewing area, alone, it looks out over LUNA-2 and has a glass ceiling to allow him to look up at the sky. 

What's actually intended here is that we have one shot inside the city and then another one outside; but reading "looking up at its spires" and "look up at the sky," I added two and two, made five, and placed Frank's observation dome inside the city. I then set about designing the sequence accordingly.

Designs for Luna-2 architecture. To make the city look a bit different, I hit on the idea of using shark forms; tails, fins, snouts with open jaws (I like to think of this as "sharkitecture.") On the left are layouts for the first version of the double page spread, with the observation bubble set inside the city.

The first, incomplete version of the double page spread, set inside the bounds of Luna-2. Halfway through work on this I received the script for part 4, which indicates that Frank's location is in fact some distance outside the city with a view of the whole thing.

Bum.

Now, I could have gone back to Rob and asked for a rewrite, but this business was really my fault… and then, looking at the action from the following episode, and seeing the possibilities of a big wide shot of the city… it would be a real pain in the arse to re-do the spread, but there was just time, and it could be really brilliant…

Sometimes it's just worth making the effort. Back to the drawing board.

In my 3D program, I made up a simple model with the plan view of Luna-2 inside its concealing crater. Following the "sharkitecture" theme, I made the city plan a sort of fat shark shape. I used 3D because we were going to see the city at a low angle and the perspective of the complex curved shape was the key to showing the scale of the thing. It's easy enough to draw something so the reader knows it must be big, but I wanted them to feel how big it was. I wanted this to be a real "money shot."

I generated this view in 3D, using a wide-angle virtual camera to create strong perspective effects - this is the key to the sense of scale. I've only made a flat outline as it's easier for me to draw in the rest of the city than try to model it - this view is just a guide.

The 3D rendering pasted into the double page spread in Manga Studio EX 4. I've used the Perspective Ruler tools to add a perspective grid over the top of the image, though it's hard to see at this scale.

Rough "pencils" over the top of the 3D rendering. I've "rescued" the foreground bubble containing Frank and Overdrive from the previous version.

"Pencilling" added in bright colours over the rendering and rough pencils. Though I often use colour coding to indicate different parts of the drawing, in this case the bright colours are just to help the drawing show up against the brightly-coloured rendering.

 Because I'd already spent time on the abortive first version, I was running a bit late, so I pencilled everything very loosely with the idea of doing most of the drawing at the "inking" stage. With fantasy architecture, I'm pretty confident at just doodling in buildings, especially at such a small scale. Note that I add a bit more detail to key landmarks - the tower at the top of the hill, for example.

The "inks" over the pencils and rendering. This was a couple of days' work on its own. With this sort of repetitive detail work, patience and stamina are much more important than drawing skill. I find the best way to do it is listening to something absorbing on the radio - a good drama, say, that occupies the attention - and then it's almost like doodling. I also broke the fine detail work into chunks and interspersed it with work on other pages to give myself a bit of variety.

The spread with greys added, ready to be exported from Manga Studio. The striking false colours indicate areas where I'll drop in subtle gradations in Photoshop, which handles grads much better than Manga Studio. The blue on Frank's face is a mask where I'll drop in a "grot" texture.

The finished piece, with grads added in Photoshop. I'm pretty happy with this, but there's a reason I only do one of these big spreads every decade :-)

Luckily, there weren't that many other changes needed; I had to tweak the views out through the bubble on page 5, but that wasn't much work. The biggest change was re-drawing the background to page 6 panel 2, taking Frank's observation bubble from the centre of the city to the crater wall. All of this was made easy not only because I work digitally, but because I have the habit of drawing foregrounds and backgrounds on different layers - I could erase the cityscape in one go without touching the bubble itself.

Lowlife: The Deal Part Three: After Hokusai

Cover to 2000AD Prog 1752, based on a print by Hokusai
© 2011 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Dirty Frank Created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint 

I didn't have that much so say about this week's episode of Lowlife: The Deal, but, luckily, Prog 1752 is the one that gets my Hokusai-derived Dirty Frank cover, which has been getting a lot of nice feedback, so I'll blat on about that instead.

Tharg-in-Residience Matt Smith sent me a very loose brief - a shot of Dirty Frank "done in a Japanese, Hokusai-style." Luckily, as a fan of the graphic works of Japanese print-master Katsushika Hokusai, I already had plenty of reference for his work to hand, so I set about searching for compositions with figures who were bowing, bending or otherwise inclining - ones that could easily be adapted to make a slump-postured Dirty Frank.

"Musahshi Goro Sadayo Dies in Battle at the Age of Fifteen" (right)
was the source for the figure of Dirty Frank.
From the Illustrated Book of Heroes of China and Japan in the Style of Katsushika.

To give you an idea of what I was looking for, here's the source material for the final cover, from the Illustrated Book of Heroes of China and Japan in the Style of Katsushika. I realized that the dying Samurai on the right-hand page could be easily turned into Dirty Frank striding along holding a staff.

I came up with three main possibilities, which I worked up as roughs on a 2000AD cover grid:

Three cover roughs - in the end, I only submitted the centre one.

The first is Dirty Frank and a stylized Aimee Nixon (the symbol of Frank's quest in Japan). The second is Frank on his travels, striding towards Hondo-Cit . The third is a Warrior Frank looking out over the city.

After thinking on it a while, I decided the second image was so much stronger than the others that I'd just submit that one, keeping the others in reserve. Luckily Tharg-in-Residence Matt Smith liked it, so away we went.

I wanted the backgrounds to have the correct flavour, so I borrowed the countryside portion of the background from this print, Aoigaoka Waterfall at Edo from A Tour of Japanese Waterfalls. I flipped the image left-for right to fit the composition, omitting the figures to focus attention on Dirty Frank.

There being no Hokusai prints of Hondo-Cit skyscrapers, I just made that bit up, using a sort of rough orthographic projection to match the not-quite-but-nearly perspective that Hokusai employed in his drawings.

A close-up of the lines in Dirty Frank's
coat, showing the lines created by
Manga Studio's brush tool.

The Samurai I was using for reference was wearing armour, and I wanted a "Hokusai-i-fied" version of Frank's normal outfit, so I copied the folds in the cloth from other Hokusai prints. I also noticed that Hokusai was using a brush for his cloth folds - the lines are more irregular that the ones on, say faces and hands, which I'm guessing are drawn with a bamboo pen - luckily I was drawing this in Manga Studio, a Japanese program which has analogues for the sort of Sumi-E brushes you'd need to get this effect. I can't say I controlled the lines all that well (see left), but it helped to give verisimilitude* to the drawing.
*I've always wanted to say that, "give verisimilitude."

The final stage was to export the drawing to Photoshop for colouring. Since I was imitating the effect of woodblock printing, I used flat colour with no modelling or shading, just a couple of gradients (an effect Hokusai produced by mixing inks on the printing blocks). I opened the file in Corel Painter and "mussed up" the gradients a little using a blender brush to stop them looking too mechanical.

Hokusai printed his work in lovely bright colours, which have subtly faded over time. To get the character of the colouring right, I sampled most of the key colours from scans of Hokusai's prints, filling in with a few colours of my own as needed. The final stage was to add a subtle texture over the whole image - appropriately enough, one I made myself from a photo of the weathered paint on the back door of our local Chinese grocers. This gave the impression of paper texture and helped to break up the too-perfect flat Photoshop colouring a little.

So, after all that effort, do you have anything more than a big cold swipe? Well, I made sure to sign the cover "After Hokusai," the standard artist's way of crediting the person who's work is being quoted (thanks to the guys at 2000AD for including this in the cover credit). For those who already know Hokusai's work, it'll hopefully be an amusing pastiche, a fun way of summing up the themes of this series of Lowlife. For those who haven't heard of Hokusai before, hopefully it'll be a way of spreading the word; and if you'd like to know more, his Wikipedia page and this Google search aren't a bad place to start.

Stickleback: London's Burning Part Three References

Page One: The Alley Containing The Silver Ring Club

Hardcore fans of Gerry Anderson's 1967 puppet series Captain Scarlet might just recognize this as the alley that features in the show's title sequence. It's the first shot in each show, where the camera tracks down the alley to Ed Bishop's honeyed tones ("The Mysterons - swworrn enemies of Earth!") just before someone steps on a cat and the camera whip-pans round to show the good captain himself getting machine-gunned to no ill effect.

The sign for the Silver Ring Club is based on the painting Portrait présumé de Gabrielle d'Estrées et de sa soeur la duchesse de Villars ("Portrait presumed to be of Gabrielle d'Estrées and her sister the Duchess of Villars"), dated about 1594, artist unknown, which hangs in The Louvre.


Page One: The Silver Ring Club

The interior of the club contains various tips of the hat to Andrew Davies' violently-throbbing 2002 television series Tipping the Velvet*, in particular, the names of the performers Kitty and King.

*Tipping the Velvet is an adaptation of the novel by Sarah Waters, but I've only seen the TV series.






Page One: Kitty and King

Ian's script describes this panel as follows: "Kitty is swooning in King’s arm and he’s using the cane he’s holding in his other hand to lift Kitty’s skirts to get a glimpse on her front bottom."
Although Simon B. Davies had successfully slipped a huge purple willy (ooh, missus) into the last episode of Stone Island back in 2008, I thought it best to check with Tharg-in-Residence Matt Smith as to whether Furry Front Bottoms would be acceptable (see pencil image, right) - word came back that 2000AD really wasn't That Kind of Comic so I fitted Kitty out with a pair of bloomers with a picture of a pussy on them (oo-err vicar).


"Rache"

Stickleback's use of the German word "Rache" ("revenge") is a reference to the Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet (which Ian has been busy adapting as a graphic novel with our good mate Ian Culbard.)
I believe the reference to Holmes may hint at a possible origin for Stickleback... perhaps more will be revealed in time.

Incidentally, Stickleback must mis-pronounce the word, since the door(wo)man hears it with a long "a" and an English "ch"as in "Rachael," but in fact it has a short "a" and the guttural "ch" of "loch" - to an untutored ear it would sound more like "racker."

The Crais

Named (in a fashion) after Ronnie and Reggie, the infamous Kray twins who ruled London's underworld during the 1960's. Ronnie Kray was rumoured to have had sexual relationships with both Labour MP Tom Driberg and Conservative Lord Boothby, which may have led to a lack of political will in stamping out their criminal activities.

Our Ronnie is based on the famous image of a young Marlene Dietrich in a tuxedo.



Gene Colan Tribute

The composition and lighting in the panel are a bit of a tip of the hat to veteran comic artist Gene Colan (whom I remember fondly for his runs on Marvel Comics' Daredevil, Iron Man, Captain Marvel and Howard The Duck).







The Centurion

When I was drawing this panel, I couldn't help but think of the puzzled ape-men regarding the alien monolith in Stanley Kubrick's trippy 1968 tour-de-force 2001: A Space Odyssey (even if the proportions of the block are wrong).







The Centurion Unfolds

Naturally enough, a reference to 80's-toys-become-2000's-movie-stars Transformers. What it folds out into, you'll see next episode.

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.

Stickleback Parts 3 & 4 References

Fewer than in the earlier ones, but here we go:

Part 3

Mister Punch
The comparison of the malign hunchback Punch with Stickleback is pretty obvious - however, you may not know that the figure of Mister Punch derives from the Harlequin - the unpredictable trickster figure of the Comedia dell'Arte.







Stickleback's Loft
Some of this was covered by lettering, but from left to right we have a giant stone head of Hastur from Leviathan, a poster advertising The Circus of Dr. Lao , A portrait of Capt. Jack Dancer from Red Seas, the After Eight Ormolu clock (between Stickleback's feet), Kali from Ray Harryhausen’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and, symbolic of Valentine Bey's situation, a Greek vase showing Herakles battling the Hydra.


Part 4

Festival Road
I messed up here; this should have been Festive Road, home of Mister Ben (from the 1970's UK children's TV series of the same name.)

Alberto Breccia Part 3: Perramus

Breccia Introduction
Breccia Part 1: Mort Cinder
Breccia Part 2: El Eternauta to Lovecraft
Breccia Conclusion

All images in this section from Perramus by Alberto Breccia & Juan Sasturain

Artistic achievement aside, the creation and publication of Perramus has to be hailed as an act of courage. It is story about life under dictatorship, begun in 1982 when the military government in Argentina was still in power. The consequences of attracting the attention of the regime would have been plain to Breccia and writer Jan Sasturain - Breccia’s former collaborator Hector Oesterheld had become one of the “disappeared” in 1976*. The first book of Perramus received an award from Amnesty International in 1989.
*See Oesterheld’s Wikipedia entry for details.

Style; though he’s pulled back from the more extreme, abstract drawing style used in the later Lovecraft adaptations (and much of the work in between), the characters in Perramus are relatively stylised, moving towards a much more cartoony look in the later stories. Several real persons appear as characters. The author Jorge Luis Borges, who is a regular cast member, gets a relatively restrained treatment, often based closely on photo reference. Others, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fidel Castro and Frank Sinatra are caricatured a little more freely.

Backgrounds are another matter; here Breccia plays freely with all the tools he’s learned to use in the preceding years. This panel (from page two of the first story) combines watercolour for the sky, plus a collage of various hand-made textures and even a photograph (bottom left). Two important things to note: first, Breccia’s still working with a kind of chiaroscuro - see how you have areas of dead white highlight, with the texture and detail concentrated in the shadow areas? Second, he’s keeping everything very graphic; that is to say, all those bits of texture and splodginess are confined within hard edges. It’s still all about the drawing.

A typical townscape from Perramus; Breccia not only plays off dark against light, but also different types of texture against each other to give the buildings shape.

The organic disorder of the jungle balance against the stark regular lines of the aircraft. I suspect the jungle is a monoprint (oil-based ink on glass?); Breccia’s not afraid to use accident, letting the paint take its own direction (within limits) and riding the edge of chaos to produce an astonishing end result.

Complex as it looks, this is still chiaroscuro; the guy in the chair stands out white against a jumble of blocks of texture. Overall, you can read the background as a street scene with figures, though individual details may be unclear. What’s important is that the foreground figure stands out. Though some of the panels in Perramus can be very busy, Breccia never lets self-expression overwhelm the storytelling.

Perramus is a unique and outstanding piece of work; possibly because of the technical know-how needed, it's never really been imitated. Breccia balances "realistic" drawing, cartooning, expressionism, painting, drawing, order and chaos in a way that had never been done before or has been since.*

*If that statement seems a bit odd coming from someone who is attempting to reproduce the look of Perramus, it's because I consider my own work a mere, pale shadow of Breccia's.

Breccia Introduction
Breccia Part 1: Mort Cinder
Breccia Part 2: El Eternauta to Lovecraft
Breccia Conclusion