Project Waldo

Propheteering

2011-12-17T10:23:00.000-08:00

Last week, I visited a bit with Brandon Graham, the all-around nifty dude who draws King City and Multiple Warheads. He's currently writing a book called Prophet for Image comics, and the roster of artists he's brought onto the project is a murderer's row of new talent, including Farel Dalrymple and Giannis Milonogiannis. The first issue is drawn by Simon Roy, whose work I love very much:

I haven't been this excited about a new comic in... I dunno, forever. Having heard from Brandon what he has in store for future issues, I'm getting a little bit of that kid on Christmas morning feeling. Brandon gives his imagination a very long leash. I suspect that when I'm on my death bed and going over my list of regrets, close to the top will be remorse for not having been as brave as Brandon with my creative choices. If I could save game right now, live out the rest of my life the way it's currently headed, and then come back to today and live out my remaining days Brandon-style, I suspect the second game would be way more fun than the first.

Anyway, here are the first few pages that Brandon has posted on his blog. The first issue (#21, in deference to the previous Prophet series from the '90s) comes out next month. (Oh, and these very beautiful colors are by a guy named Richard Ballermann).

Hat In Hand

2011-12-13T10:03:00.000-08:00

Does anyone work at, or know someone who works at, a Seattle-area game studio that may be looking to hire a reasonably genre-agnostic concept artist/comic book creator/low-poly modeler? Because I know a guy... oh, who am I fooling? I need a job.

This does not spell the end of Nonplayer -- in fact, this is just about the only way that Nonplayer has any chance of getting finished. And if I turn out to work faster while holding down a day job, I'm going to be kind of mad at myself for this whole meandering sabbatical. More mad at myself than I already am, I mean.

If anyone knows of an opening, please contact me at nonplayercomic at gmail. Resume and portfolio available on request. Apologies for the blog-spam.

Thanks!

One Way to Fail

2011-12-01T11:30:00.000-08:00

Every thousand years
This metal sphere
Ten times the size of Jupiter
floats just a few yards past the Earth.

You climb on your roof
and take a swipe at it,
Hit it once every thousand years,
'Til you've worn it down to the size of a pea.

Where you gonna be?
Where will you spend eternity?
I'm gonna be perfect from now on,
I'm gonna be perfect starting now.

-Randy Described Eternity, Built to Spill

When you're working on something big, the most difficult part is always the middle bit. Starting a project is easy -- you're full of new ideas, untapped energy, and naively optimistic notions about scheduling. And you'd be surprised what kind of spiritual reserves become available as the finish heaves into view. But the middle is a drag.

If you'll indulge another cycling metaphor: drawing a (slow) comic is like riding (slowly) in the Tour de France. The peloton has left you behind, the cheering crowds that lined the streets of the last hamlet can no longer be heard. The next town lies somewhere over the horizon, and the surrounding countryside does not change. There is no way to mark your progress, nor are there other racers against whom to measure your pace. The motorcycle-mounted camera has disappeared with the fast riders, so you don't even get the satisfaction of knowing your struggle is being shared.

There's just the sound of your breath to distract you from the pain in your legs. Occasionally, you pass a lone spectator who has waited patiently by the roadside to clap for you. There's also the rare heckler, who jeers as you wobble past.

But no matter how much the world begins to feel like a demense-covered treadmill, you remind yourself that the finish line is up there somewhere. It may be far away, but every turn of the pedals brings you a little bit closer. It took Lance exactly the same number of foot-pumps to get there as it'll take you.

The only way to fail is to stop.

I'm somewhere in the middle of issue 2 of Nonplayer. With my shoulder back in shape, my work-days are approaching their former length. But I'm comically late -- my milestone schedule mocked me today with the words "End Nonplayer #2." The drastic inaccuracy of that prediction would be funny if it didn't also trigger shortness of breath and a cold sweat. It feels like I'm failing. In slow motion. In public.

But I have to keep reminding myself: the only way to fail is to stop. All the predictions of doom and gloom, the retailers wailing about betrayal, the publisher bemoaning the loss of sales, the general sense of having been forgotten -- it's all immaterial, as long as I don't stop.

You may not see me, but I'm out there somewhere in the dark right now, pedaling. And knowing that there are other folks out there on their own stretches of lonely road, putting away the miles -- that's just about the greatest comfort there is right now. That, and this video.

Don't stop, you guys.

Podcasts are Better Than Arm Casts

2011-11-15T09:12:00.000-08:00

Hi guys!

Arm's out of the sling and I'm drawing again. Hopefully we can push through to the end now.

I participated in a couple of podcasts this week. First, I was interviewed by Gaincarlo Paniccia over at Complete Geek Radio, and we had a splendid little chat. Thanks, Giancarlo!

Then I had a fascinating conversation with a couple of other artists who have been climbing Mount Comics over the last two years, Jason Brubaker of ReMIND and Daniel Lieske of the Wormworld Saga. We talked for more than two hours, and the first half of that epic roundtable can be found here. These guys are industrious, talented, and articulate creators, and I expect that a lot of interesting stuff will come out of this podcast in the future.

Cheers!

Oops

2011-09-26T18:03:00.000-07:00

On the morning of Wednesday, September 14th, I crashed my bicycle. I was standing on the pedals, accelerating downhill from the intersection of Pine and Boren, when the chain popped free of the chain ring and the pedal jerked itself free from my cleat. I don't remember the crash. There was a "ping" as the chain came free, and then I was on my back, trying very hard to breathe. Some other bike commuters dragged me out of traffic and stayed with me until paramedics arrived, at which point my shirt was cut from my body and I was loaded into an ambulance. My shoulder hurt something fierce, and I had some pretty nasty road rash.

So what did I break? Well, I'll start with what I didn't break, which was my head. My helmet was completely cracked open above my right temple, so if I hadn't been wearing a lid, I would now be either dead or waiting in line at the brain store, receipt in hand. Let this be a lesson to you fellow velocipede cartoonists: the quality of your comics is likely to suffer if you damage your noggin. Please wear a helmet.

As to the final toll: I'll let this x-ray do the talking.

That thing that's in three pieces -- that used to be a collarbone. One surgery later, it looks like this:

I also broke my scapula, which means that when I went over the handlebars, my right shoulder took a very hard hit. Every bone connecting my right arm to my torso was broken.

In accordance with Murphy's Law, I'm right-handed. So Nonplayer #2 will be on hold until my arm comes out of the sling. I've heard a few theories about how long it'll be before I can hold a stylus again, ranging from one to three weeks. I've tried to write my name with my arm in the sling, and I can say pretty confidently that I'm not ready yet. Because ouch.

So what to do in the meantime? Besides watching MST3K reruns, of course.

I'm trying to use this time to review how things were going with the book before the crash, so that when I jump back into the work I can apply all that stored hiatus energy in a useful way.

If I'm grading the last six months of work honestly, I think I've earned a solid D+. I've done a few things right, and a bunch of things wrong.

Here's what I did right: I put in the hours. Though some have assumed that I've been goofing off for the last several months, I have never stopped working on the book. In fact, I probably put more hours per day into the second issue than I did into the first one, at least partly because of the increased pressure associated with having a first issue out in the wild. In fact, go ahead and replace that word "pressure" with "abject terror," because as soon as retailers started telling me I'd committed career suicide by not releasing an issue a month, I went into full-on panic mode.

And that panic was the source of almost every mistake I made. I've written here in the past about going slow to go fast, and while I believe strongly in the theory, it takes real guts to put it into practice. From the day issue 1 hit the stands, I've been hearing the rumble of that big boulder of failure coming down the tunnel after me, and I hit the ground running as fast as I could with issue 2. I roughed 25 pages in a couple of days, and then jumped right into final linework.

After six pages were complete, it dawned on me that they were boring. I'd begun the story with several pages of exposition-heavy dialogue between two people sitting in chairs. As with many prior impasses, this problem was resolved by talking the scene over with my wife. The solution turned out to be a fairly neat application of the adage "show, don't tell." But the prospect of implementing the fix forced a showdown between two equally horrified parts of my brain: one side was scared to release the book late, but an equally-frightened mental faction was mortified by the prospect of releasing a bad comic book. In the end, quality won out. The first six pages were re-drawn from scratch.

That's several weeks of work lost, but the drama doesn't end there. Soon after I fixed the intro, I began to sense that the book's pacing was wrong. There were several pages in the 12-panel range (which is high), and there wasn't a single one-panel page. Too much story was getting shoved into too few pages. Again, in my hurry to get the job done quickly, I'd made some questionable editorial decisions in the early going. My initial mantra had been "25 pages, no matter what." But after living for several months with a clunkily-told story, I began to despair.

Once again, after talking it over with my wife, I decided to make some changes. In this case, it was determined that since I technically had 30 pages to play with (a standard comic book is 32 pages, including the front and back covers), that I might as well use all of them. The idea of pin-ups was shelved, and the story was allowed to expand to fill the available volume. Suddenly, everything felt right. But there was some bad news. Yes, some radical surgery had to be performed yet again on the first six pages.

By now you're probably thinking that I'm an idiot. I won't argue with you. At the very least, this last half-year has been an expensive lesson in panic-mitigation. None of these problems would have occurred had I spent a couple of calm weeks roughing out the entire issue without letting circumstances frighten me into jumping the gun.

For issue 3, I think I may end up setting aside some large chunk of time (say, two or three weeks), and not letting myself do anything but thumbnails for the duration. If I finish them in three days, that'll leave two and a half weeks for revisions. And I'll be subjecting the results of this planning process to multiple third-party reviews. Lesson learned.

My trepidation contributed to one other unforced error. In my eagerness to finish the comic as quickly as possible, I decided that I'd need to work day and night. While I'd happily worked in a shared studio space for the last year, I didn't want to spend every waking hour away from home. So I packed up my Cintiq and moved my operation back home so that at least my nighttime work hours would take place in the general vicinity of my wife.

Now that I've worked at home, then at a studio, and then at home again, I can say one thing with certainty: working at home is a bad idea. There needs to be a clear distinction between the place where you work and the place where you relax. What gains I may have made by working at night were more than offset by all the extra recess minutes I snuck by sleeping in and taking long lunches. When my arm works again, I'll be giving some serious thought to moving back into a studio. If homework is still something I need to do, I'll go ahead and buy a second Cintiq (who needs to buy food anyway, right?) and set it up at home.

So where do things stand now?

Band-Aid removal in three, two, one: I was working on page 13 when I took my spill.

As bad as that sounds, I'm very happy with where things stand. Some really cool stuff happens in the second issue, and what's been drawn so far looks pretty good. In addition, the rest of the issue has been roughed out to the point where everything works well. The trick from here on out is to work quickly and efficiently without letting panic set in again.

What does that mean in terms of a delivery date? In the afterword to issue 1, I said it would likely take less than a year. In an effort to satisfy the letter, if not the spirit, of that promise, I think I'm going to shoot for March. This decision's a bit of a nail-biter, because I'll need to commit to that date before completing the comic. Which means that if page 29 suddenly turns out to be a trench-warfare drawing, things could get pretty ugly. But again, if I'm making sober decisions, uninfluenced by fear, everything should be fine.

So that's what I've been doing. How about you?

NEAR MINTerview Podcast

2011-08-09T22:35:00.000-07:00

Quickie post (because darn it, I should be drawing right now).

My interview with Ben Peirce over at the NEAR MINTerview podcast went up today. If you're interested in hearing the details about how Nonplayer evolved from pictures on this blog into a full-on Image comic, you may find our chat illuminating! We also talk about the reasons for the issue 2 delay, as well as what's being done to get it finished. Plus lots of other stuff.

Ben's a great interviewer. I really enjoyed doing this one.

BACK TO WORK.

Everything's Different But Everything's the Same

2011-08-04T22:54:00.000-07:00

At around 1 p.m. PST today, Variety magazine reported that Nonplayer had been picked up by Warner Bros., which is a company that makes moving pictures. We (or at least I) had not anticipated this leak, so I was a little unprepared for the new experience of sailing Nonplayer out past the sheltering breakwater of the comics world and into the choppy seas of the Internet at large.

Over the past twelve hours, Nonplayer has become something of a lightning rod for certain angry constituencies inside and outside of the comics world. Probably most common is the "one and done" critique, which suggests that I have cynically created a single comic book with the express intent of selling it off to a movie studio, never to draw another comic again. Some see a dark portent in Warner Bros.' eagerness to sign on the strength of a single issue -- is this the moment when Hollywood's comic book strip mine hits the water table? And still others just think Nonplayer isn't developed enough, or good enough, to deserve this sort of attention to begin with.

So that I am not tempted to waste hours defending myself on the Internet, I want to lay out a few facts here and then leave this whole topic alone for the rest of time.

I will finish the Nonplayer story arc. It may take years, but it'll get done.
The second issue will not go slower because of the Warner deal. If anything, this deal makes it easier for me to devote myself completely to the comic.
I am very excited to see Nonplayer adapted as a live-action film. And because the producer behind the Harry Potter franchise is overseeing it, I think it stands a very good chance of being a visually striking, intelligent, and emotionally nuanced film. I don't see how the existence of a Nonplayer movie in any way effects the quality or meaning of the comic I'm drawing. I want to see Dana ride Pookie into battle on the big screen. That's going to be sweet, and you know it.
The deal was not made on the strength of the first issue alone. Warner was shown a very detailed breakdown of the entire story, and they liked what they saw.
Warner Bros. has shown a heartening eagerness to swing for the fences, creatively. Inception, Harry Potter, and the Dark Knight have taught them that there's a market for thoughtful fantasy, and I think you're going to see a number of unprecedentedly cool movies from them in the coming years. Yes, there have been too many superhero films lately. Does that mean that we should pooh-pooh every idea that finds its first expression in the medium of comics? It's a pretty broad medium, guys.

Anyway, I hope that if you like the comic, you'll keep reading it as it (slowly) comes out. I'll be doing what I always do -- trying to figure out how to tell a story with pictures. I'm still wrestling with page composition and clunky dialogue, still using every blend mode to try and surprise myself with new color combinations. This morning, I spent way too much time trying to make a utility pole look good. Nothing has changed here at the studio.

This was all supposed to be fun, remember?

Unmanned While Manning

2011-07-29T11:48:00.000-07:00

It takes the same amount of effort to make bad art as to make good art, and you won't know which you've made until you release it into the wild. You can continue to refine a work until it doesn't set off your own quality alarms, but that's no guarantee that what you've made will touch anybody. A lot of artists, including many of the best ones, don't particularly care whether their art is "good" or whether anybody else appreciates it. Regrettably, I am not one of those artists.

The way that I deal with this uncertainty is to assume that everything I make is bad, which prevents me from being surprised by negative criticism. But a side effect of this stance is that I feel like a fraud when someone says something nice about my comic. That doesn't mean I won't revel in the attention -- I've developed quite a little addiction to praise. But I have trouble shaking the sense that the world will someday realize, en masse, that my work is crap.

All this is in my head right now because of the Eisner Awards. Last weekend, I flew down to San Diego to attend the event -- I'd been nominated for the Russ Manning Promising Newcomer Award, breaking a zero-nomination streak that had gone uninterrupted since the ninth grade. I shared a table with John Layman and Rob Guillory, the author and artist of Chew (who were both very nice and who went home with a well-deserved award for best continuing series). My dad, my stepmom, and my wife came along, as well. Oh, my poor wife -- the Manning Award gets announced sometime near the end of the third hour of the ceremony, which meant that she was faced with the marathon task of preventing the vibrating, sweaty ball of nervous tension to which she was married from melting down. By the time the Manning rolled around, I caught myself wishing that I'd be spared the horror of having to go up on stage in front of so many people.

And then I won. Whew. My heart speeds up a little just typing that.

Well, I didn't trip on the stairs on my way up to the stage. That was my biggest worry, so I was already feeling pretty good by the time Chris Bailey handed me the award. It was so bright at the podium that I couldn't really see the audience, which was probably for the best. I don't really remember what I said. I'm told that many attendees were preoccupied with a clothing-related mystery -- I wore a white shirt and black tie, but I'd forgotten to pack a white t-shirt to go underneath, so at the last second I borrowed a Threadless t-shirt that I'd given to my dad. I'd turned it inside-out, hoping that the writing on the front wouldn't show through two layers. Alas, those lights were probably bright enough to penetrate to my skeleton, so the giant hi-def screens treated everyone to a dim message that read, in reverse, "I listen to bands that don't even exist yet."

The applause felt great. Famous people came up to me and shook my hand. My parents beamed with pride. My wife looked happy. It was an amazing moment.

And then right back to the self-doubt. In case you're wondering whether getting an award like that changes how you feel about yourself, let me share the insider's perspective: it doesn't. You think to yourself, "all I did was make 25 drawings. One measly issue. I do not deserve this." And now former Russ Manning winners have begun to tell me that I've made some sort of promise to the world to be awesome. Yikes. Perhaps not coincidentally, the frequency with which I've been asked what's going on with issue #2 has peaked.

I really hope the second issue lives up to peoples' expectations. But what I would like even more is to have the fortitude not to care. I look around me and I see other artists who create as easily as they breathe. And though I'm sure they all enjoy receiving attaboys, they'd be drawing exactly the same stuff even if the whole world told them they were talentless hacks. I'm not sure I can say the same.

Here are some of those artists, by the way:

Eric Canete. I know I mentioned him before. I'm mentioning him again. Just browse his DeviantArt gallery and feel the rock and roll.

James Harren. His sketchbook. My God, his sketchbook.

Little Thunder. The awesomeness of her name is only superseded by the awesomeness of her art. I really hope she gets published here in the States. I need more of this.

I heard about this Merwan guy yesterday. Wow. If anybody has any links to a blog or gallery, I'll post them here.

Jordi Bernet! Also heard about him yesterday. Yesterday was a good day.

Cory Walker! What a lovely, economical line. And the proportions. And the feel! You may remember his work from Invincible, also drawn by the fantastic Ryan Ottley. I love them both.

Here's some new Ottley for you:

That's probably good for now.

Issue 2 is happening. Hopefully not too long now.

San Diego Do-Over

2011-07-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

I've been making noises like I wouldn't be making it to San Diego Comic Con this year, but it turns out those noises were inaccurate. I'll be at the Image booth next Friday from 3:45 to 4:45. Feel free to swing by and say hello -- I'm happy to answer questions, talk shop, smile at babies, sign stuff, talk with babies, shop for questions, quest for answers, and sign babies.

See you there!

Home Archaeology for Fun and Profit

2011-06-30T10:12:00.000-07:00

While helping my mom move to a new place last week, I discovered a portfolio full of old drawings. Most of it was pretty iffy stuff, but I did find this unfinished Captain America sample (please excuse the smudginess and crappy scan quality):

The year was 1995. I'd just driven back to school in Chicago after having my portfolio shot down by the Marvel editors at San Diego Comic Con (that story is told here). As soon as I got my drawing table set up, I funneled all of my embarrassment and anger into this new page. I wish I could find the sample I'd shown at the con, because it would make a nice contrast -- this version is sort of a watershed moment in my development as a draftsman.

It's definitely got some problems (Cap's musculature is... creative), but it was a giant leap forward in quality from what had come before. For the first time, I told myself to forget about speed and to just work on a drawing until it felt right. Until that point, I'd prided myself on my speed (you can stop laughing now), but the San Diego Smackdown forced me to reconsider my priorities. The front of that chopper is probably the noodliest thing I've ever drawn. I kind of like some of the hatching, too -- after Nonplayer is done, I think I may want to try moving away from the clean line stuff and back toward something a little more hatchy.

Other stuff I like about this page:

On the leading edge of the canopy in panel one, the seam is serrated to reduce radar signature. This despite the insanely-reflective gun assembly only inches away. I'm not sure if this was a joke or if I was too in the zone to think about the design rationally.
I'm pretty sure this is the first time I thought of attaching a motorcycle-style radiator to a piece of equipment (aft of the gun mount). I still use this trick (see penultimate page of Nonplayer #1).
Cap's boot in the last panel. Feet are always challenging for me, so I get really excited when one comes out right.

Some current events:

I'm working very hard on issue 2, and progress is being made. I'm still not close enough to make a confident estimate about a release date, but I feel pretty good about how it's coming along.

Also, I got nominated for a Russ Manning award! The other nominees are amazing, and I expect that my Eisner journey begins and ends with this nomination. That said, I haven't been back to SDCC since the 1995 portfolio debacle. I can't imagine a better way to reconcile myself with mid-'90s Nate than by walking back into that building with a Russ Manning nomination.

Well, I wouldn't mind also pouring pasta sauce down that Marvel editor's pants. That might speed the reconciliation process a bit.

Chasing Windmills

2011-06-11T23:30:00.000-07:00

I've been seeing lots of pretty art lately. How about I pull a royalboiler and just, you know, show some of it?

Here's M.C. Barrett:

You have to see this guy's sketchbook. Watching him go to town on that thing last week, I felt simultaneously inspired to start a sketchbook of my own and ashamed to even make an attempt. I love his composition instincts. It's like he's constitutionally incapable of making an uninteresting image:

One more by Mr. Barrett:

Next up, John Kantz. One day I want to write a comic and have him draw it.

But can he draw environments? Yes.

Here's Marcel O'Leary, who is going to be famous someday:

Check out this page from his 24-hour comic. I can't believe this guy graduated from art school this month.

This next thing is from Clement Sauve, a brilliant artist from Montreal who passed away a few months ago. He left us some rare gems:

What a tremendous loss. It's all so beautiful:

Oh, and I found Benoit Springer's blog! Here's what he does:

Sort of like Moebius and Mignola had art babies:

I'll sneak in one more by this guy. Wowee.

Man, I need to go back to school or something. I need an art tutor.

In other news, I'm still working on Nonplayer #2. When I've got the final color locked down for the first few pages, I'll post them here. Gonnamakeit. Gonnamakeit. Gonnamakeit.

P.S. If you've sent me a message in the last two months and I haven't answered, please be patient. I am slowly working through the backlog, and I will reply as soon as I can. Thanks.

Vancouver Comic Con

2011-05-15T07:44:00.001-07:00

I'm in Vancouver -- Canada's life-sized Sim City map! You can find me at the Vancouver Comic Con today from 11 am to 5 pm. I've brought a few stacks of Nonplayer #1 to sell, as well as some new posters (the first four pages of the comic are now available in poster form). My studio mate Moritat (The Spirit, Elephantmen) will also be attending. If you're in a gift-giving mood, I quite enjoy donuts, while Moritat prefers alfalfa sprouts.

See you there!

Nonplayer #1 Back in Stores Today

2011-05-11T07:09:00.000-07:00

Nonplayer #1 is back on the stands today! If you live someplace without a comic shop, I have bad news and good news. Bad news: you don't have a comic shop, which is sad. Good news: you can now also buy Nonplayer #1 at the Nonplayer online store! International shipping is available, as well.

Here's the product description:

Nonplayer #1 - Second Printing.

32 pages, full color. Contains pinups by Brandon Graham, Ben Templesmith, and Moritat. Final page includes a letter from the artist.

Includes polypropylene bag with backing board. Shipped in a 9"x12" non-bendable envelope.

All copies will be signed inside the front cover.

Free Comic Book Day Signing at Arcane Comics

2011-05-05T10:05:00.000-07:00

Yet another hit-and-run post. I yearn to sink my teeth into a long post soon. Could someone please call God or Obama or whoever handles these things and ask them to add one more day to the week? I need a day for blogging. Anyway, on to business:

Free Comic Book Day is this Saturday, May 7, and I'll be making an appearance at Arcane Comics from noon to 4pm! I will be selling and signing advance copies from the second printing of Nonplayer #1, as well as selling some very handsome little posters. Please drop by to say hello!

Arcane Comics is located in Ballard -- they're my hometown shop, located only a few blocks from my studio:

5809 15th Avenue Northwest

Seattle, WA 98107-3006

Hope to see you there!

Second Printing Info

2011-04-14T10:05:00.000-07:00

Two posts in one hour! Clearly the internet isn't distracting me from my work AT ALL.

I just wanted to remind you guys that the second printing of Nonplayer #1 will be hitting stands on May 11. Image bases the size of their print runs on the number of preorders they get from retailers, so if you want a copy, now's the time to call up your local comic shop and reserve one. The deadline for ordering is April 18 -- this coming Monday. Please tell your friends!

Content-wise, the second printing is identical to the first -- the cover will be slightly different (and slightly prettier, I think) and there may be some different bonus stuff in the back, but the comic itself is the same. There's really no need to go to Ebay for a copy unless you're a super hardcore collector.

Okay. Really working now. Really.

Stumptown Bidniz

2011-04-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

Quick morning post before I commence to doodlin'.

This weekend, I'll be at the Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland, OR. If you're in the area and you'd like me to sign your copy of Nonplayer, please visit! I've got my signin' wrist all limbered up. I will also be selling (and, if you like, signing) posters.

I had not anticipated the shortage of issues of Nonplayer #1, however, and I'm only able to bring ten copies to the convention. There will be a raffle, with five issues given out on Saturday at 4pm and the other five awarded on Sunday at 4pm. But wait, that's not all! When you enter the raffle, you're guaranteed first priority when second-printing copies of #1 go up at the Nonplayer store on May 11. So in the loosest possible sense, everybody wins! I'm hoping that everybody who wants one will get one this time around.

Also, if you have sent me a message online over the last couple of weeks and haven't yet received a response, please know that I am not ignoring you! I am slowly chipping away at my inbox, but I'm doing my best not to let the internet derail my work on issue 2. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

I will post more here soon, hopefully. Now that the embargo is lifted, I can show some more pages from the first issue -- I tried some very clumsy perspective experiments that I want to bounce off you guys. And after that, I can start posting the first pages of issue 2, just like we did the first time around. Fun!

Thanks to everybody who bought (or attempted to buy) Nonplayer last week. It's been a very exciting time, and I owe it all to you guys.

Okay, off to work!

Hurry Up and Wait

2011-03-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

No matter how much an astronaut sacrifices, no matter how hard she's worked to get her shot, there has to be a moment -- probably right after a million and a half pounds' worth of propellant lights up under her -- when she wonders if she's made an error. Having put every last ounce of myself into the promotion of Nonplayer over the last few weeks, I suddenly have a similar feeling of unease going into the debut weekend.

Promoting something does some pretty strange things to your head. For one, there's the endless bragging. I've been looking at my comic for long enough that it's hard to see past my own mistakes, but that doesn't square very well with the job of being a salesman. Sadly, I don't think people will rush to pick up the book when I tell them to "check out Nonplayer -- on one panel, a character's eyes don't quite point in the same direction!" So I'm trying to be a good cheerleader for the book. I recognize the necessity of it, but it does go against a lifetime of programming that says "stop talking about yourself, douchebag."

The tone of my relationship with the public has also changed. When that relationship was conducted solely through this blog, I was able to interact with commenters as individuals -- to look at their work, to get a sense of who they were as people. There was a refreshing lack of anonymity. We were sharing and caring! And since very little was said about Nonplayer outside the walls of this comfy little garden, I was able to parse every comment and benefit from it, regardless of whether it was critical or supportive.

Well, now there are more people talking about the book outside these walls than there are here in the garden. It's tempting to wander the web to read what people are saying -- few things are more intoxicating than hearing a stranger say something nice about you. But it doesn't take long before the whole thing starts to make you a little queasy. When that anticipation gets whipped up past a certain point, you start to wonder if there's any way the work itself will live up to readers' expectations.

Regrettably, I've even bought into some of this hype -- when I finally opened the first shipment of books, my first thought was that they looked awful small. Apparently my sense of the book had become so inflated that some part of my brain had expected the book to be physically larger than a normal comic. Weird, right? I'll be selling copies of the first issue at WonderCon this weekend, so we'll see if others have this reaction.

Out there beyond the wall lurk negative comments too, about which the less said the better.

Of course, there's one very big elephant in the room: each issue of Nonplayer will take a few months -- maybe even many months -- to create. Nobody wishes more than I do that it would come out faster -- after all, I'm trying to make a living off of this thing, and more than one retailer has explained to me that every day that passes between issues is money lost. My stomach makes a foreboding gurgling noise just thinking about it.

I certainly get why both I and retailers have cause for concern -- in both our cases, it's a matter of making financial ends meet. It was that financial imperative that prevented me from doing all six issues before releasing. I'd never have gotten anywhere near the finish line on my own dime.

I also remember what it was like to be a kid waiting for a late comic. I had a vision of the artist spending his days jet-skiing and partying while I waited patiently for him to get back to work. Sometimes I still fall prey to that kind of thinking, which is why I get antsy when I spend even a couple of hours away from my desk.

But that's probably not very good for the quality of the book, in the long run. Nonplayer #1 was made in a commercial vacuum -- no deadlines, no editors, no readers to impress. And though the commercial context has changed, I'm doing my best to preserve that sense of calm while working on the second issue. I need to be able to take chances, to make mistakes, and to start some things over when they don't work. This started out as a learning process, and I want to keep on learning. I want the second issue to be better than the first.

I'm very sorry for making folks wait between issues. I really do hate to inconvenience anybody -- I'm pretty sure I hate it enough that it qualifies as a neurosis. And the thought that I'm grabbing the attention of so many readers, only to disappoint them en masse, is putting a bit of a damper on all the recent good news about the comic's reception. I feel like I'm jumping up onto a big stage, only to have my pants ripped away at the last moment. Ta-dah!

All that said, if you'd one day like to hold a nice fat Nonplayer trade paperback full of noodly, self-indulgent artwork, then you may want to say this when you meet me:

"I can wait. Pace yourself."

Pounding the Pavement

2011-03-10T10:17:00.000-08:00

Four days to Final Order Cutoff, the last day that comic retailers can order copies of Nonplayer #1 (which hits the stands in less than a month).

It turns out that the work of making a comic doesn't stop when you send the finished pages off to the printer. There's this whole other magical, impenetrable thing called "promotion." I don't have much experience to inform my decision-making in this area, so I've opted for the blunt-force approach: I'm contacting individual retailers and reviewers one-by-one via email. I'm sure there are useful force-multipliers that I'm overlooking (for example, a shout-out from somebody like Patton Oswalt, Chris Hardwick, or Felicia Day would probably quadruple my sales, but I don't really know how to make it across their fan-moats). If anybody has any good ideas, I'm putty in your hands.

So far, I've focused on Twitter, the Nonplayer website, this blog, DeviantArt, and the Project Waldo Facebook page. A word to the wise about DeviantArt: when you open your account, pick a username that relates in some way to your real name (or which is at least relevant to your interests). I chose "hughferriss" out of habit (many years ago, it was the only numeral-free name I could find for a Yahoo account). Now I've got thousands of people out there who think Nonplayer was written by a guy named Hugh Ferriss. I am not Hugh Ferriss. Hugh Ferriss was an extremely talented architectural renderer of the art deco era, and I certainly wouldn't mind being him, but sadly I am not him. This is enough of a problem that I'm considering opening a new DeviantArt account, even though I've already got a couple thousand people following the hughferriss account. It'll take many hours to get everything set up again, and I'll lose a lot of followers. Don't do what I did. (Edit: I went ahead and set up a new account -- one with the word "Nate" right there in the username. That's two hours I'll never get back.)

One weird thing about promotion is that it requires constant bragging. It's awkward in the same way that writing a resumé is awkward. I've decided to treat the Nonplayer website as the rah-rah outside voice and let this blog be my inside voice. Also, I'll be posting new art here soon.

Anyway, I've been sending personalized emails to comic shops, websites, blogs, podcasts, and magazines. I'm seeing about a 30% response rate, which is a little better than I expected to get through the unsolicited email approach. If you do something similar, I recommend finding out the name of your key contact and using it in the greeting, and then working the name of the store or website into the first couple of sentences. This is your way of saying "this is not spam." The other thing I try to do is keep it short. My story synopsis is one sentence long, and then I toss out four positive one-sentence reviews. I try to keep in mind that retailers and reviewers probably get thousands of unsolicited emails, and they're not likely in the mood to follow me on a wondrous journey through the labyrinthine backstory of Nonplayer.

By far the biggest promotional boost has come from you guys -- many of the shops I've contacted have told me that preorders have been coming in, and they've upped their orders as a result of customer interest. One good example is Comics Heaven in Stockholm, Sweden. When I first contacted them, they wrote back to tell me they didn't plan on stocking Nonplayer until it came out in trade paperback. A week later, I got an email from Dan Cooper at DICE, who said he'd gone around his office talking up Nonplayer and then gone into Comics Heaven to order fifteen copies. And a week after that, the shop contacted me again to report they'd upped their orders. That was a great feeling, knowing that somebody was excited enough about the comic to go to bat for it like that.

If you're interested in helping out, please swing by your local comic shop this weekend and remind them about Nonplayer. Tell the owner that if he/she contacts me at nonplayercomic [at] gmail [dot] com, I'll send them a signed poster. I've listed the shops that haven't gotten back to me below -- if you see your favorite shop on this list, please hit them up for a copy! And if you don't see your favorite shop on any of these lists, now's the time to drop them a line. After Monday, it'll be too late.

North American shops that have not confirmed interest in Nonplayer, in alphabetical order:

8th Street Comics, Saskatoon

A-1 Comics, Sacramento, CA

Alternate Worlds, Cockeysville, MD

Amazing Stories, Shrewsbury, NJ

Atomic Comics, AZ

Bedrock City Comics, Houston, TX

Books, Comics, and Things, Ft Wayne, IN

Bridge City Comics, Portland, OR

Captain Nemo Comics, San Luis Obispo, CA

Chicago Comic Vault, Chicago, IL

Chicago Comics, Chicago, IL

Comic Heaven, Willoughby, OH

Comic Smash, Los Angeles, CA

Comic Stop, Redmond/Lynwood/Greater Seattle, WA

Comic Store West, York, PA

The Comics Keep, Bremerton, WA

The Comics Place, Bellingham, WA

Comix Connection, York, PA

Comix Experience, San Francisco, CA

Corner Comics, Totem Lake, WA

Cosmic Comics, Bellingham, WA

Cosmic Monkey Comics, Portland, OR

Danter Room, Olympia, WA

Dark Tower Comics, Chicago, IL

Desert Island, Brooklyn, NY

Dr Comics and Mr Games, Oakland, CA

Dreamworld, Culver City, CA

Earth 2 Comics, Sherman Oaks, CA

Excalibur comics, Portland, OR

Fantasy Shop Inc., Saint Louis, MO

Forbidden Planet, New York, NY (note: Forbidden Planet UK is fully on board)

Golden Age Collectables, Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC

Golden Apple Comics, Los Angeles, CA

Heroes Comics, Fresno, CA

Isotope Comics, San Francisco, CA

Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash, Red Bank, NJ

Karen's Comics, Portland, OR

Lone Star Comics, Dallas, TX

Lost World of Wonders, Milwaukee, WE

Meltdown Comics, Los Angeles, CA

Midtown Comics, New York, NY

Mile High Comics, Denver, CO

New England Comics, MA

Olympic Cards and Comics, Lacey, WA

On Comic Ground, San Diego, CA

Phantom of the Attic Comics, Pittsburgh, PA

Purple Earth Comics, Huntington, WV

Ron's Coin and Book, Yakima, WA

RX Comics, Vancouver, BC

Silver Snail Comics, Toronto

Source Comics and Games, MN

The Secret Headquarters, Los Angeles, CA

Things From Another World, Milwaukie, OR

Third Coast Comics, Chicago, IL

Universe of Superheroes, Jacksonville, FL

And stores outside the United States that have yet to respond:

The 3rd Place, Dublin

The 4th Dimension, Dublin

Album Comics, Paris

Alternate Worlds, Windsor Victoria

Comics Etc., Brisbane

Comikaza, Israel

Comix, Brazil

Dynamic Duo Comics, Adelaide

Good Fellows, Helsinki

HQ Mix, Brazil

Pep Comics, Netherlands

Pulp's Comics, Paris

Story, Dublin

Sub City, Dublin

T3 Terminal Entertainment, Frankfurt

But let's end on a high note! These are the North American stores that HAVE shown interest in Nonplayer:

A Comic Shop, Orlando, FL

Alakazam Comics, Irvine, CA

Arcane Comics, Seattle, WA

The Beguiling, Toronto, ON

Challengers Comics, Chicago, IL

The Comic Bug, Manhattan Beach, CA

Comic Oasis, Las Vegas, NV

Comicopolis, Santa Cruz, CA

ComicReaders, Regina, SK

Comics Conspiracy, Sunnyvale, CA

Comics Dungeon, Seattle, WA

Cosmix, Montreal, Quebec

Downtown Comics, Indianapolis, IN

Dreamstrands, Seattle, WA

First Aid Comics, Chicago, IL

Floating World Comics, Portland, OR

Graham Crackers Comics, Chicago, IL

Heroes Aren't Hard to Find, Charlotte, NC

Newbury Comics, MA

Planet X Comics, York, PA

Strange Adventures, Halifax, NS

Third Eye Comics, Annapolis, MD

Titan Gaming, White Horse, YT

Unreal City, Saskatoon, SK

Vault of Midnight, Ann Arbor, MI

Westfield Comics, Madison, WI

Zanadu Comics, Seattle, WA

And the fine stores abroad that have shown interest:

Comics Heaven, Stockholm

Dave's Comics, Brighton, UK

Forbidden Planet UK (in a big way, at 16 stores -- all but Edinburgh, the manager of which reportedly isn't all that into the comic)

Gosh!, London

Kings Comics, Sydney

Mega City Comics, Camden, UK

OK Comics, Leeds, UK

Paradox, Poole, UK

Travelling Man Comics, Manchester, UK

Thanks for all your help, guys. None of this would have happened without your support.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

2011-03-07T14:44:00.000-08:00

Emerald City has come and gone, and it's time to sit down with this big sack of memories and sort them out into neat little piles.

First off, thanks to all of you who came by to visit the Nonplayer booth in person. Everybody was eager to talk shop, and it was a pleasure getting to put faces to names. I feel like I'm writing this blog for real people now, rather than for a bunch of disembodied internet beings. I hope the folks I met this weekend turn out to be an accurate sampling of Nonplayer readers in general, because every age group, gender, and lifestyle was well-represented. The only thing you all had in common was niceness and smarts. I especially enjoyed meeting all your kids (and I'm proud that I thought to laminate my sample comic before it was drooled upon by so many babies). And to all of you who bought posters, I hope you like them!

Which brings me to a bit of business: those very posters are now available for purchase at the Nonplayer online store. One last time, here's what the two 11" x 17" posters look like:

Thanks in advance for supporting Nonplayer -- as has been previously discussed in this blog, my wife and I ended up dipping pretty deeply into our savings to get Nonplayer out the door, and this is our first opportunity to slow (or even stop) our inexorable descent toward coal-faced street urchindom.

If you do get a poster, please let us know how the ordering and shipping experience went -- this is our first time selling merchandise online, and we want to make sure nothing's amiss in the poster pipeline. I'd love to hear what you think of your poster, as well. Those who saw them at the convention seemed very happy with the quality of both the printing and the cardstock paper, so I hope that trend continues!

Okay, back to the convention.

I met so many cool people. It was very strange to be sitting next to Nick Spencer during the Image signing. I mean, the guy who writes Morning Glories is right there next to you, and he's treating you like you deserve to be there! He's a really nice guy, and I'm sad I didn't get more of a chance to talk with him. And then just around the corner was Nathan Edmondson, who gave me a couple of free (and totally rad) comics of his own. How have I not read "Who is Jake Ellis" before? I have to say, people named "Nathan" sure do seem to be slightly more awesome than everybody else. And before I forget, Tonci Zonjic is amazing, too. That's one beautiful comic.

Edmondson and Zonjic's "Who is Jake Ellis?"

Of course, as an artist, I was especially excited to meet some fellow doodlers. As expected, I was completely starstruck. Like, to my left during the signing was Ryan Ottley, of "Invincible" fame. The whole time I was supposed to be pimping my comic, I just kept looking over at his pencils and being blown away. There was this one spread of the Hulk punching a dude (I think it was the Hulk) with all these tiny action panels behind the main event, and it was like a little master course in how to compose a two-page spread. That guy. Wow.

Ottley's "Invincible"

And then a little farther down was Brandon Graham, who is another one of those guys who sends me into fits of I'm-not-worthiness. I don't know how much of his work you've seen online, but Multiple Warheads is going to incinerate the comics world and leave it badly irradiated for decades to come. Brandon's color is like ice cream for my eyeballs. If you aren't already aware of his blog, go check it out right now. It's my favorite.

Graham's "Multiple Warheads"

Maybe the biggest surprise of the con was Emi Lenox. I'd already known she was a ninja in the autobiographical comic genre, but when I saw her entry in the Monsters and Dames convention book, I realized she'd been keeping some very big guns in reserve. If she ever lets you beat her at a game of pool, resist the temptation to put money on the next game. If she plays like she draws, you're going to lose your shirt. I hope she gets to do more color stuff soon, because it's super sweet.

Lenox's "Monsters and Dames" Illustration

And those are just the guys I could see from my seat! I bet there were other supertalents just on the other side of the partition. How I'm supposed to make my mark in this sort of company is beyond me, but I'm happy just to have been there. I feel like Moonlight Graham -- somehow, I got bumped up from the minors to play right field for one inning with the Giants.

So that's Image. I still haven't gotten to Frank Quitely and Frank Cho, who frank-ly (HA!) were two of the nicest guys I met at the convention, and who both said some really nice things about Nonplayer. I have trouble understanding how guys who work at that level don't get completely full of themselves. Cho kept asking me if I wanted anything from the concession area. FRANK EFFING CHO. I'm supposed to be anointing his feet with fragrant oils, not taking bottled water from him. And Quitely just showed up at my booth and starting chatting with me about Manga Studio -- we'd been talking for some time before my table-mate Joe whispered to me to ask the guy his name. I'd just thought he was some cool-looking Scottish dude. Sigh. Frank Quitely. Thanks to the devious Ales Kot for bringing Quitely over and then gleefully keeping his mouth shut while I lectured the legendary artist about IllustStudio. Ales, you are a bastard.

Keep an eye out for Ales, by the way. He's quietly wrangling the best artists in the business for some very interesting-sounding projects.

The high point of the weekend came yesterday, when Frank Cho introduced me to hero-since-childhood Geof Darrow. People say you should never meet your heroes, but I say pooh to that. Darrow not only looked at my comic and liked it (possibly for reals), he regaled us with all sorts of stories about Hard Boiled and then gave me one of his drawings! I'm sure I was a blubbering shmoo the whole time, but he was warm, funny, and generous. Geof Darrow: first he blows up my conception of what's possible in a comic, then he turns out to be a swell fellow. My wife said that when I got back to our booth I was beaming. Joe and I just kept giggling about it for the rest of the day.

Geof Darrow and some skinny dude

And that brings me to Joe Keatinge, who offered to share his table with me at the very last minute, long after I'd given up on having a place to sit. Joe is a force of nature -- I've never met anybody as enthusiastic about making comics, or as persistently supportive of everybody around him. He's sort of a volcano of pep. He co-edits the Popgun anthologies (which I finally read last night and enjoyed immensely), and I totally get why they gave him an Eisner for his trouble. He's working on some new top-secret stuff right now, and I can't wait to see how it all comes out. If you see him, be sure to remind him to keep drawing. He's another one of those double-threat guys who's way too humble about his chops, but I think if we work together, we can guilt him into making us some more pretty art.

Finally, Joe got me to start taking Twitter seriously this weekend (and then graciously told his many followers to follow me, as well). I'm @NateSonOfSimp, and I look forward to learning if the hashtag has any function other than turning a tweet into a mini-version of Stephen Colbert's the Word.

It was great meeting you guys -- thanks for making this weekend such a great experience.

Emerald City Update

2011-03-05T08:54:00.000-08:00

Nonplayer now has a table at Emerald City: L-10, at the rear of the main hall to your left as you enter (against the wall, to the right of the men's room). Poster signing at the Image booth is still scheduled for 11am - noon today, but I'll be at L-10 doing exactly the same thing at all other times.

I've really liked the people I've met so far. Lots of folks making their own ways up Mount Comics, and it's all very inspiring.

Hope to meet more of you today!

Correction

2011-03-03T20:16:00.000-08:00

It looks like my initial poster-signing schedule was erroneous. It turns out the convention center opens at 2pm tomorrow (Friday), which, it turns out, is after the planned 11am signing. So it looks like I'll just be doing it on Saturday from 11am to noon. Until that also turns out to be wrong.

I'll be at the convention all three days, and the posters will be in boxes behind somebody's table, somewhere. If you see me roaming the floor and you want a poster, we may have to conduct the transaction like a smack deal. I'll send a runner to the stash and have it brought out to you, barring the appearance of 5-0.

Still ironing out some kinks, obviously.

Con-founded

2011-02-26T09:38:00.000-08:00

Less than a week to Emerald City Comicon. My first convention with a badge that says "Image" on it.

Since Nonplayer won't be out for another month (it's debuting at WonderCon on April 1), I'm not completely sure how I'll be spending my time at ECCC. Image has said I'll be able to hang out at their booth, but there are many more creators than seats, so that'll be touch-and-go. Right now, it looks like I'll be signing there from 11am to 12pm on Friday and Saturday. I'll be at the convention for all three days, though, so if you don't see me at Image and you want something signed (or just want to say "hi"), just ask someone at Image where they last saw me.

There will be Nonplayer posters for sale -- they're 11" x 17" on silk cardstock paper. Both the second and third pages of the first issue have now become posters:

There are a hundred copies of the one on the left and two hundred copies of the one on the right, and they both turned out quite nicely. After the convention is done, the posters will go up at the Nonplayer store, so don't worry if you want a poster but can't make it to Seattle. Once they're online, I'll happily ship them to any destination. If you want the poster signed, all you'll need to do is mention it in the comment section of the order form. Easy!

So what do I need to do to be ready for this convention? I'll bring good pens for signing stuff. I'll bring some paper so people can add their email addresses to the mailing list. Let's see. What else? Feels like I'm going camping. Trail mix. Gotta bring trail mix.

I haven't had this much riding on a convention since the 1995 San Diego Comic-Con. I lived in LA at the time, and this guy at my office (a talented fellow named Raphael Navarro, who went on to become a much-beloved comic artist) showed me some sample pages he'd made for a portfolio viewing at the Marvel booth. There was less than a week until the convention, but I somehow got in my head that I'd be able to wow Marvel with some hastily-drawn Captain America pages. I'm still not sure why I decided on Cap -- I think it was because Raphael had drawn him, and on the strength of his treatment I'd decided that Captain America was the platonic Marvel character.

I was still working on my pages in the car on the way down to San Diego -- my mom was going to hit some kind of job fair in San Diego that weekend, so she dropped me off right in front of the convention and agreed to pick me up a few hours later. So there was 20-year-old Nate (still "Nathan" at the time), illusions intact, ready to take the comic world by storm. The plan was simple: first show Marvel my work, then go over to DC, then sit back as the inevitable bidding war erupted.

The line at the Marvel booth should have been a clear warning, but I managed to keep my chin up through the hour-long wait. The portfolio review area was completely enclosed by black curtains, and an obviously-bored Marvel editor waited within. I suppose I expected him to start drooling over my work as soon as I'd unsheathed it, but his expression did not change when the pages came out. He hit me with some stock advice about studying anatomy harder and not letting my characters stand on the bottom edge of the panel, I gave him a numb "thank you," and out I went.

I didn't even bother with DC. I wandered the convention floor until my mom showed up, and I barely said anything in the car on the way home. I haven't been back to Comicon since.

The experience did have a couple of positive effects. I started a second Captain America sample, this time working at my own pace. I never submitted it, but it was many times better than the first outing. I've always found embarrassment to be a great motivator, and this was up there with Halloween of '87 on the embarrasometer. So I leveled up a little.

I also learned an important lesson. Now, when I look at someone's artwork, I try to keep in mind that people grow. Technical skill is a learned thing, like driving or using chopsticks. It's worth trying to see through the quality of execution to find the thing that illuminates the work. If a person is excited enough about their art to show it to me, then there must be something there for me to be excited about, too. If a 16-year-old Mignola-to-be comes up to me at a convention and I dismiss him because his anatomy isn't quite there yet, I've not only done the kid a huge disservice, I've robbed the world of a great creator (and plus, my anatomy isn't quite there yet, either).

We may all be passing different mile markers on that road that leads from kindergarten craft-enthusiast to Albrecht Dürer, but if we want to be handled with care by those who are ahead of us, we need to try to remember what it was like back when we were just starting out on the same road.

See you at Emerald City!

PS. Thanks for all the comic shop recommendations, guys! I've contacted nearly 90 shops around the world, and the reactions have so far been pretty positive. If you want to be absolutely sure that your local shop will carry Nonplayer #1, you probably want to pay them a visit before the Previews ordering cutoff on March 14. It may help to tell them the ordering code, which is FEB110397. And tell the shop owner that if they contact me directly (nonplayercomic (at) gmail (dot) com), I'll send them a signed poster.

PPS. A correction from two posts ago: It turns out there is a Korean word for "loser." In fact, there are lots of Korean words for "loser." But they don't use them the same way we Americans do. Or maybe they do. I'm going to ease off on the broad cultural generalizations from here on out. My point was that my wife has a can-do spirit. Maybe that's more because she's awesome than because she's Korean.

But Koreans are awesome, too.

That was a generalization. Cannot win.

Good Comic Shops?

2011-02-24T11:18:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a brief post -- I'm trying to contact comic shop owners to make sure they know about Nonplayer, and I could use some suggestions for shops you like. If you want Nonplayer available at your local shop, make sure to add them to the comments!

To sweeten the deal, I'm offering a free signed poster to any shop owner who gets back to me. Please don't ask me for a free poster if you don't run a comic shop -- I'm printing these with my own money, and I'm poor.

The poster may be difficult to send to non-North American comic shops, but I'd still like some overseas suggestions, too. I'll see what I can do on a case-by-case basis.

Thanks guys!

As a reminder, this is what the poster looks like:

Fear is the Mind Killer

2011-02-12T09:38:00.000-08:00

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

-Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear

Last week, I did a phone interview for the Comic Book Page podcast. I've done plenty of interviews by email, but this was my first real-time interview. Things went... well, I should have known something was amiss when I woke up on the morning of the interview in a state of panic.

For the entire day leading up to the 5 p.m. interview, the anxiety got progressively worse. This was my first and only chance to make a good impression on the ears of the internet, and there would be no do-overs. What if I messed up? What if the right words didn't come out? What if, God forbid, I came up completely empty? Then my mind switched to preemptive self-accusation. You're a 35-year-old man! How could something this inconsequential put you so off-balance? You're going to sabotage yourself!

As total freak-out terror began to set in, I listened to several earlier podcasts to get a sense of the kinds of questions I'd be asked. Every guest was confident, poised and intelligent. Never an "um" or an "I don't know" -- just well-reasoned opinions and easy congeniality. My fear was total.

By the time my phone rang that evening, I was in pretty bad shape. Bob Bretall, the interviewer, turned out to be a calm and sympathetic host, but during the pre-interview chat my mouth was so dry that I could barely croak the words "yes" and "no." And then he said, "okay, if you're ready, let's begin." A pause as he started recording, and then a shift in tone as he assumed an announcer voice and introduced me. Then came the serve, high and slow over the net: "Nate, welcome to the Comic Book Page podcast."

"Thanks," I squeaked. "It's nice to... see you."

There was a brief, tense pause before Bob resumed, but the seconds felt like eons. Every voice in my mental peanut gallery began shouting. You blew the greeting! This is going to be a total disaster!

Next, I was asked to give a synopsis for Nonplayer. My mental bandwidth, consumed as it was with recrimination, had fallen to sub-dial-up speeds. I'd written a few notes beforehand, but they didn't seem to match the question exactly. I went off-script and started babbling. Finally, about half-way through my meandering explanation, I drew a complete blank. This was it. No safety net, no second chances -- there was a yawning chasm of dead air, and I could find no words with which to bridge it.

I gasped, made sort of a weird squeal. "I'm so nervous right now, can we just..."

"You're doing fine, let's keep going." On to the next question, which attempted to make some sense out of the mess I'd presented so far. Perhaps satisfied with my opening face-plant, my inner critic had finally gone quiet. Things certainly couldn't go worse than they already had. The rest of the interview went quickly, if awkwardly. When it finally came to an end, I apologized to Bob for blowing the intro. He said he thought it went fine, but I knew I'd turned in the worst-ever performance in the history of the Comic Book Page podcast -- perhaps in the history of all podcasting.

The rest of the day was a blur of self-loathing. Here was confirmation of all my worst fears -- that I wasn't cut out to be a professional artist, that the comics industry would destroy me. That I was an incomplete human.

That inner critic said one thing very clearly: "You'll never be any good at public speaking. In the clutch, at that do-or-die moment, you'll always choke. You just don't have the knack for it."

As soon as she got home, my wife asked how the interview went. I tried to keep a stiff upper lip, but she could tell I was wounded.

She didn't miss a beat: it was time for some intensive media training. She never once bought into my "I'm no good at this" theory.

I'm sure most wives would respond similarly, but I wonder if there wasn't a certain culturally-ingrained vehemence to her reaction. My wife is Korean, and she clearly subscribes to the Korean belief that humans can improve themselves through practice and hard work. This contrasts especially with our American fixation on giftedness and genius. Where we are happy to sort our children into "winner" and "loser" piles from kindergarten onward, Korean teachers expect under-performing students to keep up with their peers, regardless of their supposed deficiencies. There isn't a Korean word for "loser."

I would not be allowed to hide behind the "no knack" defense on this one. After a night of beating myself up, I wrote back to Bob and asked if I could have another shot. He very generously assented. Turns out there was a safety net, after all!

Queue intensive training montage. I went to the library the next morning and wrote a detailed plot synopsis, refining it until it was brief and clear. I practiced saying it aloud, making sure to take my time, to pause between sentences. I meditated. I listened to Carl Sagan talk about our role in the universe. I made a new cheat-sheet, this time more organized and legible. At its top were two sentences:

"Thanks for having me."

"GO SLOWLY."

When the call came that evening, my heart went back to jackhammer mode. Bob handled me with kid gloves this time, pointing out that if something went awry, I could just say "do over" and we'd edit that part out. And then came the dreaded pause and shift in tone as Bob began the podcast. He welcomed me to the show.

"Thanks for having me," I said, triumphantly.

And the whole thing went fine. Afterwards, Bob and I talked about his amazing collection of comics and memorabilia. What a cool guy! With my fear-blinders removed, I could enjoy Bob for what he was -- the most passionate fan of comics I'd ever met. I like Bob.

I went home exultant. It was like I'd gotten hold of a time machine and rewritten my own history. All thanks to my wife, who refused to let me run back to the safety of my burrow. Could it be coincidence that after thirty years of spinning my wheels, I'm only able to finish something with her around?

No, it couldn't!

Okay, on to other business. The first Nonplayer interview is up over at Good Comic Books. Joe's questions were great -- I especially enjoyed talking about the differences between comic-making and game design. Thanks, Joe!

Also, I'll be at Emerald City Comic Con from March 4-6. This will be my first-ever convention appearance, so if you want to witness the in-person equivalent of my interview crisis, you'll be able to find me either in the fetal position somewhere near the Image booth, or loitering just within earshot of Geof Darrow. I have printed up 100 Nonplayer posters to sell, so come and get them while they're hot. They're 11" x 17", and they look like this:

No speech bubbles! I'll happily sign yours, if that's how you like your posters. My comic won't be out for another month, but I'm hoping a couple of early adopters will swing by to say hi.

Thanks!

Here We Go

2011-02-06T14:15:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have seen this over at the Nonplayer website, but I felt I should post it here for posterity's sake:

The guy on the right is my friend Joe Keatinge, and the guy on the left is Moebius, my all-time comics hero. Joe and my studio-mate Justin "Moritat" Norman went to the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée Angoulême last week to scope out the French comics scene (and to see the by-all-accounts-stupendous Moebius show in Paris), and before they left, Justin made me print out a copy of Nonplayer #1 to take along with him.

I need to make a quick digression. Despite being universally overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated, comic creators are the most generous, selfless, and encouraging people on planet Earth. Justin and Joe are great examples. These are busy guys with books of their own to think about, yet they went out of their way to take a sample of my work to the other side of the planet. In my experience, this is unusually nice.

Also illustrative of this rampant altruism: the existence of pinup artwork. Comic artists regularly make pretty drawings for one another for free. Nonplayer #1 has three pinups in it, and all three contributors (whom I will showcase in a future post) are full-time comic artists. Which means they had to carve time out of their already impossible schedules to do free work for a guy they only met a year ago. In what other industry do you encounter that kind of generosity? I find it a little inexplicable, but I assume it has something to do with the general sense that comic artists are embattled underdogs who must stick up for one another. They're like scrappy English street urchins.

With so much competition in the world of comics, you'd expect newcomers to be treated with coldness, if not contempt. But once again, almost every creator I've met has demonstrated a strong conviction that a rising tide will raise all boats. Perhaps this "more the merrier" attitude is buttressed by the knowledge that attrition among comic artists is worse than at the Battle of the Somme. There's little danger of overcrowding.

ANYWAY. Justin apparently dared Joe to go up to Moebius after a lecture to show him my book. And according to Joe's account, Moebius said something like "very cool, beautiful, may I have it?" What a nice guy, right? It looks like that generosity of spirit goes all the way to the top of the comics pyramid. Joe called me a few minutes later, and I could tell from his quavering voice that something weird had happened. His first words were "somebody stole your comic." I was in the midst of telling him it was okay when he interjected, "it was Moebius!" And then I went all Tourette's and started jumping around my studio.

That photo still sort of blows my mind. A part of me still thinks it's 'shopped. People like Moebius inhabit a mythical dimension that we can view but never touch. To see my comic in his hand is like seeing my brother walk by in the background of the cantina scene in A New Hope. It's totally unbelievable.

So! That was nice.

In other news, Nonplayer #1 is listed in the February issue of Previews (Previews is the distribution catalog that comic retailers use to order books for the coming months). If you want to make sure that the first issue appears on the shelf at your local comic shop in April, please mention Nonplayer the next time you visit. The item code for Nonplayer is FEB110397, and there is a four-page preview on page 178 of the Previews catalog. Thanks for your help!

Finally, I would like to start showcasing some Nonplayer art by folks other than me! If anybody wants to submit Nonplayer-related artwork, I'd be happy to show it off at the official Nonplayer website (and maybe here on this blog, as well). If you wanna, send stuff to nonplayercomic (at) gmail. Yes, I know there are only eight pages out there (plus, as observant onlookers may already know, one page fragment on the banner for the Nonplayer website and two more bits on display at the Nonplayer Store). Between all these, there should be enough funky creatures, guys with pointy ears, and weird-looking swords to come up with something, right?

At Last

2011-01-27T19:02:00.000-08:00

Nonplayer, brought to you by Image Comics! Coming to a comic shop near you on April 6.

More details at the official Nonplayer website.

Sorry, it's hard to reach the keyboard from the ceiling. I'll post more when I deflate a bit.

Very happy.

On Waiting

2011-01-22T08:56:00.000-08:00

This posting hiatus started pretty innocently. Having mentioned in several previous posts that I had a major publishing announcement to make, and certain as I was of that announcement's imminence, I decided to refrain from posting until I could drop the Big One. After all, it was getting kind of embarrassing, saying over and over again that there would be big news and then coming up empty every time. Maybe the internet didn't really care one way or the other whether I'd landed a publishing deal, but in the echo chamber of my head it felt like a big deal.

So, is this the post? Nope! But since there isn't anything more for me to do, and since I feel an overriding need to do something, I'll write about it.

I got into comics for the autonomy. A comic is just about the most elaborate thing a person can create without assistance, which sounds like heaven to somebody who's spent fourteen years in video game development. But what I hadn't taken into account was that "a comic" was more than just 24 pages of sequential art. Without a publishing infrastructure, a distribution network, advertising, and other promotional support, a comic is just a tree falling in a forest. Initially, I had anticipated handling the publishing logistics on my own, through print-on-demand publishers like Ka-Blam and distributors like ComicsMonkey. That probably would have worked out fine, but I was unsure of my ability to reach much of an audience on my own.

Soon enough, more established publishers came sniffing around. It was intoxicating. Sometimes it was humbling, too: many were quite up-front about what they perceived to be my comic's shortcomings (after I'd drawn only five pages, one executive told me that my color was going in the wrong direction, an assessment that was eagerly affirmed by several others on the same conference call). Ego-bruising aside, there was now the prospect of seeing my comic at a real comic shop. I might finally get to meet my comics heroes -- and as a peer, not just as a fan!

Late last summer, I finally came to an agreement with a publisher. I finished the first issue, went to work on the second, and waited. A publisher is a big, slow thing -- those who run it have to support hundreds of other creators while overseeing a large, complex business. Naively, I thought that once we came to an agreement, we would immediately step out the front door and shake hands for the cameras. Well, of course it doesn't work that way, least of all for a first-time creator. You may be in a hurry, but nobody else is. And why the hurry, anyway? Should the publisher give my comic some sort of priority because I erroneously mentioned in my blog that it would be coming out soon?

My hurry is the problem. It's also ironic, given how slowly the comic was created. I still have trouble achieving enough distance to realize how little it matters whether my comic comes out in March or April, and that impatience has had all sorts of bad side-effects: it has distracted me from my work, it has been an annoyance to my friends and family, and it has turned me into an email-crazy serial irritant to my publisher.

So why am I in this insane hurry? I guess I'm hungry for validation. Especially when you quit what to all observers looks like a perfectly good job to go do something that sounds silly, there's a gradually but inexorably increasing burden on your shoulders. Double that burden if your wife is paying the rent in the meantime. You wake up every morning just a little more desperate to prove yourself, and you go to sleep feeling like more of a failure every night. Eventually, this struggle becomes the only thing you think about. By the time you finish that first issue, you already feel a little bit hollowed-out. But it's okay, because that void is about to be filled with gallons of warm, nourishing validation.

And then nothing happens. For months.

One day, I'm going to look back at this post and laugh at myself for having thought of the release of the first issue as some sort of finish line. It's really the starting line, and things are only going to get harder. How easy will it be to focus on the comic when I'm one click away from a forum where somebody's ragging on me for working so slowly?

Christmas never comes. There will always be some ever-receding prize on which to fixate at the expense of the real blessings that surround me now. How much sense does it make to obsess over fulfilling my role as a good provider if that obsession turns living with me into a miserable experience?

I have not been a particularly spiritual or even philosophical person, but I'm starting to recognize the usefulness of a philosophical framework in these situations. In that spirit, the following quote from the Bhagavad Gita seems wise, if not easily emulated:

You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself -- without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat. For yoga is perfect evenness of mind... Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do. When consciousness is unified, however, all vain anxiety is left behind. There is no cause for worry, whether things go well or ill. Therefore, devote yourself to the disciplines of yoga, for yoga is skill in action.

So next week, I'll announce both my publisher and the successful renouncement of all my desires. Ha!

Note: I posted this text yesterday, then took it down after ten minutes. It felt like this was one of those self-indulgent mope-posts that can't really help anything and can hurt quite a few things. Of course, I have since received several emails pointing out that anybody with an RSS feed can still read the whole thing, anyway. So the cat's out of the bag. And I suppose if the real point of this blog is to chronicle the entire experience of learning comics, then it has to show the dark moments as well as the happy ones. So here you go.

Story Toy

2010-11-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

As I work on the story for Nonplayer, I'm frequently reminded that I'm not a very good writer. Which isn't to say I can never be a good writer -- after all, I'm just barely making a dent in my ten thousand hours. Clearly, I'm thinking about story much more than I used to -- there's a new dread that seeps into the back of my head whenever I watch a movie or read a comic that has the same shortcomings I'm encountering in my own work. How is it that I walk away from those experiences with the feeling that I've failed somehow? I didn't even write that movie! It's a strange thing.

Here's a tentative first pass at a definition for "story": a story is sometimes more than, but never less than, a sequence of significant events. I might even venture that those events need to have some narrative connection to one another, but maybe a thematic relationship is all that's really needed. Jackass 3D worked fine, right? Well, okay, maybe that's not a story (possible future digression: is story even necessary?).

But what constitutes a significant event? For me (and for many artists who came to drawing through the comics/movies/games side of things), the default list of significant events doesn't stray too far from four basic modes: violent confrontation (everything's either an argument or a fight to the death), chases (at high speed, usually through canyons full of obstacles), rescues (often involving improbably-proportioned women), and gratuitous posing (feet apart, sword or gun aloft). I don't know if it's habit, or nostalgia, or maybe a reluctance to bore the reader, but I still get a little uneasy when I stray from these old chestnuts. Paradoxically, I am increasingly bored by them. So what else is there?

Part of the reason I enjoy Japanese comics is that they exhibit a broader interpretation of what constitutes a significant event. Yes, there is plenty of male power fantasy manga -- but even within the action genre there are some pretty surprising tangents. For example, ping pong can look like this:

Ping Pong by Taiyo Matsumoto

Or how about wheelchair basketball?

Real, by Takehiko Inoue

Or maybe Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi winning major diplomatic concessions from George Bushes Jr. and Sr. by beating them at high-stakes mahjong?

The Legend of Koizumi, by Hideki Ohwada

I suppose these are just different isotopes of the same action element -- note the use of speed lines in all three examples. Still, it's hard to deny that the application of novel settings does seem to inject some new life into the old action-comic structure.

Over the last few years, my wife has coaxed me into trying some new flavors of manga. Her favorite (and one of my favorites, too) is called Yotsuba, by Kiyohiko Azuma. Yotsuba chronicles the day-to-day adventures of a five-year-old girl and her single father. Yotsuba gets into trouble, but it's not Dennis the Menace-type trouble. Instead, her newness to the world causes her to interpret her environment in skewed ways, and sometimes she acts upon those incorrect theories to hilarious effect.

No explosions, no monsters, no robots. Okay, one robot. Made out of cardboard.

Part of what's so charming about this comic is that as Yotsuba learns about the world (where milk comes from, why it's not good to draw on your father's face while he's napping, etc.), the adults around her seem to unlearn their stodgy adultness.

The whole process feels so natural that it sometimes reads like a documentary. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet that Azuma's been observing some goofball kid somewhere. Some of this stuff is too good to have been made up.

Even further down that slice-of-life path lies The Walking Man, by Jiro Taniguchi. The whole manga is devoted to one salaryman's commute -- most of it follows him as he walks home from work. In one story, he checks out a library book to help identify a seashell he's found. In another, he discovers a broken wind-up airplane in a gutter and takes it home to fix it. In a third, he sneaks a nighttime skinny-dip in a locked public swimming pool. To hear me describe it, it must sound like deadly dull stuff. But it's not.

Weirdly, seeing these everyday events drawn with such care (and Taniguchi's amazing draftsmanship is a big help here) has altered my sense of the value of the ordinary things I see around me. Here's an artist who cares so much about the experience of missing a bus stop and taking an unusual route home that he draws a whole story about it. Somehow, a little act of worship like that enhances the real world. This thing you're looking at -- this tree, or this broken toy -- is important enough to deserve its own comic. That's cool!

To any normal person (particularly any non-male one), this is going to sound pathetically naive, but I'll say it anyway: the things that happen in everyday life can be just as significant as exploding robots with swords. That doesn't mean I should ignore my muse if it tells me to draw sword fights. But it does mean that there's significance in nearly everything, and that letting a story move through a few different registers may breathe some life into it.

Watch, now there are going to be a bunch of really boring pages in Nonplayer. Hey man, it's a learning process.

Quick aside: some people have begun to think I'm screwing around with this whole "announcement around the corner" thing. I have been 100% convinced that I was within a day of signing a contract more times than I can count, but publishing a comic turns out to be a process that involves the cooperation of multiple people, all of whom have to have their ducks in a row before anything can happen. All I can say is that when the announcement is finally made, you'll agree the wait was probably worth it.

And that announcement is right around the corner.

IllustStudio First Impressions

2010-10-24T17:06:00.000-07:00

I’ve got a week of IllustStudio under my belt. The verdict: spectacular.

As I mentioned in my last post, IllustStudio has a similar interface to Photoshop’s. Many of the macros are the same, most of the button icons are similar, and you’ll recognize the same basic tools -- magic wand (comically transliterated from the Japanese as “magikkuwando”), color picker, lasso, etc. The key difference between the two programs is that IllustStudio allows you to make either raster or vector layers. In a raster layer, you draw with pixels. In a vector layer, every line you draw has at its core a tweakable, transformable mathematical spine. The important thing here is that from a user perspective, the two feel mostly identical. But boy, are they different.

The Eraser

In the IllustStudio demo video, you see this little guy in action a couple of times. Until I actually started drawing pages in IllustStudio, I hadn’t fully grokked how this tool, paired with vectors, could revolutionize my pipeline. The eraser tool has three modes: normal, intersection, and whole line.

Normal mode works exactly like Photoshop's eraser. It removes what it touches. Intersection, however, is a game-changer. Consider panel borders: in Photoshop, I used to use the line tool to draw overlapping lines and then manually remove the lines from the interpanel spaces. Not the toughest task in the world, but definitely a chore.

Here’s how you do it in IllustStudio: first, use the line tool to make two vertical lines that span the height of your page. Then, make two horizontal lines that span the width of your page.

Second, set your line-modifier tool (translated for some reason as "line level") to “duplicate lines,” and increase the influence area of your cursor so that it selects paired panel lines at once. Then click and drag your panel borders to place them where you want them. Finally, flick the eraser (set to “intersection”) over the lines you don’t want. This takes maybe ten seconds for the whole page:

Done. Ten minute task becomes one minute task.

Or how about speech bubbles? Another non-trivial task that becomes increasingly annoying in Photoshop as you switch back and forth to the paths palette and re-stroke your paths for every revision.

In IllustStudio, you start out with a plain old oval. You can easily tweak this oval into a more pleasing shape using your trusty line-level tool, this time set to “fix both ends” (you may want to play with the influence area of this tool as well -- too narrow and it’ll just give you dimples, too big and it’ll move the entire line at once. Warning: "influence area" is translated here as "adjustable thumb." No idea). Once you’ve got your bubble, add the tail by drawing two overlapping curves with the curve tool. Now go back to the eraser tool (again set to “intersection”). Boop, boop, and boop:

Done. You need to see this happening in real time to get a sense of how fast it is. All this happens in seconds.

Before I stop hyping the eraser tool, I should mention the usefulness of the “whole line” setting. In this mode, the eraser removes all of every line that it crosses, from end to end. Think about all the fuss that’s required to erase, say, the collar of a shirt in Photoshop. You’ve got to zoom way in and make sure that at the end of that line you don’t make a dent in the line of the person’s neck, right? That sort of stuff is ancient history now. With IllustStudio, you don’t ever need to zoom way in for anything, really.

Transformations

In Photoshop, you may find yourself scaling and rotating parts of images after you’ve drawn them (I usually end up resizing and repositioning parts of human figures this way). Of course, because Photoshop is raster-based, the result is blurred. And it gets worse if you do it a third and fourth time. What you catch yourself doing is transforming the element and then tracing over it to get a clean line again. Modify, retrace. Modify, retrace. A real time-sink.

With vectors, transformations are non-lossy (“lossy” describes any process that involves an irreversible loss of data). That means you can rotate, increase scale, stretch, shrink, rotate again, do the hokey pokey, and rotate one more time, and the line stays exactly as sharp as ever. That’s huge, right? How many hours did I spend retracing for issue #1? Days? Weeks, maybe? Are you starting to get a sense of how much this program rocks?

Related to the transformation fluidity is the ability to change page size. You probably already guessed this one, but I’ll go ahead and spell it out: you can change your page size to any dimensions at any point in your drawing, and the results will be perfectly clean. You can draw the whole drawing at 1000x1500 pixels if you want, and then scale it up by a factor of ten. Your lines will still look sharp.

For issue #1 of Nonplayer, I drew the pages at very high resolution because I wanted to be able to make posters from the pages at some point. This slowed everything down drastically -- with some files, it took five minutes or more just to save, and things got exponentially worse as I added layers. For Nonplayer #2, I’m working at a reasonable resolution (6.875 x 10.437 in @ 400 dpi), safe in the knowledge that I can blow up the entire page after I’m done (note: there is an upper limit to how big you can go -- I don’t know if it’s a hard ceiling or if it’s limited by RAM, but I didn’t have much luck getting the page higher than the 15000 pixel range. That may just be because my computer is a sissy).

Perspective Ruler

Perspective ruler, I love you. This is a fully-customizable ruler (in one-, two-, or three-point flavors) that lets you place your horizon, vanishing point, and key guide lines in seconds. But what’s really sweet about this tool is that once it’s been placed, the lines you draw with the line tool will automatically conform to the perspective you’ve chosen. It senses the general direction you’re trying for, compares it to the three available axes, and matches your line to the most similar axis. To be clear -- it doesn’t snap to the actual reference line on the ruler, it merely redirects your line to point either towards the appropriate vanishing point or makes it perpendicular to the viewer (in the case of one-point perspective).

I’m almost excited to draw some buildings. Almost.

Color History

Every time you use a new color, it gets registered on a color history palette off to the side. Most Photoshop artists I know (including myself) put color swatches along the margins and use the eyedropper to revisit oft-used colors. No more:

A little feature, but one I’ll use often.

Drawbacks

As with all programs, there are a few flies in IllustStudio’s ointment. Most of them are pretty insignificant -- the biggest hassle so far has been reprogramming my brain’s macro habits. Though most of the buttons and macros are similar to Photoshop’s, there are some notable differences. For example, ctrl-Z is undo, but crtl-Y is redo. That means if you want to do multiple undos, you just hit ctrl-Z over and over. For those who paired ctrl-Z with ctrl-alt-Z in Photoshop to toggle between an older undo state and a newer one, there does not seem to be a corresponding function in IllustStudio. There is a history palette though, so it's really just a matter of changing habits.

Another problem is the dearth of online tutorials in English. Try Googling “IllustStudio tutorial” and you’ll find very little. So far, the most useful English-language introduction I’ve found is this one. It's brief, but handy to have on hand for your first few minutes of exploration. From then on, it’s mostly a matter of clicking every button to see what it does. The English translated tooltips are helpful here, but not everything has been translated (Google will point you to the current English translation -- switching languages is a matter of replacing a single file).

Ultimately, there may be some tasks that still make more sense in Photoshop. For example, Photoshop’s blend modes are far more varied and robust than IllustStudio’s. I haven’t played much with coloring in IllustStudio (I’ll post again here when I do), but it may make sense to move everything over to Photoshop after establishing basic areas of color. Switching back and forth between the programs is no problem -- IllustStudio can save images in .psd format. As long as you keep the lines and colors on separate layers, there’s no problem with resizing the image later, even if rasterized colors are brought back into IllustStudio from Photoshop. The vector linework will cover up any unpleasant artifacts along the color boundaries.

Where Do I Get It?

The good news: IllustStudio is ridiculously cheap (around $70.00 US). The bad news: it’s sold only in Japan. This is the point where I wish I could tell you that I’ve made a deal with a local reseller and that I’ll get five percent of every sale referred through this post. Sadly, that is not the case. But it would have been sweet.

In my case, some friends and I contacted a Japanese importer who was willing to ship multiple copies to us in a single shipment (we ended up paying an even $100 for each copy). Looking around on the web a bit, I see that you can buy a copy at an overseas retailer and then have it shipped to this other company, who will then deliver it to you in your home country. I can’t attest to price or reliability, so a little due diligence may be necessary. I’m sure some net-sleuthing will reveal other procurement methods.

The Final Analysis

It’s taken a while for me to get fully settled into digital art making -- so many tasks require popping the clutch on my art-brain and going into button-pushing gear, then trying to get back into art mode again. It’s exhausting and counterintuitive. With IllustStudio, I think I may finally have found the perfect complement to the Cintiq (which puts the pen in direct contact with the image) and the Ergotron armature (which turns the Cintiq from a monitor into a pad). I feel like I've crossed over some intuitiveness threshold, back into traditional media territory. By dodging the price of Photoshop CS5 ($657.00 on Amazon) and buying IllustStudio instead, you’ve got nearly 600 extra dollars to apply to that Cintiq purchase, too.

Still no announcements on the publishing front. Nonplayer is quickly shaping up to be the Duke Nukem of comics, isn't it?

Second Verse, (Hopefully Not) Same as the First

2010-10-13T06:49:00.000-07:00

I’m visiting my wife's family in Seoul for a couple of weeks, which means I’m temporarily Cintiq-less. We timed this trip to coincide with preproduction on issue #2 of Nonplayer, so I’ve been concepting, writing, and doing some rough layouts on a “pad,” which is a non-digital wood-pulp-based substrate for graphite residue. I think it might be broken, though. The undo button doesn’t seem to work.

I skimped on the preproduction for issue #1, and everything took twice as long because of it. Driven by a desire to show pretty pictures to my friends as quickly as possible, I hung my final artwork on some very flimsy layouts -- sometimes they weren’t much more than stick figures. No surprise, then, that I ended up redrawing a lot of finished panels because of botched camera angles and bad poses.

Here at the beginning, it turns out you have to go slow to go fast. A little extra clarity, especially during the layout phase, can give you a lot more confidence going into the final artwork. It doesn’t hurt that when you finish clean layouts you’ve got the bones and muscles of your finished book, and you can recruit friends and family to catch storytelling errors (which, at my level, are plentiful).

When I commence final artwork, I’ll be trying out a new Japanese illustration program called IllustStudio. I still haven’t dug too deeply into it, but here’s what makes it cool: it has the UI of a raster-based art program, but the linework is vector-based (actually, raster-based is also available, but meh). The interface is not such a far cry from Photoshop -- you’ve got brushes, a palette, fill tools, that sort of thing. Using the Cintiq, you make the same kind of varied, tapering linework that’s possible in Photoshop. But underneath it all, there are vectors instead of pixels. This means the following:

Linework can be modified after the fact, either by dragging the line or modifying its thickness.
Image resolution is immaterial -- you can blow your image up to the size of a building without any blurring or pixelation.
The line can be auto-smoothed as it’s drawn, cancelling out shakiness and freeing me from one of the most time-consuming rituals of issue #1: redrawing long, curved lines again and again until my wrists exploded.

There are lots of other promising functions -- I’m particularly interested in an auto-masking tool that prevents color from crossing adjacent linework. There are some nice perspective aids, as well. Here’s some mind-altering video of IllustStudio in action. As I get deeper into issue #1, I’ll post some more reactions to the software.

Finally, I’m trying to figure out if I want to set up an online store for Nonplayer merchandise. I’m not really sure what kinds of things people would be interested in finding there. I think poster-sized reproductions of individual pages might be fun. T-shirts, maybe? The thing I’m really excited about is figurines -- with 3D printing technology in its current state, there are some ridiculously detailed collectible sculptures making the rounds. I wouldn’t mind having a nice little sculpture of the guy on the cover riding his steed. Would you mind having that?

It sure would be swell if Nonplayer could start helping out with some bills. Heck, I’d settle for one bill. Nonplayer, please pay our Netflix bill. Thank you.

As always, an official publishing announcement is right around the corner. Man, this sure is a long corner.

DIY Not?

2010-09-28T15:14:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading "Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World," by Mark Frauenfelder (founder of Boing Boing and editor in chief of Make magazine). I never thought of myself as much of a DIY guy, but I enjoyed his Colbert Report interview enough to hunt down his book at the library. It chronicles his misadventures in do-it-yourselfing -- undeterred by failure, he hacks his way through several ambitious projects, including the building of a chicken coop (and the stewardship of its residents), the construction of several cigar-box guitars, and the raising of a colony of bees. I wouldn't have predicted I'd have been interested in any of those things, but it turned out to be a fun ride.

Frauenfelder quotes some interesting folks. For example, there's this gem from Charles Martin Simon's "Principles of Beekeeping Backwards":

Our apicultural forefathers, those great men who defined the principles of modern beekeeping, Langstroth, Dadants, Root . . . why were they so extravagantly successful? The answer is simple: because they didn’t know what they were doing. They made it up, as it were, as they went along. That is the creative principle, and that is the way it works. Once the standards have been set and carved in stone, the pictures and diagrams and procedures etched into the books, we have then models to live up to, and we can’t do it. Everything that comes after primary is secondary, or less. It will never be the same. For us to succeed, we have to become primary. We have to view beekeeping with entirely new eyes, just as our great pioneers did.

I haven't been at comics long enough to know if that's true, but I'd sure like it to be true. Clearly, it's not enough to be clueless -- otherwise, we'd all be accidental Picassos. But to be unsure of what you're doing while wanting desperately to figure out the answers on your own -- that might be some kind of sweet spot.

Later, Dr. Peter Gray critiques the way modern schools work:

"...our education system is set up to train kids to be scholars, in the narrowest sense of the word, meaning someone who spends his time reading and writing." This is a poor way for kids to learn, Gray explained, because people survive by doing things. School, however, is about "always preparing for some future time when you will know enough to actually do something instead of doing things now. And that's such a tedious approach for anybody to take in life - always preparing."

Could it be that school just prepares us to prepare for things? No wonder the local Utrecht is doing such brisk business in Moleskines and watercolor kits, but so little is actually getting made! He goes on:

The right way to approach learning, Gray said, is by encouraging play, "where you just go out and do things, and learning is secondary to doing. In school, you learn before you do. In play, you learn as you do and you're not afraid of mistakes -- you make mistakes and that's how you learn. Whereas in school a mistake is something bad. In some ways you become afraid of taking initiative and trying things out for fear you'll make a mistake."

It was near the end of Frauenfelder's book that it occurred to me that making your own comic also counts as a DIY project. I guess I had associated the movement with sawdust and calloused hands, maybe because there seems to be so much caveman back-to-the-land stuff mixed in with the maker subculture. There's one bit where he even says his DIY activities take away from some of his other hobbies, which include painting and drawing. Somehow those two don't qualify as "true" DIY, I guess? Too sissy? I wonder where Make magazine stands on the subject of Cintiqs?

Anyway, the book's a great read for anybody who's trying to overcome that inner schoolmaster who keeps telling them they're not good enough to get going on a project. I could have used that encouragement a year ago. Heck, I can still use it now.

A few people have asked me what's going on with the Nonplayer publishing situation. I'm really, really close to signing something, and as soon as I do I'll make an announcement. We're in chickens-about-to-hatch territory now. I'm looking forward to being able to breathe again.

Issue #2 is bopping right along.

Sitting Duck

2010-09-22T14:25:00.000-07:00

I just realized that I hadn't gotten around to posting the color version of page 8. Here it is. Click to enlarge:

There seems to be a lot of disagreement about the usefulness of sound effects. The anti-SFX people point out that big words look cheesy, cover up the linework, and ruin the general fine-artness of things. The pro-SFX partisans counter that sounds can make things more visceral and engage the other senses (if indirectly).

Then there's Japan. They'll add a sound effect for a gentle breeze or the sound of somebody blinking. This tool must have some value if it's been used for decades on multiple continents. Then again, so has dynamite. That doesn't mean I should use it to loosen a stuck spark plug.

I guess the real question is whether sound effects make sense for Nonplayer. I started out staunchly against them, but was surprised to discover that some pages seemed to come to life when I added them. Of course, I then went whole hog and put in too many, in some cases ruining entire pages. In the end, as with every other part of the book, it came down to trying every panel both ways and keeping the changes that worked. I ended up with a comic that has some loud events that go completely unlabeled and some muted events that make little noises. Did I make the right choices? I don't know!

That leads to a bigger concern: when Nonplayer gets printed, I'll be opening myself up to a kind of criticism that I've never experienced before. The internet is pretty polite when you're a nobody, but as soon as your name shows up in Previews, the gloves come off. I feel like I'm asking the web to kick me in the jimmy.

I'll say it right now: my comic has flaws. Sometimes it looks to me like it's made up of nothing but flaws. It's hard to resist preempting my critics by listing what's wrong right here. At least then I'll have scooped the griefers.

But that's a pretty unhealthy way to think, right? After all, one person's mistake is another's charming idiosyncrasy. I bet Geof Darrow felt like he'd totally blown it when he finished Hard Boiled (when in fact he had made one of the raddest things ever). Not that I'm anywhere near his level of bodaciousness, but who knows -- maybe some of my mistakes won't seem so big when I look back at them in a few years.

I guess this is the lesson I'm trying to learn this month: drawing a comic (or creating anything to share with others) requires a willingness to make highly-visible errors. Mistakes are like little badges that say "I'm trying as hard as I can." With comics, books, and movies (not so much with food), I care less and less whether something is good or bad. What matters is whether the creator is trying.

There's a lot of very polished, mistake-free art made by people who aren't pushing themselves at all, and there's some really terrible art created by people who are putting everything they've got into what they're doing. I prefer the second category of creators (not to mention, if someone's that into what they're doing, they'll have a hard time staying bad). I wonder if this accounts for the well-documented rock band trajectory -- proficiency usually increases over time as obvious flaws are polished away, yet the earliest albums are often the most prized. It's not that missteps necessarily make the early stuff more enjoyable (though sometimes they do), but they seem like an unavoidable consequence of pushing through unknown territory.

For all of Nonplayer's shortcomings, I feel I can say one thing with confidence: I gave my best effort. In what is surely a first in my creative life, I have no cause for regret. And if the script is any indication, issue #2 will drag me even further into Terra Incognita. There are eight pages in a fish market. Boy, I bet I'll know how to draw fish after I'm done with that one.

Anyway, see you in Previews. My jimmy awaits.

Bombs Away!

2010-09-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

When I announced on Facebook a couple of weeks ago that I'd finished the first issue of Project Waldo, the plan was to post something here the next day. Since then, I've been making the comic a little more finished. Today, I finally threw in the towel for good. It's done.

So first things first. "Project Waldo" has a new title:

With any luck, you'll be seeing this soon on a shelf at your local comic store.

Justin "Moritat" Norman went with me to Arcane Comics yesterday and we brought the cover along to see how well it would stand out among the other comics that started with "N." It'll be parked right next to Northlanders, which is some rotten luck, because that's one amazing-looking comic. Northlanders notwithstanding, I was happy to discover that most modern comic covers are so dark that a yellow-and-orange pile of fruitsauce like mine glows like a little campfire in the forest.

One last thing: from now on, I'll try to post here once a week. Part of the way I'll manage that is by keeping my posts shorter. We'll all still be here next week, right?

Back to issue #2. We can rebuild it. We have the technology. Better, stronger, faster.

Breakaway

2010-07-21T22:15:00.000-07:00

Why on Earth did I wait until last month to rent a studio?

As with most of the delays that have plagued this project, chalk it up to a failure of imagination. It takes a firm commitment to convince your mental hinterlands that you’re serious about a new course of action, and there’s no firmer commitment than the financial sort (that’s not true, but let’s proceed as though it were).

Having moved my stuff to the studio, I find that I’m exactly twice as productive as I was back home. I can’t completely account for the speed gain -- perhaps when I’m working at home, there’s a part of my mind that’s stuck in some domestic slacker-torpor. What’s nice about this new arrangement is that when I am at home, I can enjoy a TV show without being terrorized by the solemn beating of the tell-tale Cintiq in the corner.

I have three office mates, and they are all cool bros who have yet to ice one another. Inspired by the artistic slipstream effect that seems to have accelerated our output, we have named our studio Peloton. Which leads me to the second big change of the month -- I’ve been riding my new (ancient, crappy) bike from Capitol Hill to Ballard every day. This may seem to have nothing to do with anything, but I have found that after only a month of exercise, my brain works better.

There’s a thing that used to happen to me -- usually around 2 in the afternoon -- where some minuscule task would suddenly become insurmountable. Faced with the impossible challenge of changing a character’s eye color, I’d end up going to the convenience store, reading a magazine, changing the water in the hummingbird feeder -- anything but making an actual creative decision. I just didn’t have the mental oomph to get over that little artistic speed bump. That doesn’t seem to happen too much anymore, and I credit all the happy exercise chemicals square-dancing in my brain. Somehow, physical stamina equates to mental stamina -- almost like your brain is part of your body or something. On a related note, if you’re on the Burke-Gilman trail at 7 in the morning and you blow past a skinny guy straining up a 1% grade in the wrong gear on a rusty old Trek hybrid, tell him you’re rooting for Project Waldo.

Finally, I learned a new workflow trick this month. For the first half of the book, I completed the linework and all color for each page before starting the next. This habit had more than a little to do with my desire to submit finished drawings to this blog on a regular basis. Recently, however, I hired a flatter to prep my linework for color (side note: his name is Eagle Gosselin and he’s the best -- he’s got a great eye for detail and a real passion for his work and you should hire him to flat your next book if he isn't too busy with my next book).

With this sudden flood of pages ready for color, I couldn’t help but work on multiple pages at once. And heavens to Betsy -- it’s much, much faster that way. It turns out that some of the toughest problem solving happens somewhere other than in your conscious mind -- I suspect it takes place somewhere in the vicinity of the ass -- and it just won’t be rushed. With the earliest pages, I’d end up fiddling with sliders for a whole afternoon, only to realize the next morning that a better approach had materialized as if by magic. When I hit a tough problem now, I just put the page aside and move on to the next one. More often than not, a solution presents itself when I come back to the page on the next day. Wonderful that I’ve only figured this out a couple of weeks before the end... anyway, the next issue will go like gangbusters now that I've harnessed the power of ass-thought.

Alas, Comic-Con is happening right now and I didn't make it. It seems like every blog I follow is full of giddy stories in which people meet personal heroes, sign 18-figure deals with Hollywood moguls, and get drunk with Australian comic book artists. Well, I’ll have you all know that we’re partying pretty hard up here in Seattle, too. Why, I just drank a delicious sparkling apple juice! Straight up!

So suck it, San Diego!

Going the Distance

2010-05-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

An unexpected and ironic side-effect of finishing a project like this is the overwhelming sense of having failed. You feel like you're driving a Rose Parade float at the Indy 500. Somebody else won the thing weeks ago, the stands are empty, and the reasons to pull over start to outnumber the reasons to keep going. There's only one lap remaining, but there won't be any victory milk waiting for you at the finish line.

You go into something like this with expectations. You think your actions will bear fruit. You fantasize about your debut at San Diego Comic-Con, and how your heroes will invite you into their club. You've seen too many montages -- you think the world will pay you back for your effort, with interest.

Then San Diego flies by, and you're not ready. That iron has gone cold and you never struck it.

The thing is, this isn't your moment of failure. This is actually the most important chapter of the whole odyssey. This is where you discover that work can be its own reward, and that you've got some hidden tenacity in you. This is where you become a grown-up.

In the end, you're going to have a comic book. Does it seem like a small thing, compared to the time you put into it? Ask yourself what you have to show for the 34 years that went before this one. Your list of accomplishments just went from zero to one. You improved more as an artist over this last year than over the whole decade that preceded it. You got 2500 hours closer to that 10,000 hour grail. And maybe best of all, you made some new friends.

Besides, you'll do better on the next issue.

----

A side-note: The Livestream client blue-screened my machine twice. I'll have to put that idea aside until I've got a computer that can handle it. It was fun while it lasted, though. For anyone who missed it, I look like Keanu Reeves.

Discipline and Punish

2010-04-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

Almost immediately after you get married, you start outsourcing stuff to your spouse. For example, I am now the toilet-cleaning guy. I did it a few times in a row, and now I'll be doing it for the rest of my life. Another example: Jiyoung waters the plants. I used to know how to water plants, but now that she does it, I've completely shut down the plant-watering part of my brain. I don't even know how to get the water from the sink to the plant. It's a mystery.

When Jiyoung went off to work a month ago, it was like half of my brain vanished. That half apparently included the machinery responsible for self-discipline. With her nearby all day, it was difficult to drift too far from the path. It's not like she was looking over my shoulder, but the house was filled with a general sense of focused productivity. With her gone, the house has quickly filled with a new sense of "let's play PS3, surf the web, take long lunches, and snack continuously."

Well, I figured out a way to not only recover my work ethic, but to increase my productivity. Frequent contributor Eagle has directed me to a streaming video site called Livestream, where several comic artists broadcast their desktops live while they work in Photoshop. That's a level of openness that I'm not ready to attempt, but the site also lets you broadcast from a webcam. Henceforth, from Monday through Friday between 9am and 6pm Pacific time, my little rat-fink webcam will tell the whole internet whether I'm shirking.

It works. I've been drawing my butt off. And the beauty of it is that it doesn't matter whether anybody actually watches the feed -- which is good, because I look sort of like a cross between Prince Charles and an ostrich. What matters is that somebody could be watching. The internet is now my Panopticon! If my mind starts to wander, all I have to do is look at that beady little electronic eye to the left of my monitor. It's like living with HAL.

Anyway, my Livestream feed is on the left toolbar. Livestream also supports chatting, but I keep the client minimized while I work. If you send me a message, please don't be sad if I don't respond. I don't let myself check the chat box until the end of the day.

In other news, my mom got me an Ergotron desk mount LCD arm for my birthday. Now my Cintiq is connected to the desk by a fully articulated steel armature. It looks like this:

Here's a video of another guy's setup. This thing is spectacular. It's great to be able to change your posture whenever your neck or back starts to complain. You can even hold the monitor in your lap like a sketchbook. The only problem is that I'm worried webcam/HAL will somehow commandeer the arm and bludgeon me to death with my own Cintiq.

Something else I got for my birthday: Viva il Ciclissimo, co-authored by Katsuhiro Otomo and Katsuya Terada. The two artists went to Europe to watch the Giro d'Italia bike race, and then drew one of the most beautiful illustrated books I've ever seen. I hadn't seen anything Otomo had drawn since Akira, but this book shows that he's been busy turning into some sort of art god. Click the image to see more.

Finally, a word of advice: if you're having trouble getting to the finish line (in my case, I'm staggering toward page 24 with a head-full of dehydration-induced hallucinations and a pantload of exhaustion-poop), listen to this song and imagine you're participating in one of the many studying montages from Real Genius. I admit that I did this. I'd like to suggest that I did it because I found it ironically humorous and not because it filled me with a sense of purpose that blazed with the majestic intensity of a thousand nerdy suns.

Fat Man and Little Girl

2010-04-12T10:44:00.000-07:00

If you're on the lookout for a good podcast, you may want to give Radiolab a spin. It's nominally a science podcast, but the hosts are so charming and the format so creative that it's easy to forget that you're also learning something. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have a knack for unlocking the latent entertainment in just about any topic, from archaeology to zoology. Their favorite haunt is neurology -- V.S. Ramachandran and Oliver Sacks contribute so frequently that they should probably be credited as co-hosts (I'd like to take this opportunity submit my nomination of Sacks for Most Huggable Scientist, and if such an award does not yet exist, somebody needs to get on that).

I can't pretend that I completely understand the mental machinery they describe (I'm not sure anybody does), but there's a common thread that connects every interview: this idea that the mind is not a unified entity, but is instead a loose coalition of independent operators that may occasionally work at cross purposes. In extreme cases, you can end up with hemispheres that have dramatically different goals (see alien hand syndrome). The whole notion of a single identity starts to look like a gross oversimplification of a much more complicated reality. What's your favorite color? There may be ten different and completely legitimate answers to that question.

It's hard not to speculate about the ways that this sort of inner diversity may affect artistic creativity. I've started to think that whatever agency is responsible for the good bits of Project Waldo is completely separate from the mind that's composing this blog post. I've heard many artists talk about "tuning in to their muse" or "getting in the zone" when they work, and I've spent many years attempting to get that well of creativity to flow on demand. Those attempts have been mostly unsuccessful.

Once a month, I attend the Tuesday Art Group, a gathering where game and comic artists congregate to sketch and talk and look at one other's work. Some blindingly talented people show up to this thing -- folks like Vinod Rams and his wife Emily Fiegenschuh fill giant sketchbooks with endless, effortless streams of gorgeous artwork. It's hard not to feel like Salieri in a room full of Mozarts. In any event, the people looking over your shoulder are people you'd like to impress. And for the life of me, I can barely manage a stick figure in this setting. It's gotten to the point where I've started to feel like an impostor.

It's certainly not the first time I've experienced the art version of a bashful bladder -- sitting beside Brandon Graham at this year's Emerald City convention, I was stunned by the ease with which he whipped out sketches for fans. I kept thinking, "there's no way I could do this. Every character drawing I made would end up a stunted, homunculoid atrocity."

Radiolab has prompted me to think about this problem in different terms. I've started to wonder if it's not so much a problem of finding my creative voice as it is about turning down the volume on a second, louder voice that's been shouting it down. The metaphor that comes to mind is of a room that contains a shy but poetic little girl and her hulking, overbearing agent. The room's door has a little grill to talk through, and I come to it every day hoping to hear some poetry. When I show up, the fat guy starts berating the child: "YOU'VE GOT TO COME UP WITH SOMETHING GOOD THIS TIME! THEY'RE NOT GOING TO LIKE YOU ANYMORE IF YOU BLOW THIS!" And he keeps shouting even as the kid begins her recitation. Of course I can't hear that little voice through the door with all that yelling going on. On rare occasions, perhaps when the man is asleep, I can sneak up to the door and catch a snippet of what the girl's saying. Of course, as soon as the agent realizes I'm there, the din resumes.

I also suspect it's the agent who's so eager to take the credit when I return to the room with news that someone liked the poetry. "I'M PRETTY DARN GREAT, DON'T YOU THINK?" I don't suppose the girl really cares what anybody thinks.

So I guess it's not so much a problem of getting the girl to talk. It's a problem of getting the big fat guy to shut up for a second.

A New Ball for Juggling

2010-04-05T21:24:00.000-07:00

My wife got a job!

I'm so proud of her -- it's hard enough for locals to find work in America these days, so you can imagine what a coup it is for a Korean to land a job here. Not just any job, mind you, but a good job! I'm reminded of how helpless I felt when I was looking for work in Korea - I couldn't have gotten a job as a dishwasher, let alone something resembling a career. I know I don't really have the right to be proud of Jiyoung, since I didn't raise her or anything. But whatever. I'm proud and a little awed. She's so freakin' smart! And brave. And employed! She's also cute.

This development is relevant to this blog in a more direct way, of course. I still need to make some money at some point, and the sooner the better. But there's a lot more runway ahead, and there isn't a brick wall at the end of it anymore. The idea of turning comics into a career just got more plausible.

Meanwhile, Project Waldo is getting pretty close -- the linework for the last pages is coming together and final coloring should be underway by the end of the month. I'm excited about moving on to the second issue and trying to apply some of the lessons I've learned during the bumpy creation of issue one. Still, Project Waldo has been saddled with a fairly cumbersome rule set -- with all the little fiddly bits, the whole thing moves forward so slowly that it sometimes feels like it's actually going backwards. It's not that I don't like working on it -- it's usually a lot of fun. But when my friends are cranking out six issues to my one, it's hard not to feel a little left behind.

To mix things up a bit, I've decided to start a second comic once this issue is finished -- something I can work on in the mornings before hunkering down for an afternoon of hardcore foliage-drawing. This probably sounds kind of insane, so let me explain. This one's going to be different:

Stylistically simpler and lower-resolution, focusing on value and proportion instead of linework
Rough enough to finish a page in a few hours
Black and white
A much higher panel count, with an emphasis on storytelling
Digital primary distribution method, with print to follow

That last point is the big mystery right now, and I know it's the riddle everybody's trying to solve. "Digital distribution" can mean so many things these days -- ad-supported web comic? How about mobile devices? What about the iPad and Kindle? And then there's Longbox. Is there a format or aspect ratio that is most adaptable to a wide range of displays? Is it even a good idea to try for a flexible layout? What the heck am I even talking about?

Imagine you wanted to get as many eyeballs on your work as possible, and you weren't encumbered by the need for an advance. What would you do? Discouragingly, there don't seem to be too many success stories in the world of English language dramatic webcomics. Some humor strips are doing well, of course, but is anybody paying the bills with a non-funny webcomic?

The Koreans are having a lot of success with serious online comics (this one, like several others by the same author, was turned into a film). Korean web comics are very meaty, with long, vertically-arranged chapters that come out on a regular schedule. The most popular artists are sponsored by the gigantic portal sites that host them. Webcomics are not only sustainable, they're very big business in Korea. One interesting aspect of this system is that there's no formal barrier between amateur and professional submissions -- anybody can upload a comic to Daum (Daum's sort of the Korean Yahoo, Naver is Google, and Google, ironically, is Bing). As artists attract readers, they increase their chances of being selected as a sponsored artist. It's such a great setup that a case could probably be made for translating your comic into Korean just to get a crack at all those millions of readers. As you might imagine, it's a pretty competitive space, and foreign comics don't have the best track record in Korea. But who knows? You might be the first!

Anyway, I'm keeping an eye on the iPad. If the install base gets big enough, the iBooks store could be the golden ticket. Other than that, I don't even know what questions I should be asking. It'll be a couple of months before I break ground on the new project, so I'll be in info-gathering mode until then. Hopefully some smart people will drop some knowledge-bombs on the comments section.

Ah, one last thing. I replaced the clunky left-toolbar page previews with a slick Flash-based thingy. Here's another link to the same preview:

It's all shiny and Apple-y. If you want to do this with your artwork, all you have to do is upload a .pdf to Issuu, and voila!

Perfect from Now On

2010-03-20T23:41:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I had this recurring dream in which I'd get into a fight with a bully, but the air between us would somehow slow down my punches. Like an animal trapped in tar, the harder I pushed my fist toward my adversary, the greater the invisible opposing force. That dream pretty accurately presaged the experience of creating a comic. The harder I've pushed for perfection, the more things have tended to bog down.

The painful lesson that's headed for my forehead like a Tomahawk missile is this: comics are compromise. An artist's ability to finish a comic is proportional to her willingness to tolerate imperfection. This sounds simple enough, but it's a real bear if you're at all invested in the world you're creating (which, if you've decided to make a comic on your own, you probably are). Then there's the added burden of knowing that even if you manage to complete a "perfect" comic, you'll look at it again after a year of further artistic growth and be unimpressed by what you see.

To offer one example of the sort of drastic compromise that's lurking out there: most people come to comics from one of two directions -- you either like to draw, or you like to tell stories. To make a comic, you have to do both. This, frankly, is ridiculous. Think about how divergent and how deep those two skill sets are. Invent a new type of art -- let's call it "shmizzling." To shmizzle well, you have to bat .400 or better in Major League baseball, and you must also master the tenor role in the opera, La fille du régiment. Shmizzling is exactly as difficult as creating comics. You're either Darryl Strawberry in a ruffled shirt trying to hit the high Cs of Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!, or you're Pavarotti trying to get his bat on Hideo Nomo's forkball. How do you move forward from that position without compromising?

I've seen three kinds of comic creators: those who are so uninvested in their work that compromise comes easily, those who care deeply but succumb to the apparent futility of the process before they can finish anything, and those few who keep chasing the mirage of perfection even as they understand that it can never be attained.

There's an infinite gulf separating the first kind of artist from the other two, but there's much less distance between types two and three. I don't know what ingredient makes the difference -- for a lot of people, it just comes down to money and time. Still, I wonder if the biggest distinction may be a willingness to recognize and improve upon your own shortcomings, and to be able to repeat this process for decades. It gets worse -- you have to be okay with putting all that imperfect stuff out in the world for other people to see. And some of those people are going to say mean things about you on the internet.

Anyway, when the molasses of perfectionism drags especially hard on my drawing hand, I try to remember the words of Leonard Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything--

That's how the light gets in.

Man, this post is disjointed. I could either spend all night editing it, or I can just hit "publish post." See lesson above.

Page 20 in progress. Four to go.

Oh, before I forget -- Project Waldo got a page in the April issue of ImagineFX! Seeing it in print (even in tiny form) has gotten me excited to see the rest of it on glossy paper. The colors look way, way better on good paper than they do in my desktop test prints (surprise). Exciting stuff!

Paths of Glory

2010-02-27T20:20:00.000-08:00

Word balloons seem so simple in the beginning. The first time you make one in Photoshop, you just draw an oval with the Elliptical Marquee Tool. After a while, the symmetry starts to bug you, so you decide to draw your word balloons by hand with the Brush Tool. Really, really slowly. But they still look kinda crappy. Before long, word balloons have become a source of sadness in your life.

Well, there's a third path. That path is Paths.

Why are paths so good for word balloons? Three reasons. First, you get super-clean, super-even lines. Second, you can modify them (if you change the words -- which you will -- it's no big deal to modify the dimensions of an already-placed balloon). Third, they're reusable. You can save all your paths into a single file and use them in future pages.

Here's how you do it (more accurately, here's how I do it, and I probably do it oddly, so please feel free to offer your own techniques in the comments section):

First, let's make a path that's shaped like a word balloon. Start by selecting the Pen Tool. The icon looks like a little pen nib.

The Pen Tool makes points, then connects them to other points to create paths. It's important to note that a path is not actually part of the image -- it's sort of a mathematical template that lives in the world of Paths. Think of Pathland as a parallel universe, full of ideal Platonic forms that can be scaled to any size and then copied into the static, pixelated world of Layerland.

To make a path with the pen tool, just left-click and drag. When you drag, you'll see little handles sprout from the point you've just made (if you don't drag, you'll just get a point without handles). These handles allow you to bend the paths between points. When you click and drag your second point, you'll see a path connecting the two points. Each new point you place will extend your path. Right out of the gate, you can make a rough word balloon shape -- don't worry about how funky it looks right now. We'll fix all that in a second. When you finally return to your starting point, your path is complete!

fig. 1: Starting Out

Now we want to adjust our points and handles. To do this, choose the Path Selection Tool. Now left click on an existing point to select it. You may find that all of the points in your path have been selected at once -- just hold down ctrl and click your point again to select only that point (ctrl toggles the Path Selection Tool between point mode and path mode). Now click and drag the little handles to see how they change the shape of your balloon. Also, if you want to either add or remove points from your path, click on your path with the Pen Tool (my biggest problem early on was a tendency to start out with too many points -- the fewer you use, the smoother your path will be).

Note how moving one handle automatically moves its opposite counterpart, like a see-saw. You want this for smooth curves, but for the sharper turns, you need to be able to move the handles independently of one another. To do this, hold down the alt key while dragging on a handle. Now that handle's free as a bird! Do this to get the sharp angles around the word balloon's tail (is "tail" the accepted term for the pointy bit? Maybe "beak" is better).

fig. 2A: The See-Saw

fig. 2B: Free as a Bird!

Fiddle with the handles a bit, and you should end up with something like this:

fig. 3: A Completed Path

Once you've gotten things adjusted the way you want, you're ready to stamp your shape into Layerland. With the Path Selection Tool selected, right-click your path. Choose Stroke Subpath, and WHAMMO! You've got yourself a word balloon! When you stroke a path, Photoshop applies whatever brush size and color you've got currently selected. If you like, you can move your original path to an empty spot, play a little bit with your brush size, and stroke again to see what different line thicknesses look like. Here are a couple for your perusal:

fig. 4: Stroked Paths

There you go! One last thing: you can access your paths in the Paths tab, which lives just to the right of the Layers tab (usually at the lower-right corner of your workspace). Here, you can make new paths and modify old ones. To hide your paths, just click in the empty space at the bottom of the Paths tab.

fig. 5: The Paths Tab

Let me know if you have any questions. I know I'm not using the right words for stuff, but hopefully this is a decent jumping-off point.

Happy ballooning! Also, thanks to Jason Brubaker for suggesting this topic (check out his comic-in-progress -- it's really good).

P.S. I'm almost done with page 17. Since I'm embargoing myself, here's a concept I did for the last game I worked on (click to enlarge).

UPDATE: In response to this post, talented artist Stefan Grambart has put together a detailed word balloon tutorial that's MUCH more sophisticated and ultimately more flexible than what is described above. I highly recommend checking it out, and take a look at some of his amazing art while you're there!

Gonnamakeit. Gonnamakeit.

2010-02-13T09:31:00.000-08:00

Page sixteen is underway. The last time I'll need to draw any rocks, swords, or trees for some time. Eight pages to go. Two thirds done. I can't show any of the new stuff here, but rest assured that I'm mere decades away from finishing this issue.

So slow. Here's what the grown-up part of my brain tells my inner Chicken Little when things get really bad: don't confuse speed with efficiency. Quality is a variable in the first case, but a constant in the second. Eliminating waste, automating repetitive tasks, honing drawing skills, and cultivating self discipline are all worthwhile efficiency improvements. If you're doing everything you can in these areas and people are still saying you're too slow, go to your local comic shop and look at the thousands of examples of what "fast" gets you.

May lightning strike me down on the day I tell someone that they've got to draw a page per day to be successful in comics. That sentence really means "I never got to show the world my best work, and I can't bear the thought that you're choosing not to get on the same hamster wheel."

In the absence of new images, here's some stuff from a game I worked on ten years ago. Black9 was sort of a sci-fi dystopian grab-bag that got the chop after about a year and a half of development. I think the original intent was to do something in the Shadowrun vein, but I went in a slightly fruitier direction.

I accurately predicted that the automated floor cleaning solution of the future would take the form of a bionic Care Bear with a Dust Buster. Roomba shmoomba.

I'm not sure what's going on here. Her knees have bunny ears.

Back to work!

Phase One, in which Doris Gets Her Oats

2010-01-23T14:48:00.000-08:00

I've scoured the internet in search of other folks who are making DIY comics, and there are some very inspiring blogs on the subject (I recommend reMIND, Near Death, and Wormworld, for starters). While there are quite a few examples of people doing things right, I've learned a lot (maybe even more) from people doing things wrong. In fact, if I'm looking for instructive screw-ups, I need look no further than my own portfolio. This isn't the first time I've quit my job to attempt the summit of Mount Comic. My first try was called Gordon and the Stareater.

By the summer of 2005, I had been working for a year and a half at an online game company in Seoul, Korea. It was a great setup -- I had gotten a promotion, I was living in a spiffy loft apartment in a swanky neighborhood, and I loved my coworkers. Still, my job didn't let me make art anymore and I felt a little out of place in the producer role. I did my best, but at some point it just didn't make much sense for me to stick around.

When I quit, my work visa had four months left on it and I had about three grand in my bank account. I ditched the loft and dragged my sofa over to my friend John Kim's apartment. I didn't really have much of a plan, but I knew one thing: I wanted to make a graphic novel.

Gordon and the Stareater had been kicking around in the back of my head since college. Attempts to work on it during my off-hours had never gotten much past the concept phase. This free stretch was a perfect opportunity to finally sink my teeth into my dream project.

I felt pretty guilty about couch-surfing through John's entire summer, so I made myself as scarce as possible. I spent a couple of weeks scouting good drawing spots -- I drew the first page in a coffee shop near COEX mall, then drew the next couple of pages in the Seocho public library. Right out of the gate, I had logistical problems -- Seoul in August is a sauna, and every library I visited was like a sweat lodge. I'd probably have set the thermostat at somewhere below the boiling point of water, but the librarians had other ideas. My pages became grey smudge-swamps. My sweat turned out to be a pretty decent fixative, making erasing a high-friction, high-risk endeavor.

About a month into things, I discovered that the International Studies library at Seoul National University didn't check student IDs. There was sweet, sweet air conditioning for us sissy foreigners, and the library windows looked out on a beautiful, cicada-filled forest. That month may turn out to have been the high point of my life -- the days were spent drawing spaceships and eating lunch among the evergreens, and in the evenings I studied Korean and went for long riverside walks with Jiyoung, my future wife.

Here are the first couple of pages (if you're a glutton for punishment, you can see the rest of them here):

I blogged about my comic then, too. I had maybe ten people following along, and that was enough for me to feel like a mini-celebrity. I remember watching the students at the library and thinking "these people have no idea that the great Nate Simpson is drawing his magnum opus right here in their midst!" Ha.

Well, my visa ran out, but not before I fell in love with Jiyoung. The only way I could stay in Korea was to get another job, and that meant teaching English. I chose a split shift, thinking that would make it easier for me to continue working on my comic. The idea was that I'd teach from 6:30AM to 11:00AM, then draw until 6PM, then work again until 9:00. My memories of that year are a sleep-deprived blur of Katamari Damacy, MST3K reruns, and napping. Gordon and the Stareater was dead.

Looking back, the book may have been doomed from the start. Part of the problem was that I had sat on the story for too long. Or more precisely, I had never come up with a story, but had instead accumulated a decade's worth of labyrinthine backstory. I still can't believe I drew ten pages without having any idea where the story was headed. Artists often think more in terms of scenes than stories, and we end up with these precious tableaux that absolutely must be included, regardless of their irrelevance to the storyline. For a good example of this tendency writ large, see the movie "9."

Stareater had a few other handicaps:

Revision-freak that I am, I had trouble finishing the drawings before erasing clean through the paper.
I only had a laptop for coloring (not to mention, I didn't really have any ideas about color to begin with).
The main character looked like me. I'm still immature and self-obsessed, but I've learned not to put myself in the stories anymore. Nor are Project Waldo's female characters perfect, untouchable ice-queens. These are both good reasons to jettison any characters you came up with before you finished puberty.
I didn't plan the dialogue before drawing the pages. I'd just draw a bunch of people standing around with their mouths open and then figure out what they were saying afterwards. And I used simple ovals for speech balloons, which drives me crazy now.
I didn't really have a publishing strategy -- I guess I thought Joe Quesada would just happen across my little website and immediately fly out to Korea, contract in hand.
I didn't have access to the feedback and tips that regularly appear in the comments section of this blog.
I didn't have Jiyoung around all the time to keep me chipper.

Most of these mistakes are so boneheaded that I doubt this list will be of any use to anybody but me. If nothing else, you can feel better about your own project because you're competing with people who blow whole decades drawing space operas in which they've cast themselves.

I don't want to end on a sour note, so here are a couple more comics I drew in Korea. For those who think I draw too slowly, please note that I drew both of these comics inside of fifteen minutes on a pair of bar napkins. In case it isn't obvious, I was intoxicated.

I already know somebody's going to point out that these are better than anything I've done since. Duh.

Intermission

2010-01-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago I mentioned that I had taken a short(ish) break from Project Waldo to draw a pinup for a real live comic. Well, an official announcement has been made, so I can finally talk about it. My first entry into the world of grown-up comics is this drawing for the upcoming Viking trade paperback from Image Comics (click to enlarge):

Written by Ivan Brandon and illustrated by Nic Klein, Viking has earned some justifiable critical praise over the past year, mainly on the strength of Ivan's hard-boiled characters and Nic's gorgeous painterly style. I especially enjoyed the mini-romance that unfolds between Egil (a bloody-minded Viking version of the Tasmanian Devil) and a stray kitten that shows up after one of Egil's many gruesome head-splitting sessions. For my pinup, I tried to show how a kitten might express its affection for a Viking in terms the recipient would comprehend.

It's hard to fully express how grateful I am to both Ivan and Nic for letting me participate in this enterprise. Hopefully I'll get more chances to work with them both down the road.

Project Waldo proceeds apace, with pages 9, 10, and 11 drawn and page 12 in progress. I can't show any of it here, which sucks because I'm fairly happy with how they're turning out so far. I really only have one more Project Waldo image to post here (the color version of page 8), so I'm going to have to figure out some other stuff to post until the first issue comes out. I may double back and show some development sketches for the first 8 pages... if there's anything else you'd like me to talk about here, I'm open to suggestions.

A few people have asked where things stand with publishers. I'd probably be stricken by lightning if I got into specifics, but I can say that the project has attracted persistent interest from several high-profile companies. I think it's likely that Project Waldo will be published by an established company, though I haven't rushed to sign anything. I'm happy to self-fund the comic for as long as I can, especially as the lack of hard deadlines allows me to learn through semi-directed experimentation (and to try out techniques suggested by commenters on this blog). I'll be running out of cash soon enough, however, and when the music stops I'll have to rush to find an open chair. We'll see how that goes.

Finally, if you haven't seen Avatar in 3D yet, stop reading this and get thee to a theater. Regardless of what you think of the story, this movie marks the firing of a starting pistol, and the race is on. The bang has no doubt been heard by everyone who ever wanted to make their imaginary worlds tangible. I left the theater with a strong desire to be among the first to find out exactly how much else could be done with Mister Cameron's new paint box.

I wonder what Moebius thinks of the film. It's hard to deny that Avatar bears a distinct resemblance to Arzach. Probably just coincidence, right? I hope not. I think we should all be ripping off Moebius as much as possible.

Out of Limes

2009-12-14T23:57:00.000-08:00

Page 7 first-pass color. Click to enlarge. Below, there will be moping.

I spent some time revamping the linework for this page before diving into the color -- that bottom panel has been a big jerkface from the get-go. At some point I'll animate the billions of pose revisions that figure went through. Legs here, legs there, chin here, chin there, arm too skinny, arm too fat -- seen in time-lapse, she'll do quite a jig. Happily, I think I ended up with something fairly inoffensive. The color sort of irks me, though. In the interest of not taking forever, I've decided to leave it for now and come back to it when I've got some new ideas.

In other news, I'll be doubling the resolution of my linework (from 3300x5100 to 6600x10200). My computer seems to be able to chew on this mega-bolus as long as I keep the layers reasonable, and I can knock it down to the lower resolution for the coloring pass. In the end, I can blow up the color layers to the higher resolution, and any loss of crispness will be hidden by the hi-res linework layer. Though I originally did all this to make it easier to do posters, there's another nifty side-benefit to working at the higher resolution -- the flatting plugins handle the little culs-de-sac more deftly, so I spend much less time hunting and clicking through the edges of bushes and eyebrows. Sweet!

The thing that keeps me up at night is the fear that I'm not living up to the promise of the first pages. There are plenty of convenient excuses -- for one, the establishing shots didn't need to move the story forward, so I could sort of revel in the scale of everything. Still, it's a little unnerving to watch the web stats plummet as I move further into the story. This is probably the main drawback to making the development process public -- when the buzz drops off I feel like a schlub, and when it spikes I turn into King Doucheron of the Nozzleites. It's hard to shut that stuff out. Word on the street is that James Stokoe quit the internet cold-turkey for similar reasons. I get it.

I happened across an imperfect metaphor for the way things feel right now: there are lots of parallels between drawing your first comic and setting out on an exploratory voyage during the Age of Sail.

Announce your plan to search for the Seven Cities of Gold = start blogging about your comic
Queen makes a speech in your honor = Warren Ellis says nice stuff about you on his blog
Handbills announcing your departure are posted all over town = you're mentioned on drawn.ca
Throngs cheer as you are paraded toward the harbor = you're a Daily Deviant on Deviant Art
As you leave the harbor, the cheering becomes inaudible = your blog stats fall off a cliff
No matter how many sails are abroad, you can't do better than one knot = you force yourself to sit in front of the computer for ten hours a day, but your brain is perennially constipated
Sharks = carpal tunnel syndrome
Becalmed in the Sargasso Sea, you boil and eat your boots = you search for your own name on Twitter -- finding nothing, you give Bing a try

There must be a billion of these. Feel free to add to the list. This probably means I'm reading too much Patrick O'Brian.

Please don't tell anybody about the Twitter thing.

Bubblicious

2009-11-23T15:10:00.000-08:00

Page 6 colorized. Click to enlarge. More after.

I learned a new lesson this week: never draw speech bubbles directly into the original line art. I'm pretty sure somebody made a comment to this effect several months ago, but I'm a late bloomer. There are a few really good reasons not to bake speech bubbles into the drawing:

The dialogue may need to change (as it did with this page).
I may want to change the way I draw the bubbles, themselves (with this page, I switched from the old hand-drawn bubbles to stroked paths, which will be easier to modify in the future).
I'm going to have to change the font (suggestions welcome), which means I'll have to resize the speech bubbles later, anyway.
I want to publish the book in other languages, and I'll have to resize the bubbles to match the localized text.
I may want to use the panels in an animatic someday, in which case I'll want the bubbles removed.
If I ever want to sell prints of individual pages, they'll probably sell better without the text.

That said, the bubbles need to be a part of the composition from the very beginning. They just need to be on a separate layer. It took some time to re-draw all the bubble-hidden detail for this page, but I'm glad I did it:

Another lesson learned. I'll double back and remove the bubbles from pages 3, 4, and 5 in the coming weeks. That's what we artists call "eating your vegetables."

Ah, before I forget: paths are rad. Once again, a commenter recommended this months ago. I had known about paths for years, but for some reason hadn't really played with them too much until I picked up the DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics. The moral of the book: paths are rad (it has other morals, but I am prohibited from learning them until I've wasted a few thousand more hours doing stuff the wrong way). But yes, paths. I am a convert. Never again will I spend fifteen minutes redrawing a long, curved line by hand.

For the uninitiated (i.e. me, a month ago), paths are vector-based lines that can be manipulated with little handles. You bend the handle, the line curves. You need to make the line zig, you add a new handle and bend it the other way. The paths live in the paths palette, which sits just to the right of your layers palette. The path tools sit near the bottom of the toolbar -- you really only need two of them to start: the pen tool and the direct selection tool. Try different combinations of ctrl, shift, and alt (or the Mac variants of these keys, which I think are command, lilt, and traipse) to see how these tools alter a path. Once you've got a path, right-click it and select "stroke subpath." BAM! Photoshop traces the path with whatever brush and color you've got currently selected. Instant smooth line. Now go have an Asahi. Note that it is super dry.

On to new business! Namely, my ongoing quest to get faster. I could really use a breakthrough on this -- I feel like I've been achieving incremental efficiency improvements, but what I really need is to go twice as fast as I'm going right now. I'll be trying out the following tactics this week:

No internet (this time, for real).
Start each day with fifteen minutes of planning. Set small, achievable goals.
Systematize the coloring process: do all shadows at once, do all highlights at once.
When stuck on something, switch to a new task and let the old problem percolate in the background.
Spend more time on the rough underdrawing -- work on it until the proportions and composition are correct. This should reduce the amount of time spent erasing "finished" line work.
Hire a flatter.
Take more small breaks to prevent short-term burnout.
Get a more comfortable chair (I'd imagine that in the current economic climate, the market would be glutted with abandoned office chairs).
Check out more audio books from the library. Preferably, ones that don't suck.

Does anybody have any other ideas?

Finally, many thanks to Craig and Nathalie Kaplan for translating my pitch letter into French for me. With their help, I've added some French names to the list of publishers who are now looking at Project Waldo.

Où est Waldo?

2009-10-27T18:09:00.000-07:00

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 assume many publishers have similar bouncer-types. It often helps to know a guy who knows a guy. If you're that guy, or you know the other guy, then I would like to be the guy who knows you.

Finally, I think I should probably send my pitch email in French. To my knowledge, I don't speak French. If any of you Francophones would be willing to translate a couple of paragraphs for me, I'd be so grateful that I'd give you a free signed copy of Project Waldo when it comes out (how's that for hubris?). I might even make a really crappy drawing on it. Of a penguin. If you're interested in doing this, please contact me directly through email.

Sorry to spam everybody with this. I appreciate your help and/or patience!

A Seattlite Yankee in King Louis' Court

2009-10-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

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's been pointed out that if I get an ISBN for my Ka-Blam run, it could prevent me from re-releasing the comic through a new publisher (I'm not exactly sure why this is, so if anybody has any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them). Third, there's a guy over at the Gutterzombie forums who's had some problems with color profiles at Ka-Blam -- it sounds like their output may be a little inconsistent (though on second viewing, there may have been a miscommunication about CMYK profiles). Regardless, Ka-Blam's the plan until a publisher shows some interest.

I've talked to a couple of established comics artists about self-publishing, and they generally reject the idea out of hand. I can certainly see the disadvantages, especially when it comes to marketing and distribution, but I've heard so many horror stories about working with the big publishers that I'm not entirely convinced one way or the other. Other than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, can anybody provide examples of successful self-published titles (and maybe share some of the strategies they used to break through)?

As I've continued to troll the internet-sea in search of publishing alternatives, I've often been told to look to Europe. To North American eyes my art looks foreign, but I wonder if actual Europeans would interpret my style in the same way. Ever since I ran across my first Moebius comic, I've had sort of an inferiority complex when it comes to Franco-Belgian comics (I have a similar feeling about high-end manga). I have assumed that readers acclimated to the "real" stuff would dismiss mine as weak tea. My blog statistics haven't done much to dispel this fear: there's a fairly marked lack of interest from France (especially compared to Germany and the UK). I guess I'm the anti-Jerry Lewis of comics. It's too bad, because France is an awesome place to sell comics -- larger format books, more generous schedules, and robust sales. AND you're perceived as a real artist, as opposed to here, where comics artists are relegated to the same social stratum as mimes and puppeteers (who, come to think of it, are probably also cherished in France).

If any of you would be willing to pose as a French person and write me an encouraging comment, it would do wonders for my self-esteem. Spell "the" as "ze." That's how I'll know you're French.

Stick and Carrot

2009-10-08T08:52:00.000-07:00

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 issue. It's all there now, just waiting for a liberal dollop of barrels and elaborately-knotted ropes. Having some certainty about the layout has taken a bit of the edge off of my completion anxieties -- there do not seem to be any un-drawable things lying in wait at the end of the book (though the last page is going to make this one look charmingly simple).

Drawing lots of barrels gives you time to ruminate on the future, and my futurey thoughts on this project fall into three categories: dreams, plans, and goals.

My dreams for Project Waldo are embarrassingly opulent. They involve winning Eisners, having the book turned into a movie, and palling around with Michael Cera. Of course these are ridiculous notions, as that sort of great luck has never befallen anyone, ever. I don't really have illusions that anything of the sort will actually occur, which is why these kinds of thoughts don't fall under the "goals" category. But they do help my mental rowers to put their backs into it when I'm becalmed in the barrel-doldrums.

Planning is much more wheel-meets-road. I've made a schedule, complete with deadlines, and set a ship date for myself. Of course, this was before I fell down the bottomless pit of page 8. So after two weeks, I'm already a week behind schedule. Still, I've discovered that being able to put a number on my lateness has added some urgency (some would say "abject panic") to my work day.

I've only got one concrete goal: to get the first issue printed. I'll have crossed my personal finish line when I'm holding Project Waldo number one in my hand (which is not to say I won't do the next issue, but that I'm not spending many cycles thinking about it right now). My prospects of getting a "real" publisher interested in this are probably hindered by my propensity to brag about how slow I am, but that's all okay because Ka-Blam exists.

I've mentioned Ka-Blam here before, and several people have chimed in with positive impressions of the company. It's starting to look like my safety school. Their site is a little confusing, as Ka-Blam is only the printing arm of a three-headed entity that also sells your books online (Indyplanet) and distributes them to retailers (Comics Monkey). It's basically a one-stop solution for the independent creator, with the (gigantic) caviat that the creator is still responsible for marketing.

Here's the ultra-rad part: you don't even need to print a single issue before posting your book on Indyplanet. You can upload your images and set your quantity to zero, and Ka-Blam will print each issue as it's ordered. That's right: you don't need any capital to get started (though I think there may be some setup fees).

I can only see a couple of potential drawbacks. First, the per-issue cost is relatively high compared to a four-color press. I did the math for a full-color 24 page comic on high-bright paper, and it comes out to $2.64 per issue (it goes up to $2.99 if I go with glossy paper -- is glossiness worth an extra thirty cents to you guys?). At $2.64, I'd have to price the comic at $4.50 just to have a chance of staying afloat. I've been listening to the House to Astonish podcast (it is hilarious and promotes accent envy), and from them I get the impression that in many cases, any price over four bucks can be a dealbreaker. If anybody has pricing advice, I'd love to hear it.

Drawback number two: Comics Monkey is a new and untested entity, and it remains to be seen whether retailers will go out of their way to set up accounts with them. CM certainly won't have the penetration of a company like Diamond, but it looks like they're very motivated to build solid relationships with stores. Sometimes the little guys show a little more hustle.

Wow, this post is getting epic. One last thing: I think this may be the last full page to appear here. I'm told that there should be some previously-unseen material in the comic, itself. That said, I'll continue to post individual panels and other development art over the coming months.

Here's one last barrel for old times' sake. Click to enlarge.

Now With 100% Less Whining

2009-09-23T00:36:00.000-07:00

Page 4 first-pass color complete. Click to enlarge. More below.

Here's why I love the internet: a month ago, I didn't know the word "flatting." Three weeks ago, I didn't know there were flatting plugins. Two weeks ago, it took me fifteen hours to flat a page using those plugins. This week, it took three hours. All because of comments on this blog. Holy shnikeys.

I ended up trying Eagle's method -- that is, removing extraneous lines from the line art layer before running the plugins. Below are examples of the line art for this page in pre- and post-culled states. Note that in many cases all I had to do was make a "leak" in between two areas so that they filled with the same color.

And here's what the plugins spat out. The second image is cleaner and more tractable. All it needs is a few dinks with the magic wand, and I'm on my way.

By the way, I still used the high-noise version at left to add some nice random variation to large single-color areas. And below is the flatted image before coloring began.

Thanks, Eagle! And thanks to everybody else who tossed out suggestions. You guys are teaching me how to fish!

I have received a few e-mails of commiseration, telling me not to get too depressed about the comic-making process. Perhaps I have wallowed a little too much in the whiny pit. Please let the record show that when I manage to make something work, I experience a boundless euphoria (really). Why, when I finished the first panel yesterday, I was so jazzed that I took Jiyoung out and splurged on fine Kentuckian cuisine. Poultry prepared using traditional old-world crispiness techniques.

Also, thank you to everyone who has joined the mailing list over the last few days. It's very heartening to see that there are interested people out there!

On that note, I've begun to think about marketing. The meager research I've done has only highlighted how little I know about, well, everything. I assume the market for this sort of work is relatively small, so I need to gain as much exposure as possible within that narrow demographic. The internet is clearly my friend. Outside of Google ads, does anybody have any idea how to get the word out?

There's also a wild-card issue: I wonder how many people who are currently interested will be put out by the unusual turn the story's about to take. Anyone who was on board for straight-ahead sword and sorcery is about to get a nosebleed.

Oh! And has anybody used Comixpress? I'm intrigued by their online store. No piles of inventory = major selling point.

Problem Solving

2009-09-19T09:18:00.000-07:00

Page 7 line art done. Click to enlarge. More chit-chat below the image.

Aintitcool recently posted a great conversation with Steve Lieber, the artist who drew "Whiteout." He shared a heap of good information about craft and process, but I was especially interested in the description of his emotional travails:

"I was ... less-than-pleasant to my wife at times, because I was just inside the pages and couldn't see past the battle I was fighting with each one. I think I let being concerned about how the book was going to turn out turn me into someone who was less concerned about how everything else in my life was going to turn out ... I was a damned troll under a bridge. [laughs] I was just really unpleasant. I was solving new problems, and rather than feeling satisfied that I was solving new problems, I was getting angry because everything wasn't coming out perfect the first time I put a line down."

I haven't quite gone to Troll Town, but I do see something similar going on with Project Waldo. Too often, my wife will sit through a silent dinner with me, only to discover that my muteness has been attributable to an all-consuming internal struggle over the correct placement of a left arm. When I start working on a page, my tension level gets cranked up to eleven and stays there until the last line is drawn. Partly, this reflects the initial ugliness of the page. I imagine getting hit by a bus while I'm half-way through and everybody at the funeral looking at that last unfinished drawing and shaking their heads, taking back all the nice things they'd said about me. "How could the guy have been any good if he drew the human figure that horribly?" Every page is a huge embarrassment right up to the last moment. That's how I know when I've finished -- I stop being embarrassed.

Of course that's not the only force driving the process. There's also the sense of having left a problem unsolved. The late, great Seth Fisher (a math major) described creation this way:

“Art is really just problem solving in action. You start with a few lines, then you try to balance those lines with other lines compositionally, then you balance that with trying to explain a certain space or emotion... Perspective, composition, timing, and color theory are technical skills. You have a problem, and you have this toolbox full of techniques that you use to paint a totally unique bridge from an assumption to its implications.”

That sounds very familiar. The initial rough sketch frames a challenge -- it says "okay, you've gotta have these masses, in this order, with this sort of movement -- now let's see if you can make recognizable real-world objects conform to this pattern in a natural, free-flowing way." Although I sort of pooh-poohed abstract art in school, I'm starting to get that it's the only kind of art. The only difference here is that I've got to make abstract art out of people and bushes and big lizard creatures.

ANYWAY. I stuck a new little button at left that lets you add your email address to the Project Waldo mailing list (actually, it's a Google Group -- the easiest and cheapest way I could find to compile a mailing list). Please don't be shy -- I'll only use this list to notify you when the first issue is out and where it can be found/ordered. I'm trying to get a sense of how many people might actually buy the comic, and this number will determine how I end up printing and distributing the book.

Based on the current list membership, exactly three people will be buying the first issue, and one of them is me. So please join up. I swear I won't spam you with ads for penis enlargement pills. Unless a male enhancement company would like to sponsor Project Waldo. Wait, what would that say about me? This is a bad idea. But yeah. Call me. Maybe we can work out some sort of trade.

And speaking of printing, does anybody have any thoughts or anecdotes about working with Ka-Blam? A few people have recommended their on-demand printing service, but I'm still open to alternatives. Moritat tells me I'll need a garage with very high rafters to store all that inventory -- a mental image that is both vivid and daunting. I'm still looking forward to the invention of a large-format, full-color, 300 dpi Kindle-type device.

On that day it'll be good-bye print, hello iTunes!

Flattened Earth Society

2009-09-09T17:48:00.001-07:00

First pass on page 3 color. Click to enlarge. Below, I will try to keep things brief and I will fail.

I finally downloaded the Flatten and Multifill Photoshop plugins. Survey says... not a magic bullet, but they probably sped things up a little bit and definitely produced cleaner, more line-conformant results. In case you're curious, here's how they work:

The plugins are easy to install -- just drag the files into Photoshop's plugins directory and they'll show up under "Filters." There's only one tricky step - the black and white line art (not black on transparent, mind you) must be completely de-anti-aliased (re-aliased?) before the plugin will work. It turns out that this is done by selecting Image->Adjustments->Threshold. Bump the slider a bit to the right until all your lines connect, and then run Multifill. Multifill automatically fills every closed area in the drawing with a unique color.

Next comes Flatten, which removes all the black lines from the drawing and smooshes all your color patches against one another so their jaggy borders meet up underneath your lines. You end up with this:

I stared at this way too long when it was first generated. It's like Mister Toad's Wild Ride for your eyeballs. I soon discovered that there were some areas where color had leaked (see the bottom-middle panel), so I had to go back a couple of times to tighten up the drawing (in the future, I will be much more conscientious about closing my outlines). Then began the arduous process of "flatting" -- that is, turning this patchwork of gobbledygook into areas of like color. After fifteen hours of hunting down leaf edges and little dangly bits, I ended up with this:

I didn't think too hard about my color choices at this early stage -- the idea is to set things up so that you can easily select objects in the scene and adjust their color later. To start, I just went with green for trees, blue for skies, and purple for people (of course). But back to that fifteen hours: does anybody know if there's a way to click-and-drag with the magic wand? If there is, I couldn't find it. The closest I could find was the Quick Selection Tool, which creates anti-aliased edges (very bad). Man, if I could have clicked-and-dragged those leaves, this would have taken two hours instead of fifteen. This whole process definitely convinced me of the need to outsource my flatting.

The flatting plugins produce one unexpected bonus: if you paste the multifill patchwork into your top layer, knock down the opacity to 9 percent, and set the blend mode to Soft Light, you get automatic variation in areas of repeated detail. I may someday look back on this trick with disdain (can you say "lens flare?"), but for now it seems like a really nice way to get big masses of leaves, rocks, or planks to look variegated. Not too shabby!

A couple of people have asked me what kinds of brushes I use in Photoshop. I use the default Brush Tool settings: normal mode, 100% opacity, 100% flow, 100% hardness. At my current image size, the 4-pixel width works best for intricate linework, while thick outlines get the 7-pixel treatment. Should I be using something more high-falutin'?

In other news, Brandon Graham has a new King City book on the stands. It's great.

Nurpling

2009-09-04T10:49:00.000-07:00

Page six. Click to enlarge. More rambling below the image.

As you're drawing the eight thousandth leaf in a drawing like this, you start to ask yourself what exactly it is that all this detail really gets you. The costs are obvious - the drawing goes more slowly, your wrist hurts, the legibility of the image can even suffer. So why do it?

For one, meaningful detail helps to model form. If you've decided on a "clean" look (and I'm not sure why I decided that, but whatever), you can't fall back on crosshatching or shading to indicate surface contours. Adding detail is a way of showing the lie of a surface. For example, I drew all the seams on the girl's costume. It's not because I have a fondness for seams. It's that, drawn correctly, the seams turn your figure into a wire frame model. The same goes for belts, straps, buckles, shoelaces, and buttons. There are pitfalls -- if you go too dense, you can lose the silhouette. If you draw even the tiniest button at the wrong angle, it will blow everything and make your image look flatter.

It doesn't just work for figures. Panel lines, rivets, and insignia perform the same function on a drawing of a spaceship. All those rocks in the background help to indicate the shape and orientation of the hillside. The place where I suck the most is in the trees. It is very easy to go into automatic mode when you're drawing a giant mass of leaves, and that can lead to disaster -- the orientation of every leaf is important. My plants always go flat. I suspect the solution is to find a shorthand that doesn't require me to draw every leaf. When I finally learn this shorthand, I will punch my past self in the nutsack.

Digital tools can also lure you into absurd situations. Until about twenty years ago, the only way an artist could increase the density of detail was to work larger. Of course, even if you're drawing on a sheet the size of a tablecloth, you always have an intuitive sense of the relationship between the panel and the whole. Not so with zooming. In the bottom-left panel of the page above, I forgot how zoomed-in I was. I actually sweated the orientations of the arrows in the quivers of the army men (those are the little specks marching behind the big hairy speck with a house on its back). When I finally zoomed back out, the panel was just a grey mass, completely unreadable. I had to erase two hours' worth of leaves and redraw them at a larger size. It was heartbreaking. The zoom tool now allows you to draw more detail than is perceptible by anyone who isn't a raptorial bird. This is silliness, and I will try not to make that painful mistake again.

It's not all bad, though. Detail can also have a legitimizing effect on things. You're kind of dressing your drawing up in a tuxedo. Weirdly, I've noticed that as I add detail, the dialogue tends to change. I'm forcing myself to look at the scene as a real place, with real people in it. I gradually fool myself into taking the scene seriously, and hopefully it has the same effect on the reader. Detailing also makes you spend more time with the drawing, which gives you more opportunities to discover and correct flaws.

Geof Darrow once said something about detail being a crutch -- that he used it to mask weaknesses in his drawing. This is typical self-effacing Darrow, and it's not true. That man draws really, really well. But I feel his point. Adding stupid-dense detail might be the easiest way to get applause. People like to see an obvious accumulation of man-hours. This arrangement sometimes makes me feel like some kind of con-man. All I can say is that the drawing doesn't tell me it's done until I've drawn what I've drawn. Maybe I have a bad case of horror vacui.

That said, after spending more than a week on a page, nothing feels nicer than sitting down with a John Porcellino book and taking some deep breaths. A nice, open, white space can be the best thing ever. As I gain confidence, I hope to learn how to do this, as well.

Changing topics. I'm starting to think about how to get this printed. I've talked to a couple of publishers, and they poop their pants (you can hear a little "blert" noise over the phone) when I tell them how slow I'm going. So I guess I have two questions: First, is it at all conceivable that a publisher could be okay with a three- or four-month turnaround between issues? Would readers even wait that long? Second, does anybody have experience with self-publishing? Can I expect a decent level of quality? Is it insane to try to market your own work? Would I spend all my time addressing envelopes? And how much do you think someone might pay for a full-color, 24-page issue?

To sum up, is there some business model that turns all this labor into food on my table?

And please don't say "go faster." That's my wife's job.

Slow Ride

2009-08-22T10:10:00.000-07:00

Page 2 first pass color. Click to enlarge. More below.

I'm kinda slow.

Getting to go slowly is the reason I got into drawing in the first place. I've never been very good at activities that demanded real-time proficiency. Dancing, sports, party conversation -- even sketching in front of someone else makes me jumpy. I mean, what if someone saw me make a mistake? They'd judge me! They'd stop liking me and tell all their friends that they know a guy who is a below-average dancer! Improvisational comedy is so beyond my comprehension as to seem supernatural.

The nice thing about drawing, though, is that you can start out with something really clunky and then chip away the things that don't work little by little. You can make as many mistakes as you want, and nobody will ever know about any of them! In the end, some of your mistakes will even turn out not to have been mistakes at all. Biological evolution works the same way -- start out with goop in a puddle and after a few billion years you get Velociraptors and sea otters. I never get anything right on the first try, ever. That's part of the reason why I use so many layers while coloring (145 in this case) -- I end up trying just about every color and every possible blend mode on every element of the scene, and then trying every possible combination of multiple blend modes... you see how things can get bogged down. Hopefully I'll come across some rules of thumb that help me to avoid wasting time on the most hopeless of these experiments. But for now, this is how it works for me.

That said, I've been getting some really helpful feedback. A colorist named Marc Letzmann introduced me the to the concept of "flatting." Flatting is the process of setting up shape selection sets that conform to the original linework so that areas of the drawing can be easily selected and colored. Often, comic artists hire colorists to do flatting for them, so that they can go in later with the magic wand and quickly add final color. The "duh" moment for me was when Marc pointed out that you have to turn off anti-aliasing to get crisp selection edges. That's definitely going to speed me up and reduce my layer count (I had been using the magic wand and then expanding the selection by one pixel to move it under the line art). There is also apparently a flatting plugin for Photoshop that I have not tried yet. As to whether I'll try hiring somebody else to do my flatting... I dunno. What have your experiences been with flatters?

I've picked up a few new viewers over the last few days, and everybody seems so kind and knowledgable! Thanks to Brandon Graham (an incredible artist who writes my favorite blog ever) for outing me and Warren Ellis for mentioning me, as well. When I found out Ellis had gotten involved on Thursday morning, I shouted so loud that my wife thought I had injured myself.

I think I'm going to take a break from coloring and get back to page 6. I'll try to pick up a little speed on this one. If' I can nail down the line art in three days, I'll be stoked.

Paint by Numbers

2009-08-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

First-pass color on page 1. Click to enlarge. More after the image.

Even more than with the original line art, it's taking me a long time to figure out whether something works or not. Right now, I'm mostly shooting from the hip. I know I don't want muddy color, and I'm avoiding using black for shadows. I'm trying to use new blend modes to modulate the color of the linework, itself (see leaves in background of panel 1). I'm also trying to keep all the panels on one page in the same color key (though I'm not sure I've pulled that off here).

That connects to a bigger lesson I've been learning over the past month: a comic page isn't a collection of smaller drawings -- it is one big drawing, and the panel borders and speech bubbles are all part of the composition. One thing that makes me wince a little bit when I look at the old Stareater stuff is how much of an afterthought the speech bubbles are. They're these perfect ovals (just running a stroke using the circular selection tool), and they don't relate to the surrounding art at all. Now that I'm actually drawing them, I see that ovals waste a lot of space. And the bubbles need to have their own visual rhythm, just like everything else on the page.

Looking at it now, it seems obvious.

Working with these color files is rough -- the .psd file for page 1 is brobdignagian. It takes me four or five minutes to save, and up to 30 seconds just to zoom. I think I need to figure out a way to do color without using 70 layers. I do quite a bit of slider-magic on every layer, though -- right up to the end. Maybe I just need a beefier computer? Donations are welcome.

Alrighty. Back to coloring page 2!