EricZ

This blog has been pretty quiet for the past year because I’ve been so busy trying to complete a big project. I’m a very patient person, so my original plan was to just illustrate all four 22 page issues and then figure out the marketing and distribution later. As a result, I had a sort of tunnel vision focus on just illustration. I wanted to get everything done in a year, but I was still new to lettering and colouring (and drawing on a cintiq) so I’m now a year and half into it with a couple of months left to go. It also didn’t help that I work a nine to five and only really have the chance to work on this is on nights and weekends. Throughout that time, there was a lot of trial and error, start and stops, redoing portions of pages and just a lot of refining my process. All the while I was trying to take enough time to make myself happy with the work, but still work at a quick enough pace that I’d be able to get it done within a reasonable time.

Striking that balance between producing work that I’m happy with but at a quick pace was very difficult and I still haven’t quite found it. If I were ever hired to do freelance work, this would definitely be a big hurdle for me. Especially considering the bulk of freelance work being published today is what I coin as ‘deadline work’. Whenever I hear someone comment on how a certain artist on a particular comic is terrible, I try to give the artist the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge that it could just be ‘deadline work’. At the end of the day, the work needs to be delivered wether the artist is happy with it or not. I’m very envious of artists like Stuart Immonen and Chris Samnee, who seem to produce fantastic work at such a regular pace.

A big help during the last year I was working on this project were Jason Brubaker’s and Nate Simpson’s blogs. Their blog’s proved both inspiring and educational. I believe that Nate Simpson’s writings in the past couple of years have a universally relatable quality for artists. I found myself relating to a lot his struggles and I highly recommend reading it if you’re working on a long comic project by yourself. I also appreciated Jason Brubaker sharing his learnings throughout the production of his comic. Considering most comic artists tend to sit alone while producing their work, it’s much appreciated that someone took the time to write honestly about their process.

My goal this year is to be better with updating this blog and getting my work out there. I plan to outline my process for producing this comic sometime over the next several months as well as get it up as a webcomic and eventually start documenting the production of my follow up project. In the meantime, here’s a preview of some pages for this project.

It’s been over a year since I last updated this blog. Since the last update, I’ve abandoned the City project I was working on and put in over a years work on a new project. I should be done within the next couple of months, so I expect to update more frequently with all the work I’ve completed. The above image is from the project, which should hopefully be shown to the world some time in 2012. It’s completely drawn, coloured and lettered by me and written by Danny Djeljosevic.

Here are a couple of preview pages for an upcoming project of mine. This was fully drawn and colored by me. The coloring was all done while I was away from my Cintiq and only had a mouse available to me. The city was a nightmare to do and I think I may have overdone it. Because I wanted to maintain a consistent skyline and overall design, I modeled the entire city in Maya and used the renders as a guide for the drawing. One of these days I’ll post a process article on the making of the page.

I’ve been hard at work on a project and I unfortunately can’t show much artwork for it. A lot of comics and TV have been inspiring me lately, though, so I wanted to comment on them.

Ex Machina

The finale to Brian K. Vaughan’s and Tony Harris’ Ex Machina just came out and it blew me away. This was a bit of a surprise because the series as a whole wasn’t working for me. My main problem with Ex Machina was that a lot of the action seemed shoehorned in simply because it’s a requirement of the medium. Whereas all the action seemed natural in Y The Last Man, it didn’t seem so natural a fit for Ex Machina most of the time. This issue was an afterward for the entire series and therefore didn’t have much in the way of unnecessary action thrown in, which is probably one of the many reasons why this issue worked so well for me.

I’m noticing a recurring theme in Vaughan’s work where the family and friendships created during times of crisis aren’t appreciated enough in the moment. Throughout Ex Machina, Hundred kept referring to his superhero days, the times when he was consistently teamed up with Kremlin and Bradbury, as terrible times. It’s not until he’s completely lost the family he created during that time that he truly appreciates them. Vaughan touched on this theme in Y the Last Man and The Escapists as well.

I noticed that Mitchell Hundred’s arc in the finale is very similar to Tommy Carcetti’s arc in The Wire. They both lost a bit of their soul in the pursuit of more political power, because they’d arrogantly convinced themselves that they’ll be able to do a lot of good the higher up the political ladder that they get.

Tony Harris also really impressed me here. It seemed like he was either burning out or under heavy deadline pressure for the latter part of the series, but he did a fantastic job in this issue. I like that he’s experimenting with dirtying up and adding finer details to his normally super clean style.

Louie

I’ve also been watching Louis C.K.’s FX show Louie lately. I really appreciate how fearless this show is. Each episodes shows off various vignettes based off of Louis C.K.’s comedy routines. While the show is very funny, what makes it stand out is its darker looks at humanity. There are several moments in the show that resonate, like the homophobia poker scene, the doughnut shop date that looks at a woman’s contradictory stance on grown men fighting and the comedy club heckler scene that features an argument between two characters that has the viewer continually switching sides. The show also goes from very comedic moments to scenes between characters that feel more real than most dramas out there, like a discussion about a problem child in episode 9 between Louie and the father, or a scene early on in the series between Louie and a close friend which shows that while they disagree on everything, they remain close because of their shared experiences over the last several decades. Overall, this series is very funny and has a lot of interesting things to say, which is exactly what I look for in a show.

Morning Glories #1

I also recently read Morning Glories, a mystery series about six gifted students who arrive at a sinister prep school, from Image Comics and Shadowline. It’s hard to pull off first issues, but Nick Spencer really impressed me. While the mystery element is intriguing, what really caught my interest was the varied characters. Most writers in this type of story would have had the standard Breakfast Club high school archetypes (jock, nerd, burnout, ect.) populate the story, but Spencer avoids this. He did a good job of making each of the six main characters feel real and unique in the short time he has to introduce them. This is only the beginning, though, so there’s no way to tell if this series will really stand out for me, but the first issue was a good introduction.

Although I did this five years ago and nowadays I approach drawing a page in a completely different way, I’m still pretty proud of the car chase sequence I did in “The Killers”. Some of the anatomy and faces are a bit wonky, but the storytelling still holds up in my opinion.

This graphic novel is now available from Arcana comics. It’s written by Frank Tra, drawn by me and colored by Megan Spence. You can pre-order it at any comic shop. It’s ISBN number is 978-1-897548-70-7. Or you can purchase it at Amazon or buy a PDF at Wowio.

`The Killers`

My 110 page graphic novel with Frank Tra, “The Killers”, will be released tomorrow by Arcana Comics. I penciled and inked it, Frank Tra wrote it and it’s beautifully colored by Megan Spence and lettered by Josh Williamson. This is the solicitation description:

In the days following the end of World War II, Sgt. Kane and his men are charged with finding and stopping a rogue band of Nazi intent on enacting a killing spree across the German countryside. When the Americans catch up to their target, they find themselves gravely outmatched. Now, it falls upon the few surviving Americans to rediscover their fighting edge as the situation continues to spiral out of control!

You can pre-order it at any comic shop. It’s ISBN number is 978-1-897548-70-7. Or you can purchase it at Amazon or buy a PDF at Wowio.

Below is a massive preview of various pages throughout the story.

Skyscraper

Lately, I’ve been playing around with a simpler coloring style in order to speed up my work. I also think it looks a lot more appealing then my previous faux-painted style. Because of this, I’ve been able to speed up a little, but not enough to make artistically doing everything (pencils, inks, colors) a practical approach. One of my biggest goals right now is to produce a page at a professional pace while ensuring that I’m still artistically happy with it. That means I should be able to get a page pencilled and inked in around 8 hours. Coloring a page should take me another 4 hours or so. This has been really tough, but it’s a necessary skill in this industry. I’m going to have to continue experimenting in order to get to that level.
 

This will forever be a dilemma. In order to advance my career, I need to be doing the best work I possibly can. But I also need to be prepared to do it at the pace of a page a day. There’s no real solution to this dilemma other then to learn how to streamline my work. I could just pull 12 hours shifts, but that’s a quick way to burn out and then suddenly I’m doing horrible work at an even slower pace. I’ll try to post my updates on this front in the next couple of months.

`The Killers` poster

A graphic novel I drew way back in 2005 is finally getting published this summer by Arcana Comics! It takes place in World War 2 during one final mission an American unit has to go on shortly after victory has been declared in Europe. It’s written by Frank Tra, drawn by me and colored by Megan Spence.

After five years, I`m glad to see it finally on it`s way to publication. It`ll be previewed in Diamond`s May catalogue and it`s solicited for August.

I`ll post some more preview images in the coming months!

MvM page 1

MvM page 2

MvM page 3

MvM page 4

This is the first four pages for the seven page short story I did for Cloudscape’s Exploded View anthology. Although I did all the pages in colour and to regular American comic size, Exploded View was printed in black and white at Manga size. Unfortunately, I screwed up the black and white conversion and it printed way too dark for the book.

The story is kind of dumb and it all hinges on a cliched twist. Basically, I wanted to draw a silent story with a ruined city setting and just make it up as I go along. After I’d completed the short, I attempted to underscore the stupidity of the story by adding the subtitle “Round 238” to the title. My idea was that if I presented it that way, it would almost set the story up as “yet another story about a robot fighting a machine, please lower your expections.” I’m not quite sure if that worked, though, because everyone I’ve told this to didn’t get that when first reading it. Oh well. I’m hoping it’s at least nice to look at.

The Adventures of Hitlerbot

This is a one page short that me and my twin brother, Chris, did for “Exploded View”, the latest Cloudscape anthology. Basically this story came out of a drunken conversation at a bar that me, Chris and my buddy Colin had one night while trying to come up with ideas for a Sci-Fi short. If memory serves me correctly, Colin commented that he discovered that a girl he knew painted like Hitler. The conversation continued and Chris brought up the idea that it would be funny if, unlike the usual exploitation convention, (*SPOILERS*) Hitler was brought back to life and all he wanted to do was paint.

From there, we used the 1960′s Marvel method to create the short, which means that I drew the page based off of our discussion and without a script and then Chris attached dialogue to it.

The reason that way of producing a comic was developed back in the 60′s was to save Stan Lee time because he was writing almost ten books a month. This, however, meant that all of the story pacing and a lot of the story direction was in the hands of the artist. And the reason why that worked so well was because back then comic artists were more widely known as cartoonists, and carried all the skills associated with that title. I think a cartoonist by the more traditional definition compared to comic artists today is someone who controls the pacing and story direction of the comic they’re drawing. Pretty much all of the comic artist today, though, just take a completed script and follow the directions that are layed out in it, which puts all of the pacing and story direction in hands of the scripter.

It’s interesting to note that in movie screenwriting, it’s a faux pas for the writer to dictate camera moves, overly detailed character descriptions and emotions, music choices and any other things that should be handled by specific production experts / artists during the development. The general idea is to let those departments do their jobs and be artists. When it comes to comic scripting, though, there is no universal template. Each writer has their own way of scripting and therefor there’s no real faux pas. Alan Moore is famous for writing scripts for 22 page comics that are phone book sized due to his highly discriptive nature. That’s an extreme example, though. Most writer’s keep their scripts fairly reasonable despite the lack of restrictions. My buddy Tim Simmons’ site, the Comic Book Script Archives, is interesting to look at to get an understanding of all the various styles of comic book scripting.

I have no problem with getting full scripts from writers. In fact, I prefer it. Every now and then, though, it’s fun to try the Marvel Method because it feels like your jumping without a parachute and it truley tests your storytelling skills.

What do most artists prefer? Full scripts or complete storytelling freedom?