EricZ

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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?

Vancouver, BC

The Olympics are in town and it seems like there’s a continual stream of references to the city I call home in all areas of the pop culture landscape at the moment. With all this attention, I almost feel more prideful of this beautiful city then I am of the Country. And because I’m such a big fan of the comic medium, I’m going to give a shout out to what little I know of the Vancouver comic scene.

It seems like this city’s comic scene has been growing quite a bit over the last couple of years. I don’t know much about the Webcomic scene in Vancouver, but my friend Connor Vernon heads up Natural1. I’m also not too knowledgeable about the indy scene, but I understand that indy publisher Arcana is based around Vancouver and I know that the majority of independent comic artists in the city have participated in Cloudscape’s yearly anthology. Cloudscape is a collective of Vancouver based artists that produces an annual publication. Its founder and CEO is Jeff Ellis, who’s a great guy that I happened to randomly meet at a work Christmas party over a year ago. Also, although I’ve yet to attend one, I’ve heard a bit about the Vancouver Comic Jam, a monthly pub gathering of local comic fans and artists.

Moving up the ladder to a more mainstream independent (isn’t that an oxymoron?) comic venue is Image Comics, which has had four new Vancouver artists contribute to their line of books over the past year. Those artists have been Brandon Graham (King City), Marian Churchland (Beast and Hip Flask), James Stokoe (Orc Stain) and Camilla d’Errico. (Sky Pirates of Neo Terra) It’s interesting to note that all of these artists serve as a jack of all trades in this medium because they tend to write, pencil, ink and colour/tone their comics all by themselves. (Camilla d’Errico only drew Sky Pirates, but she co-wrote her Arcana book Burn)

Other then Todd McFarlane, who lived in Vancouver during his 80’s Marvel years, Vancouver’s biggest comic star is Steve Skroce, who has a hand in pretty much everything the Wachowski brothers do these days. In between working on art for the movies The Matrix, Speed Racer, V For Vendetta and Ninja Assassin, he does the art for his creator owned comic Doc Frankenstein for the Wachowski founded comic company Burlyman Entertainment. In his career, he’s worked on The Amazing Spider-Man, X-Man, Cable, Youngblood, Gambit and Wolverine.

Vancouver is also well known for the couple that make up Pia Guerra (Y The Last Man, Doctor Who) and Ian Boothby (Simpsons Comics). Steve Rolston (Queen & Country, Pounded, The Escapists) teaches an “Introduction To Comic Book Production” course at VanArts and Kaare Andrews (Spider-Man: Reign, Astonishing X-Men) teaches at the 3D training school ThinkTank and is starting to launch his film directing career. I once also met the very approachable Steve Sadowski (Avengers / Invaders, JSA) around town.

Did I miss anyone significant? I’m sure I did. One thing we’re definitely missing in this city is a big comic convention. I’ve been hearing some rumblings about a decent sized convention starting up, but it’ll likely be a while before we get something on the scale of Seattle’s Emerald City Comicon, which has a 2010 guest list that seems to rival San Diego’s.

If I’ve missed anything, please leave a comment below!

Exploded View

I’ve done two short stories for the upcoming fourth Cloudscape anthology. The book, titled “Exploded View”, (pictured left with an absolutely beautiful cover by Camilla d’Errico) is going to be released on March 6. Despite the fact that I drew the upcoming Arcana graphic novel, “The Killers”, several years ago, “Exploded View” will be my first published work.

The Cloudscape guys are a very talented collective of Vancouver artists and I’m proud to be a part of this growing local comic scene. It seems like the professional comic talent coming out of Vancouver has been growing quite a bit lately and this anthology contains a bunch of artists who are definitley going to become some big names in the coming years.

The book’s launch party will be held at the Ayden Gallery in the International Village in downtown Vancouver on March 6th at 7pm. I’ll be in attendance, so if you’re free that night please show up!

I’ll be showing some preview images from my short stories in the coming days.

Here’s a panel from my 7 page short story for the upcoming Cloudscape anthology.

Apocalyptic Vancouver

Here’s a full page done with the Cintiq. Certain elements of the composition didn’t come out exactly as I’d hoped (like the movement of the robot at the end), but I’m fairly proud of the colouring, which is something that’s still new to me.

I loved working on this page with the Cintiq because I was able to easily alter the page after most of the pencil work was done. For instance, the last panel originally had a straight horizon line parallell to the panel borders, but I found it was more effective in conveying the movement of the robot by rotating it quite a bit to the left. The diagonal aspect of the horizon allows the eye to read the character as moving faster because the eye is already traveling in a similar path as it moves from panel 6 to 7. I was also able to flip a panel I originally penciled out in full and add a new panel after most of the page work was already done. Overall, creating the page digitally is much more beneficial because it allows me to more effectively improve upon work already half completed.

Apocalyptic Vancouver

Initially my biggest worry with switching over from drawing on paper to drawing digitally on a Cintiq was how I would be able to do backgrounds without the use of a ruler. Using a ruler directly on the cintiq would be too risky considering how easy it is to scratch the screen and the line tool in photoshop is not an option for me. After a little research, I found that the best option was using Manga Studio because of it’s ruler tool. The tool is amazing and I’m surprised that photoshop hasn’t stolen it yet. It took me a while to get used to it, but I ended up making the ruler grab tool one of my side buttons on the Cintiq, directly under the ink brush button, which made things a lot easier. For drawing out backgrounds, I sketch out how I want it to look, create a perspective plane using the perspecting tool and align it up with my sketch as best as possible, reduce it’s opacity so that it’s just a reference for me, then I create a ruler and put one end point on a vanishing point and then continually move the other end around to where ever I need to use it in the final inking process.

This image is my first shot at drawing a regular comic panel and it looks no different from my regular ‘drawn on paper’ look. All in all, I’m very happy with the Cintiq. I just need to develop a solid workflow and I’ll likely get faster at drawing a full page.

Cintiq 21UX

     I recently plunked down a lot of money on the purchase of a Cintiq 21UX. So basically I’m taking the plunge into the world of completely digital art. We’re heading towards a paper-less world anyway, so what’s the saying? “Evolve or die”? My goal here is to save as much time on drawing as possible without losing any quality. My hope is that it’ll save me several hours a page.

To do pencils and inks on a full comic page on paper usually takes me about 12-13 hours all said. I’m hoping to cut that down to 8-10 hours a page with the Cintiq. My theory is that I can be a lot looser with the ‘digital pencils’ and I can go straight to ‘digital inking’. The undo button is your best friend in this digital world. I’m kind of sad that there’ll no longer be any physical version of the original art, though. Also, comic artists tend to derive a lot of extra income from the selling of their original art and this is probably going to become rarer as the years go by. I understand that artists like Mike Norton and Skottie Young use the Cintiq to do the ‘pencil’ work, print that out in blue on 11×17 paper and ink over it. This way, the physical original art exists and they get to save time on the penciling. I’m thinking that my method is going to be strictly digital from start to finish, though.

      I’m currenly working on my first fully digital comic page using this new toy of mine, so I’m going to post the results soon.