Project Waldo

I'm not really sure how much traction I'll get on the strength of five colored pages, but it seems like a good time to start building relationships with European publishers. I'll be contacting the following companies tomorrow: Delcourt Casterman Soleil Les Impressions Nouvelles Dupuis Dargaud Le Lombard Frémok Glénat Les Humanoïdes Associés Standaard Uitgeverij This list is heavily weighted on the Franco-Belgian end of things (and by the way, thanks to everybody who tossed these names at me!). If anybody can suggest other companies that seem like a good fit (from any country or planet), please let me know. If you have any sort of direct contact with someone at a publishing company and think you might be able to get me past the submissions gatekeepers, your help would be much appreciated. I'm having the weirdest experience with Image -- a couple of their artists think Image would be all over Project Waldo, but I'm unable to get anything past their submissions guy. I

Page 5 first-pass color complete. Click to Enlarge. More below. This page is... well, I'll come back to it later and figure something out. I took some time off to do a pin-up for a real, live comic. It'll be my first-ever appearance in print. My rationale for breaking the no-side-projects rule was that Project Waldo might be taken more seriously by reviewers if it were perceived to have been drawn by a "real" comic artist. The theory was that I'd shed my hobbyist mantle by making an appearance in a well-known book. I'm not sure I should count that chicken before it's hatched, though, so I'll save the details for later. Meanwhile, my initial enthusiasm for Ka-Blam has been muted by a spate of anti-POD comments. There are several potential drawbacks: first, I'm prepping all the art in RGB (Ka-Blam's format), but I may run into some major headaches if I end up switching to a publisher who uses CMYK (pretty much all of the big ones). Second, it

Page 8 lines complete. Click to enlarge. More below. Here's how it looked at the thumbnail stage (witness the moment when I realize diagonal panel boundaries exist): Talk about your trench warfare drawings -- this one was the battle of Verdun. If I have a nemesis, it's multiple panels depicting the same complicated object from different angles. And man, that saddle... Why, oh why, did I put netting around two of the barrels? Why would I do that, except to add even more time to the already interminable barrel-drawing task? I suppose it goes without saying that the bottom panel was a little cathartic. I think I may have put a little extra stink on that impact, just out of spite. Take that, pagoda-with-infuriatingly-complicated-beam-placement! If this page seems difficult to read, please join me in my fervent and possibly naive belief that color will make everything much more legible. Also adding to the long turnaround for this page was a week of thumbnailing for the rest of the i