24 Hour Comics: Clementine and Oh What a Dream

 Hello! This is the first part of my 24 hour comic challenge. I wanted to adapt a Johnny Cash song into comic form, and I was inspired to try my hand with this one, Clementine. It's a lovely song, if not a little depressing. Here's a link to the late great Johnny Cash's song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYoVLVKi7fM I hope I did it justice, and I hope I adapted it reasonably interestingly. Next is Oh What a Dream.

Here's this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fRBXPF6byY This one I like a bit more than the first section. The whole 24 hour comic event was really interesting for me; I penciled this faster than probably I've ever penciled anything. I spent like 7-8 hours to thumbnail and pencil the entire 24 pages, but where I sorta fell apart was in the inking. I was working at a smaller size and thought "oh, well the pocketbrush will do for this!" In the end, I don't think synthetic brushes are for me, but it made things more complicated, and Clementine suffers because of it. For Oh What a Dream, I inked with my friend Brian Prince's Kuretake pens, and they were a ton of fun to use. I'm going to have to get some, they offer a flexibility I would need at least 6 microns to cover.

Overall I don't think this is a bad set of comics, considering this is my first 24 page comic that I actually finished it's probably okay. I feel like I have some missteps but I feel like I have more insight into where I need to streamline my process (inking) and where I'm making decent headway (pencils). But yes, I love these songs, and I hope that they do the work of Johnny Cash justice!

Pixie Punk Finished

First off, I need to post here more often. I work non-stop on pages, but I never really know what's okay to drop into a post. I'm going to just start posting things, even if its just a page, so that this site doesn't lay dormant. And in the spirit of that:

Here is a comic I did for the Change themed issue of SEQAPunch. I'm not sure if it's been selected as of this post but I completed it and I'm pretty happy with it. This is only the first 5 pages, I'll post the rest later, but I hope its clear enough from the pages here. This comic was being made around the same time as a lot of shake ups in my life, like moving, money troubles, health worries (I'm less one tooth now) and just wondering if I'd get to stay in Georgia to finish up my masters. I ended up moving in with Max Currie and things appear to evening out for me.

This comic was about breaking down walls, I'm a pretty happy dude but I'm really paranoid, and this translates into my comics in horrible uncertainty. I never know if a brush stroke is perfect enough or if I'm really using the best layout. But this comic was about being PUNK, it was about a girl who go sick of having to be perfect and chose instead to be rough and pissed off and make music to let the world know she wasn't happy about it. This comic is pseudo personal in that I was telling my inner editor to bite me and I was going to do what I wanted and not be a stick in the mud when it came to the "rules of comics."

I think the color tone REALLY adds a lot to the comic, I was using it like you would a gray tone, to push items forward or pull items back, like in page five, I chose to illuminate the band and stage in white and let the audience fade into that black by being coated in the bands hot gnarly purple. I'm also really happy with my brush inking here, I really opened up and just let it all out, and I think I need to do that more or else my lines get stiff. Also, penciling wise, I was WAAAY less precious with these. For example:

I'm trying to pencil more loosely than before, where I would try to make every line I put down a pencil version of the line I was going to ink, but that's a waste of time to me if I'm going to ink it. I'll try to be more precious with them when I'm working with an inker, but for the moment I think this will work in just allowing me to pencil faster to get these comics out quicker.