CHECK OUT THE COMIC

This past weekend, I participated in 24 Hour Comics Day at the fabulous Kingston comic store 4 Colour 8 Bit. I was down there anyhow, for my very own art show at this very same store – it was great fun, and thanks a ton to Kevin for putting it together, and Nick for allowing me to spend entirely too much time in his store despite the fact I don’t think I bought anything but Pac Man power pellet candy.

I forgot my camera for the opening, but look, art!

24 Hour Comic Day BEGINS

I suppose it was something of a cheat, since my comic was a collaboration with m’dear friend Aggy. The story came from both of us – we couldn’t decide what on earth to do a comic about, so we just decided to do EVERYTHING, and base it on our stupid conversations. She did the lettering, erasing pencils, and filling in large black areas, not to mention writing the old-man rants, which was a task in itself. (And the Cleavager is her fault. I will take no credit for that one.) So while the art is basically all mine, I couldn’t have done it without her, not to mention having somebody to yell at me to stay awake. When she was awake.

A sleepy Aggy sometime in the last few hours

Other adventures included drawing at Denny’s in the middle of the night, being interviewed for the Queen’s University TV channel… all in all, a crazy weekend! God, I love Kingston.

I tried something a little different from the last couple of Narrative projects, in a couple of ways. First, the focus on the panel structure and visual storytelling, rather than spending forever and a half on the dialogue. Second, in the last two cases, I was pretty happy with the inks but by the time they were finished, they felt immensely overworked. So in this case, I tried to just let the inks speak for themselves, with minimum meddling in Photoshop. It was an experiment; I guess it kind of worked. If I do this again, I’ll definitely put more work into the ink washes, but aside from that, I guess I’m moderately happy with the result.

How I got from that to an elevator that thinks it’s a film noir detective is anyone’s guess.

A narrative assignment; a 3-page comic with a very strict and rigid structure (no weird panel sizes here) based on a conversation between 2 people, and the idea of “do as I say, not as I do”. It had to be in colour; I’d much rather have done it in grey inks like I did the F Train images, but eh. Really ran out of time on this one; I think it worked out okay but cleaner inking and more careful colours/shades could have really pushed it to the next level. Not to mention reducing the type size by 2 or 3 points.

For the record, I had a security blanket book like that in highschool (a comic, actually – Bryan O’Malley’s Lost at Sea) but he’s definitely still working and my encounter with him at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival was quite positive – he signed my copy and drew a little cat in it. I, of course, was a bit of a terrified mess. “I… uh… you… book?” Never meet your heroes.