Just a Tad

Big Thumbs

I want to make it clear that I have normal-sized thumbs.  These "thumbnail" sketches take up about 4 x 6 inches or whatever would scale up to a comic page layout.  I made them tiffs so I could add readable dialogue along the side and bottom since I was showing two issues of Emmaryn around.  Probably a stupid thing to do.

Why? Because if you're going to show stuff around it should be your best work.  It can be rough sketches but they should be cool enough to elicit a "wow."  These are fine for planning and sharing my process, but if I was going to impress potential publishers I should've just written a full script.  I know better now and if I had slowed down enough to think things through objectively I knew better then.

LEARN FROM MY SCARS!!!!  Now let's move on:

 Letting my animation background influence my page layouts may give them a different feel than most comic artists.  But the first two panels of this page underline that there's a difference between storyboarding and graphic storytelling.  These are storyboard sketches.  They clearly map the action of what's going on.  

But they're just diagrams of action.  There have got to be better ways of drawing a troll's lunge and Mage eluding his grasp.  Or just take the same action and move the camera around to give it a stronger dynamics.

In fact, the lunge, dodge and club swing could've all been done in a single panel!  It would have a bigger wow factor and, more importantly, make the storypoint stronger, that Mage is keeping his cool while seemingly overmatched. 
 

This page has the potential for lots of depth.  It also features a bit of that animated story technique, especially in the bottom half.  I must have had second thoughts about that because I penned in "replace" under the bottom left panel.  

Maybe I wanted to show the other troll being dissolved by the bees.  The final  image is that of Mage.  Even though I gave him a sense of humor, I wanted him to feel dangerous.  Not just good at his job, but walking the edge of morality.   That's what the new gremlin character, Pistol, is worrying about.

The idea was to have a small balloon in the last panel.  Pistol is revealed as you turn the page which is fine but the balloon takes away from the dark mood.

The solution?  This page has too much on it.  It should be two pages so that the action can breathe.  It would also allow for a more impressive reveal of Mage's sword.

      

Time and knowledge gives me a fresh perspective on these pages.  I hope i can actually think this way as I'm laying out the pages next time.  One page 6, the characters in panel one are too close to those in the panel directly under it.  If the kids in panel three were smaller, more jeep would be seen which would have the added benefit of clarifying their location.  Pistol is too close in size and position in panels one and two.  

The danger in using thumbnails this way is that you draw the characters big to showcase them.  But the bears in the bottom panel would be too large.  They aren't that important to the moment.  If I shrank them all, it'd leave room for more forest and would make the page more attractive.

The last page introduces more faerie tech.  It plays out the whole punny "web" system that they use.  But the more important thing is that it's pulling us back to Emmaryn's story.  Mage Raven is a key player in the series.  He, Emmaryn and Carbunkle are the stars so giving him seven or eight pages of introduction is worth it.

I really like the last bit.  Pistol has been established as the reasonable one and even she sees that Emmaryn is a potential danger that may need eliminating.  Emmaryn is now in the target zone which is a perfect place for a protagonist to be.  -- Tad

Planning Issue 2

The first pages here were penciled, scanned then printed out so I could hand print the dialogue.  After that you see my script.  There were tinier page thumbnails, doodles of page layouts but I don't have them.  These are large enough that I could actually draw my actors then wrote the script alongside.

 

Em was supposed to zip out of the H but I couldn't stage it and make it readable at the same time.  I love Eisner's logos of The Spirit comics.

The campers have a more realistic sense of design than the fantasy characters.  They could fit easily into Amber's world but Emmaryn's cartoonier face wouldn't really fit next to these guys.  Although their actions are fairly cartoony, at least the running from Casper the Friendly Ghost action.  I chose to skp details and get them off stage quickly.

Note that the Bigfoot characters never change expression.  That's intentional and gives a double meaning to Mage's statement in the last panel of Page 2

 

Page 3 finally reveals the "reality" of this world.  Bigfoot isn't real, it's just Mountain Trolls trying to scare treats out of campers.  The trolls are caught red handed and are thankful that for once Mage is going to let them off easy.   Once again, Mage's personality is set by the way others talk about him.  Everything is going fine...until Mage won't let them take the s'mores.  

 
 "We want the s'mores, Mage."  "We ain't leavin' without the s'mores." And Mage now has the excuse to kick some butt.  Mage looks awful ugly and old here.  He, like Emmaryn, went through many incarnations although not as drastic as my little Spryte.  More next time with some readable script.

--Tad

Maybe You Went Too Far

I read all sorts of comics growing up although when Marvel started up, I recognized them as something different, something exciting.  Soon my comic buying was focused on the Marvel line, both new and back issues which were still to be had for a nickel, thirty-five cents if you actually ordered them from Marvel.

I still enjoyed the Gil Kane Green Lanterns and The Flash but my buying of DC product was sporadic at best. However, for some reason I still bought THE METAL MEN.

 

I don't know if you could find a sillier comic on the stands at the time.  Maybe because they had a fractured version of Marvel's storytelling:  They had individual personalities, very caricatured and simple but not much simpler than the early FF.  They bickered, especially Mercury.   They were in trouble with the authorities half the time and Tina had the hots for Doc Magnus. All classic Marvel soap opera stuff although they never  played it as seriously.  They just repeated the same scenes over and over in every issue.  But most importantly the stories were filled with big, crazy ideas... along with beautiful Ross Andru and Mike Esposito.  But where the Fantastic Four featured the cosmic, the Metal Men were laced with the absurd.  For example:

Not necessarily in the same league as Galactus or even the Impossible Man but you have to admit that a walking pasta roller makes for a unique cover.  On the other hand, whenever the Doc created a new line of robots, which he seemed to do more often than might be considered wise since they invariably turned evil, I ate it up.

So flash forward several decades when I'm in the offices of WB animation and the suggestion that I develop a DC property but one not in the top tier.  The exec had little figures of the Metal Men on an end table and he said they were fair game.  However, they didn't want a straight superhero show.  They  had Bruce Timm for that.  Mine would be for a much younger crowd.  Oh.

So I took a stab at it.  Considering how young in tone the classic Metal Men were, you'd think a straight adaptation would be the way to go.  But the networks were in one of their cycles when they insist the only characters that kids identify with are kids, teens at the oldest.   This is the type of thinking that gave comics the "I fight crime, risking my life every night.  It would be cool if I had a nine year old kid to help me out" conceit.  When playing superheroes as a kid, did you know anyone who wanted to be Robin?

I thought about mixing up early Spider-Man with the Metal Men.  What if the only way to develop their artificial intelligence was to place them in human society, high school to be exact.  So I doodled up this:

 

Cool kid, Jock, Nerd, "Arrogant Goth," "Tina," and Gentle Giant - slow witted were as far as I got in character development because DC they nixed it.  Evidently they had plans for the Metal Men.  Since then the title has been redeveloped two or three times, including the time spanning tale by Duncan Rouleau.

The METALTEENS ( I didn't want to use the actual name since it was such a divergence) may have sucked.  But they might have turned into something as cool as The Spectacular Spider-Man.  Guess I'll never know.

--Tad

 
 

Final Pages

...Of issue #1 anyway.   To my ear, these pages feature some funny stuff but it's personality humor, the personality of a bunch of birds.  Birds you've never met before.  I used some smaller fonts to suggest some sotto voce acting but once again, you are the more qualified judge of whether it worked or not.

   
 
The weakness of my first issue is probably that I never actually tell the reader enough.  The fun of the story is that it's like a puzzle; there are hints of Em's true nature and of an antagonist she'll be facing soon but I never tell you anything.  So on this first page Em is learning that birds talk and that she can converse with them.  Her frustration is that everyone seems to know more about her than she does.  If I produced this as a graphic novel instead of issues, it would be fine.  

"The webs goes wonky."  Geez, how many times did I read this and yet it slipped by.  More hints: there's lots of power out there, namely Emmaryn.   I'm staying in close on these guys to add to the mystery and also to set up a later gag: they're only about eight inches high.   The weird effects on the goggles is probably something that needed to be animated.  Imagine those symbols flashing and moving around on those goggles.   

One of the traits of my world of Faerie is that they had their equivalent of an industrial revolution.  Sorry, Potter, but using a magic wand would be like using an ox cart on a freeway.   To them, a wand is ancient tech.   It will be revealed that they're not watching a computer screen, they're checking the webs - which are literally glowing spider webs.   A little punny but fun.

Hmmn, rereading this I see that I actually crammed a lot into this page.  We learn Emmaryn is what Disney might call a fairy.   We learn Faerie covers a LOT of creatures.  We learn that "Mage" is Mage Raven and his job is to "deal with" those who put the secrets of Faerie in jeopardy.  And he's hunting Emmaryn, or soon will be.

The last page is another tease.  Different creatures, different locale, but we only see Mage from the back.  It's also an example of a page meant for color.  Needs to be rethought for black and white.   

So that would have been the first issue. I have the second issue in thumbnails with script.  If this blog is an examination of the creative process, then I guess I should post it.  Talk about airing your dirty laundry...

Until next time.  -- Tad

 
  
 
 
 

Keeping Things Loose

I started this blog because I enjoyed documenting the creative process during the development and production of the Hellboy Animated movies.  I thought I could do the same with whatever project I was currently working on.  However, I'm currently storyboarding and writing for shows belonging to other people, projects that I'm not at liberty to discuss. That's why you've seen so much stuff pulled from old stuff.  But as long as people are finding it interesting I'll keep dishing out this odd potpourri.

Remember when you were little and learning to "color between the lines" was a huge accomplishment?  Adults use that phrase to describe the stifling of creative instincts.  In reality, it's a kid working on his hand/eye coordination.  There's nothing wrong with it, in fact, it's a necessary step in development.  But maybe it's that early goal that sets kids thinking that they have to draw with clean, scratch-free lines.  More likely it's just that kids grow up wanting their doodles to look like the thing they're copying.  

But it's important to get over that.  Loosen up!  Don't worry about the clean lines as much as the general feel.  After that you can tighten up, especially if you're working digitally.  Don't spend time erasing or tracing.  It usually robs your drawings of life and creates distortions of form and your figures lose structure.  Jack Kirby told artists to throw away their erasers.  Today I want to share some work by Willard Mullin, sports cartoonist that said much the same thing.

Most of you don't check out the comments under the posts so you missed it when my high school pal, Leo Brodie, pointed to the ComicCrazy blog that has scanned the lessons from the Famous Artist Cartoon Course.  Mullin was one of the instructors.

There's not much I have to say about this stuff.  Just open your brain and pour this stuff in.  It's not just the looseness, of course.  It's about capturing the essence of a pose and exaggerating it.  Precisely what a 2D animator does.

 

This sort of thinking is where you start whether you're drawing Ben 10, Darkwing Duck, Batman or Phineas and Ferb.  Of course, you tone down the degree of caricature depending on the style of the character.  But why not take a moment and try pushing your poses as much as Mullin does here.  If you're drawing superheroes I bet you'll come up with something akin to Jack Kirby's work.  I think it was Jules Feiffer who said that when Captain America threw a punch it seemed like his feet were never closer than five feet apart.  Check out this drawing inked by Chad Frye.  See if you can push that action even more.

Or try it on your own characters.  Come on, what's it gonna hurt?  Spend some time really loosening up.   -- Tad

 

 
 

Decompressing Flight

When I began reading superhero comics there were at least two stories in every issue, sometimes three.  Writers and artists had to cram their pulp printed tales of Good and Evil into as little as eight pages of four color pulchritude.  Within those few panels, Superman could face of with a mad scientist, devolve into an ape or be mutated into a giant headed super brain, often both, succeed in saving the day no matter what his form and have time left over to foil Lois's attempts at discovering his secret identity.  In today's comics that same story would take seven or eight issues and possibly a crossover event.

It's called "decompression" and is bemoaned in some quarters but I enjoy it.  Gold and Silver Age comics were more like outlines of plot points.  Their glory was packing stories with huge ideas, surprising twists and a conviction that Good will triumph. But a modern comic can convey emotions, motivations, atmosphere and build suspense.  It takes time to do that.    

Flying is taken forgranted in comics.  The Legion of Superheroes got to the point where it wasn't even considered a power, just a means a transportation.  Every character was just given a flight ring and would be zooming into the sky with great confidence by the next panel.  When creating the following pages of EMMARYN I wanted to make the idea of flying special, a little terrifying but ultimately joyous.

  
 

On the previous page Emmaryn was floating out of control due to her newly sprouted faerie wings.  She was trying to get to her mother who was leaving for work.  In the last two panels the anti-gravity effects stopped and she put her hand on the door knob to open the door.  I planned Page 16 to be revealed by the turning of the page.  Again, you'd have to tell me if this was effective.  I counted on your brain making the connection between her hand on the door knob inside with the image of her hanging onto it for dear life as the wings kicked in again.  The page has no dialogue for two reasons:  There's nothing that needs to be said and I wanted this page to contrast with everything that came before.  The lettering of sound effects or a scream would just clutter up the images.  This way it's open and airy.  

I broke down the moment further.  Her feet against the sky is Em's point of view.  Graphically it's the same as if I drew her stepping over an abyss.   The close up of her hands show her fingers slipping.  Her tiny figure against the clouds indicates how fast she "fell."  Finally, the car backs out of the garage showing that her mother missed seeing her by seconds.  This page shows that I'm trying to translate film effects to comics.  Cutting the sound out during a scene highlights the tension of a moment.  Adding panels in the portrayal of a moment slows down the reader like slow motion in a movie.

A note on color: I was planning there to be some.  The clouds would have had their thick black outlines replaced with a light blue which would have increased the sense of depth and not fought the foreground stuff for attention.   The same kind of color treatment on Page 17 would have reduced the clutter.

First off, forgive the spacing on the lettering.  Great letterers do a lot more than choose a font.  I am decidedly not a great letterer.  Here you see me animating on the page again.  The camera pushes closer and closer to Em to increase the tension and provide the contrast of an extreme close up with the extreme wide shot in the bottom panel.  The sound of the jet engine would have had graduated color, from desaturated to intense, to suggest a sound getting louder and louder.  

Page 18 also suffers from lack of color.  Imagine the page featuring the pale blue of the early morning sky with the clouds catching the warm colors of the rising sun.   Then slashed across it would be a dark room in an entirely different palette.   Dialogue-wise, note I'm mentioning characters we haven't seen yet.   "Cog" is the other guy in the room and once again there is a mention of "Mage" as someone that others worry about.

One  more page for today.  Artwise this car is better but looks traced, it probably was.  The props of a comic story should match the style of your characters and this is a marginally realistic car being driven by cartoon characters.  There's an unfortunate juxtaposition of line between the mom's hair and her jaw line.  That would've been an easy Photoshop fix.  Don't know why I didn't catch it. 

The dialogue is fairly good although "Time to share the fun" is on the lame side.  I wanted to portray Amber as the "bitchy spoiled girl" archetype.  I think her mom's comment takes the curse off it.  Amber was to later to be helped by then become  a friend to Emmaryn, a relationship arc I was proud of until I realized it was basically Cordelia from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER.  I like the depth of the last panel  and the sense of hovering to Emmaryn.  Sometimes flying is more impressive when close to the ground.

That is it for today.  The format controls of Typepad are completely wonky for some reason.  I'm hoping the final page looks normal.  Remember, let me know what you think about what's working or not. --Tad

When Last We Left Her...

  

When last we left Emmaryn, a group of invisible poltergeists (which I eventually decided to call "weedlings") had taken notice of her.  Not only that, they seemed to be confused as to her nature.  I was proud of the line, "What are you doing here with the humans?"  Still am.  It's designed to confuse Em and to raise questions with the reader who up until that moment was probably thinking Emmaryn was a human girl... or they might if the cover image didn't show her with faerie wings.  Covers are designed to sell comics and sometimes that comes at the expense of a spoiler or two.  

Actually, comic cover spoilers are fairly rare since they have to be done so far ahead of time for placement in Previews that often the cover artist has never seen the script he's illustrating.  Sometimes it hasn't been written by then.

But back to Emmaryn: Yes, I feel I overdid the "unique look family resemblance" when it came to the lips of these characters.  Seemed okay at the time, Brad Pitt thought so too.  The dialogue of Amber's mom is meant to cover how the events could be brushed off by the adults.  This happens in real life; people see all matter of weird things yet go on living their mundane lives.  I mean, I know a woman who was in the center of a poltergeist event, prayed for her life then saw a group of 18 inch high "lizard men" hop over the back fence and continues to go about her daily life with no more concern than the rest of us.  Really?  But then it's supposed to be aerodynamically impossible for bees to fly yet they'll happily buzz right to your ass and sting you for suggesting it.  Of course, the obvious answer is that the laws of aerodynamics are wrong which is not something you want to contemplate while standing in the boarding line of a transcontinental flight.

Continuing: Emmaryn's, "Why are you apologizing?" hints that she doesn't feel support from her mom, that her mom might think she's weird too.  Something that would lead to a positive emotional moment later in the saga when she learns that he mom is definitely on her side.   The silent panel that comes next is something that distinguishes comics from prose, the ability to describe a mood, a relationship, perhaps even the thoughts of the characters with a picture.

The next panel is a flashback panel, a technique Mike Mignola uses often.  It's most effective when used with color because by shifting the color palette, it's even clearer to the reader that it's something plucked from another page.  Although the dialogue line makes the same point, I don't think I'd use it as much if I was doing the comic in black and white.

Em returns to an empty room and the angle is chosen to portray her as small and lonely.  The fact that the panel highlights the empty room at all is not usual.  It subliminally suggests that this bedroom is special in some way which leads us to the flashback pages.  The flashlight sparks memories of a time where weird creatures visited her when she was much  younger.

The next two pages were featured earlier in the blog.  Check the archives.  I thought the coloring worked well, better than most of the pages.

 

Several people have written me to say that my self critiques are too harsh but I like to think that it's because my critical taste is better.  I hope that will lead to better art.  I'm more confident with my writing since it's largely how I make my living... although currently I'm working as a storyboard artist so who's to say?  

Anyway, the weedlings' dialogue is more exposition but not done in an obvious way.  Or at least I hope it is.  Feel free to comment below if it worked for you or left you totally confused.  It's chock filled with hints about Emmaryn's nature, her status in their world, the fact that their world has rules about being in the human world and even some foreshadowing of an important character, Mage Raven.  Visually I was still playing with ways to make the guys read as being invisible, although there wasn't supposed to be a shadow on the word balloon.  The pink and violet color scheme should read as Amber's room.

The shift to the blue/grey world of Emmaryn is an indicator of a location change.  In the bottom three panels you can see how I use font size as an indication of volume.

Finally,  a key line of every Emmaryn pitch I made was, "When most girls are worried about acne, Emmaryn broke out in wings."  This page is the story of that moment.  Also at this point the color runs out.  That's not an artistic decision, I just felt I had enough color pages for pitching the comic.  Plenty of font fun on this page too.  This page is filled with gags that are trying to imitate the kind of gags that are usually done on film like the three panels in the top tier and the three on the  bottom but I think they work here too.  Emmaryn is placed in panel five so that she can look down at the close up of her feet in panel 6.  I don't think comic panels should be thought of as storyboard sketches that describe bits of action.  The placement of panels on the page can add to the storytelling.  

So I think it's obvious I put some real thought into the pages but was I on the right track?  I'd appreciate some input from you guys.  That's why the comments are enabled!

Later -- Tad