The Curse of the Eel chapter 2 inks and cover

It has been a long LONG week. After having finished up my final quarter at SCAD, I had but a few weeks to prepare new works for Heroes Con. Sure I've drawn and printed a bunch of comics since last Heroes, but nothing super recent. Wings of Irene is from December 2013 and the Looming Deadline wasn't super substantial, so I really wanted to put out a nice fat book to celebrate my freedom from school. So I completed chapter 2 of my thesis comic, which took me about 5 days after classes were over to finish penciling (which is slow for me) and last week at this time, I was sitting down to ink it. I finished inking the 20th and final page early this morning. And I whipped up probably the best cover I've ever made in about an hour or two. I am running on pure comics enthusiasm. I missed having this kind of imposing deadline and the drive to put out a book for no other reason than I have something I want to tell.

This story, if you've read this far into this pretty nonsensical post, is the continuation of the story from the first chapter, about a goth girl named Connie who has summoned her own Eldritch style Eel god. But now what? I guess still go to school, because you have to. This chapter was a lot of fun and a great test for how I draw environments. The first chapter was mainly forest and a trashy old hillbilly house, not much to really do with perspective or drawing buildings and such. This chapter was fun in that it posed some interesting challenges like "now that I've established this way of inking, how do I ink a bus? Or a school? Or lockers, cuz there are a TON of lockers in this comic. Granted, I don't hit every note perfectly, but honestly that's not important anymore. Comics are about fun and expression again, so when you look at these, I hope you can feel the mood or the feeling I tried to convey and weren't just looking for tangents.

I think I did hit the right notes in my character acting in this chapter. I also found the opportunity to use body language and not just faces to really help sell my ideas and I think they came out great! I sure hope I can get this book by Heroes Con so I can share it with anyone who reads this post! The book will be 40 pages of story with the color cover above. i think it's gonna be a nice little book to own! This is also the comic where I made the switch over to Stillman and Birn Beta watercolor paper. Its surface is so much more fun to draw on and more resilient than the bristol boards I've used in the past. Even the cover was inked on Alpha, which is the thinner vellum paper and it looks gorgeous. Even on 400 series bristol, the page would have warped into annoyingly hard to scan shapes, not to mention it fights me with every stroke. It's important to find the tools that make you as creative as possible.