ZX page 42, 43 : Dream's end

The comic has ended.

Just a cover to do, fix errors in all the pages (I estimate that'll take a week or so) and then I start on the painful trek to publishing. I'll try my luck with the Greek publishers first, at the annual Comicdom Convention that occurs on 16. 17 and 18 of this month. If you're Greek and you'd like to meet me you can seek me out at the fanzine room as usual. I'll post about it when it's about to happen, again.

If you have any thoughts on the comic you could share them in the comments. I'll be tweaking the art and writing in the past pages but probably not posting them hey, I have to save something for the printed version, right? The meanings of the comic will not change so although this is not yet the definitive version, it is complete.

- Helm
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ZX page 41: pillars of doubt

I opted to use a different vantage because I didn't want to do the usual Marathon dam shot. I used this photograph for reference. It kind of looks wonky architecturally in the comic but so it does in the reference too, perhaps it wasn't such a good idea to use unreal-looking reference but it did suit my purposes on a few higher levels. One is that is gives the page a nice overall construction, panel segments slotted into natural divisors. The other is that I wanted to place the monologue of Stephan on top of the pillar that supports the bridge because his doubts are shaking up the foundation of the relationship between the two of them. The black/white contrast between them in the establishing shot is a further indication of distance, of the here and the beyond. I don't expect anyone reader to read my comic and go "oh, the doubts are over the foundation of their relationship, nice!" because I think these things work best - and are most worth it - when they leave a subconscious mark. I only mention such here because I know that some readers enjoy post-analysis of an the art as a separate joy to actually reading the comic.

Marathon's already looking better, by the way. I mean after we burned it down last summer. My friend Vasilis showed up out of the blue and gave me a ride over there, it was a very pleasant afternoon. I dreaded going back because of the summer fires but it seems the green is back at least. The trees will take a while. Possible dam walkers are invited back, I guess. I wonder if we'll burn it again this summer.

Next couple of pages end this story. I'll try to post them both at the same time (if not on next Monday then certainly a couple of days later) so as to not diminish the impact of the finale. Then it's revisions on the art and a cover left to do. I'm not looking forward to trying to shop this around but in the same time, I am, if that makes sense. The comic certainly feels as if it's over already for me even though I haven't drawn the next two pages. It's over in my brain and in my heart. Drawing the last bits and then fixing the badly drawn bits before them is just routine housekeeping now. What's strange (strange? perhaps not so much) is that it has brought some psychological issues on the surface it seems I have to tackle directly soon. I guess it's a good thing if your art surprises you, right?

-Helm
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ZX page 40: Energetic Disassembly

This one took a long time. I am considering it colored for the cover too, don't know. Perhaps something else might come to me after I'm done with the comic proper.

Also a new thing I did this time I let the pencils show underneath the inks, I almost never do this as I consider it sloppy but I wanted a few more rough edges here and there on this piece, and the extra rendering level really. I tried to keep the pencils relatively tight just for this reason which increased the workload. It was a full-time week for me, an artist that isn't even paid to do this. Oh well, you're only 25 and living in the good graces of your father once, right?



Which reminds me, I won't be 25 for long, heh. Oh well, good spirits, now. Like every time I finish a page. But will this making comics thing work out at the end? I don't know!

This chapter is the last one, by the way.

-Helm
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ZX Page 39: And then she says

Chiaroscuro, they call it I think? From darkness to the light, something like that.

I wonder how many times in my life I've been inappropriate without realizing it.
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ZX Page 38

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ZX Page 37

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ZX Page 36: All our maps are lost in the wind

There's not much more to say.

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ZX Page 35: Gettting from A to B

This page is a comment on how one remembers the past: a play between regimented linearity, like pleasant summer blockbusters, this happened then that, rehearsed and made sense until it's safe. And then trauma like shards of a broken crystal, cruel vantages towards the inside of the wound that may never be contained. Square peg in a punctured heart, it never heals.
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ZX Page 34: Montage

Alright, seeing that there was worship of Heavy Metal as requested, here's more ZX.



Another difficult page that I think turned out alright. I hope the reader realizes it's a flashback through various notable memories of Stephan's life as a child and as a teenager. I hope there's no confusion as to who is who.

The Greek expression is 'Guys are robots and girls are ferryboats' only, it rhymes. I'm very sad I can't use that in English and default to the American jock-idiot talk of 'bros before hos'. In fact if you, the native English speaker, know of an equivalent expression that is more childlike and innocent, do let me know.

For those interested in the formalities of comic making, consider the same page if the panel borders were drawn in, would it be so easy to move from one highlight in time to another, where years have passed between each strip?

-Helm
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ZX Page 32: They say rage is a brief madness

I dreaded this page when I started this comic because I thought it'd be more difficult than it was to pull off. Or perhaps I'm just getting better. There's a considerable amount of technique as far as inking as commentary goes here, which reminds me, I need to write a little about inking as commentary at some point, it might help those with analytical concerns 'understand' the comic better.

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ZX Page 31: Impasse = deadend

Posting from my girlfriend's computer. This page has one of my favourite panels in it so far. And is also, the last page of calm before the storm. Next week's going to be challenging.

I'll write more soon!

-Helm
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ZX page 28: Urban Folklore

I finished this literally 5 minutes ago, I wanted to be done with it yesterday but I went to a live show and couldn't get home in time to do the 12-5 o clock shift. Anyway, it's still Monday! It was a fun page to do, I tried various things, hope I pulled them off (like the 'inking commentary' on the last three panels).

I must say I'll be glad to never have to draw that vespa scooter for more than one or two panels ever again, though.

If any of you not-Greeks are wondering, the tree has lots of bubble gum pressed on it. I don't know if people do this in other countries, I'm hoping not. It's a peculiar bit of urban folklore in Athens, though. Bored commuters might explain it, or I don't know...

Oh by the way, next week there won't be a comic, or the week after, that's my Christmas vacations. Going to Denmark. I'll post something from now to Sunday (day I leave) to remind and also hopefully the post will have merit in itself.

-Helm

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ZX Page 27: Editing

Memories go left and right and curve into themselves, they go nowhere. Skipped beats, regrets, reminders, what to do next time around, what, something different? Headless rudder left to subterranean winds. But a smart machine inside remembers the most important rule, it'll will take everything and make it neat, linear. Make it make less sense, that's what it takes for it to make any sense at all. Hold the line, hold your breath, suffocate the sounds, clip clip clip it off on the hotel floor, draw a map and take us there.

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ZX Page 26: Blink

This page took a long time but I've pretty happy with it. Happy with how the visual language bits I'm using communicate and happy with the overall page balance. As far as what's going on in the story, I guess tension is going to be mounting steadily from no on to the end. If you thought the first 15 pages or so of the comic were kinda light, well, now you'll see what they served as groundwork for.

Keep reading and also, keep talking.

-Helm

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ZX Page 24: Forest fire

Not much to say here. Keeping on trucking, you do the same.

-Helm
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ZX Page 23: Afterbirth

Again, do not click on the image if you're at work. Unless you work somewhere awesome.

Worryingly the blog is catching up to where I am slowly. This is page 23, I am working on page 26. When I started making this I did two pages a week but the tiredness caught up with me eventually. I need more time to make the pages as good as I want them to be, so I settled on a rhythm of one page a week, and lately I've been having trouble fulfilling even that deadline (otherwise, mathematically, the blog would have never caught up with me). Perhaps I want the blog to catch up so there is a practical deadline of every Monday instead of just a theoretical one I am applying to myself.

The reason I'm going slower is because there's difficult things left to draw pretty much exclusively and also that the rest of the story is very concrete in my mind so there's not much improvisation left to do. I have to see it through, basically. I will, I am certain, but not without my subconscious rebelling on me here and there. There's about 15 pages left and every one of them is going to take a larger toll on my psyche than the opening pages where relations are established and generally 'light' things happen. I want to do this, I keep reminding myself, this is why I started this in the first place.

About the page in question I've had some close friends react with a degree of horror to this and when I asked 'what, haven't you seen more severe dreams than this?' they all said they have had in the past, yes. It seems the page touches on some taboo on "what is allowed" to be discussed about the human psyche in a comic. As Nick told me a while ago, we'll have to revise how we talk about our art-forms eventually, because games aren't very gameish anymore, film isn't shot on film and comics are anything but.

-Helm
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ZX Page 22: Concrete Flow

Don't maximize the above image if you're at work.

Check out the mirrored panel formation. I do this a lot but it's not something that jumps out to the reader. I do it to suggest a constant but odd tempo to the scene, like 7/8 or 5/4. Dancing about the architecture of sequential timing. Also there's a shoe left there.

I finished page 25 yesterday. I've also written a continuation of the "that's interesting" text below, but I'll have to edit it a bit before I'm happy with it and I also don't have a header image for it! I'll either have to scan the archives, or draw a new judgmental dog to go with it, we'll see. Priority is still the comic.

If you have any thoughts you'd like to share with me about the comic, I'd read them in the comments below.

-Helm
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ZX Page 21: Shoes on the couch are forbidden

I don't generally suggest copy/pasting backgrounds to comic artists because it makes them look lazy and if the artist betrays the trust of the reader that they're trying to do the best they can at all times, then they usually lose them. The reader might not put the book down in disgust but on some level they're pushed out of the story and they start instead to inspect the artist in his cutting corners.

However there are some advantages. First of all, the reader will read the page faster, focusing on what changes from panel to panel and disregarding what stays the same. This is what you do in real life when you talk to someone, you look at his mouth and body language and what's moving around him and you're interpreting this stuff as a priority. The rest you keep a subconscious secondary watch on, and if something changes, you take account of it also. So static backgrounds have the ability to 'ground' a scene and make the reader use his real-world faculties when reading. This might seem like a banal point to make but it really isn't. Often comics make the reader use completely surreal ways of interpreting movement, space and time (and that is one of their strengths) but sometimes all of that is too extravagant for what the creator needs. I don't want to use wild dolly shots and stuff here. I don't want the viewpoint to be non-standard (meaning, toad's view or eagle's view) I want us, the viewers, to be participatory in a voyeuristic sense. We are looking at the sofa, sitting girl eye-level. We are there and we are listening in on their conversation.

Another aspect that makes this page faster to read is the uniformity of the rendering style. You'll notice that there is a style drift in this chapter (when it's finished, at least) but it happens more on a page-by-page basis than on a panel by panel one. The reasons for this will be apparent later on.

There are visual clues in this chapter for the attentive reader that foreshadow... well, I don't really need to say this again,there's always visual clues in all the pages that foreshadow everything.

-Helm

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ZX Page 20: These points make up a path.

I finished page 24 last night, I'm officially more than halfway done. Making this comic has become part of my everyday routine and though I don't feel oppressed, I need to keep reminding my brain to get into creative mode when I sit to draw, not work mode.

Another interesting thing about having the comic on my mind a lot is that I find my awareness of how to draw and convey things is improving, not so much due to practice but because of constantly replaying 24 pages worth of artistic choices in my head all day long. I see simple, deceptively simple solutions to a lot of errors I've made in these pages and I kinda look forward to when I'm done with the other 20 and I can go back and retouch, get everything up to my current vision. The end result will be something to be proud of, I hope, condensed vision and also hopefully, a degree of pathos.

When this is done I'll have to think about what more I can do with this blog. I'm torn between strangely disparate options. Either I let the blog mostly rest and update very sporadically with whatever minor (or major?) comic-related pieces I do in the future, or I take the opposite approach and update every single day with creative results on all the fields I maintain an interest in: comics, music, pixel art, videogames, philosophy & science. I wonder which of the two approaches I'll find myself committing to, because I am an extreme person and the middle road of 'post once a week with whatever, meh' will not work for me.

I want to engage in dialogue about a wider scope of items than I am currently, with this blog. As I am in the middle of making a long comic, I don't have time to worry about this too much yet, but when it's done, I'll have to tackle this and hopefully you readers will help me make it into something with a wider focus but not diluted essence. The reason I'm thinking about this is because I do a lot of posting on various forums and blogs about a lot of things, and I put a lot of myself into them. I'd rather have all my thoughts collected here because - besides the obvious benefit of condensed retrospection - I enjoy, how to put it? I'd prefer not being a guest at someone else's house, when it comes to exclaiming opinions in the lengths I usually do. I am an explainer by nature, brevity eludes me, I find facetious one-liners to belong with internet crowds completely outside of my scope and I feel the need to build into even the simplest point I'm trying to make, a number of failsafes and preemptions towards what I feel are easy ways to be construed. So I often write and write and write and I break comment limits on other blogs and I always get this uneasy feeling that this is actually an *abuse* of their comment space, that this is not what is supposed to be going on there, that it's not actually promoting a dialogue to post a novel in the comments, even if I can't help myself but write it every time.

So I want to pull all my writing somehow in a single place, so I am not a guest, so there is no abuse of a function and so I do not feel unwelcome. I don't know how well the diverse amount of stuff I'm into would cohere on the same blog but hey, there'll always be 'sorting by tag' if you've got absolutely no interest in pixel art, or video games, or heavy metal, or biodeterminism or whatever. However I hold this hope that in the end if someone is interested in my comics, they're not just 'interested in my comics'.

Anyway, I'll remember to return to this issue the months from now it will take to finish the comic (I am aiming for March the latest for absolutely everything to be finished and printed).

This is I think, blog post number 98. The blog has been up and running for 13 months. I forgot about the one year flip, so let's pretend hitting blog post 100 is more important. 100 posts in 400 days, 1 post per 4 days average, many comics, myriad thoughts, countless words. Keep reading...

-Helm

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ZX Page 19: Interlude

A layer of ordered grain on top of an ink layer, and then addition and detraction of grain on a different layer on top with an airbrush. This one prints a lot darker than I see it on the screen, I suspect a gamma issue. Hopefully when I do the final prints for the book I'll be able to screen-correct.

Oh, things will be going a bit sideways.

-Helm

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