This page is kinda pressed for space, it could have been two pages and breathed a bit more but then the pace would lag somewhat. That's the sort of thing you'd save yourself from if you were to plan your comic much more ahead than when you sit to pencil it, but in the end I think the damage is minimal.
The panel with boxy car next to boxy kiosk and curiously unshaded ZX appeals to me. Other parts of this page, not as much.
Last row leftmost two panels, check out cloud of despondency behind Mary, then it dissipates somewhat. The connection is momentarily lost. Stephan, delivered in his safe environment after all that emotion, is rendered in the simpler forms of a child.
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It's been a while since I made this page, but the main thing I remember about it is how much effort the middle scene took. One of those that I put a lot of work on systematically for 3 days and it never seems to progress before startlingly, you're done. Towards the end you can see my mind stopped making sane artistic choices, therefore that ladder (and ball) that are completely out of scale. Something to fix in the final pass. Or perhaps not, you know? Perhaps it's fine for the sanity loss to show in the art in the end.
Some friends I showed the page to, told me they had impulsive flikr mouse-hover-over-hotspot syndrome manifest, although I wasn't thinking of that when I made the page, but rather, adventure games (again) and their hotspots. Though their primary purpose is to just guide the eyes of the viewer to the path that the eyes of the protagonists took, from point of interest to point of interest, they also serve a secondary function that will be clearer in the next 10 pages or so.
The sequence of the bottom row panels works pretty well and I'm happy for that since after the sanity loss in the middle, mind doesn't want to pull the weight for the final panels since it's thing 'ALMOST THERE, GO GO GO!'.- Bottom left panel, a small classical sculpture joke, Stephan is leaning on a tree stump for support. Yes I find that sort of thing funny.
- Middle bottom panel, 'what's she looking at?' motivates the viewpoint shift. This is a subtle trick to make the reader momentarily fill in Stephan's shoes. In the previous panel he's looking at her looking up, so he fulfills his curiosity - and the readers' - by looking at that direction as well. We are Stephan, then, for a second. I mention this explicitly because I generally am not a great fan of storytelling that rests primarily on vicarious connection to the protagonists, I'm more interested in a concept Bertolt Brecht called 'alienation'. If you've been wondering why you've been having trouble connecting with Stephan, it is because I'm not letting you.
- Last panel is a pretty startling render change, for an equally forceful mood change. The new moon lends strength, and we, the readers, are kissed, our hand is held, our chests warm with borrowed embers. Who can stand in the way of desire?
- Helm
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Negotiate the terms of surrender! Free-agent cat is here for your food!
Well this cat has been visiting my friend Nick a lot lately. It's really brave when it the glass door is closed:
But when you open it to pet it it just runs for the hills. When it was smaller it did a hilarious free jump from the edge of the balcony, in perfect freefall form, spread-eagled. Cats are terrific.
Its ears are very pointy, I say it's a vulcan cat treaty cat diplomat, here to negotiate a pact of solidarity with earth cats.
Tomorrow Greeks go to vote, or not vote. Perhaps we'll talk a bit about this later, but perhaps not.
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Will we, really?
This is one of the pages that gave me a lot of trouble. Both the big portrait of Mary and the pseudo3d schema explanation of the derive premise. The first part was just due to my ineptness at drawing women, and since I've made it I have recieved several bits of correct criticism about the face and the arm that I'm going to put to good use once I'm done with the comic and move on to fixes and alterations before publication.
The second part was just due to how time-consuming the process was. I actually took a map of the streets of Paris from the internet, distorted it with perspective tool and steadily traced the city block shapes. That was the easy part, though, actually shading and doing the manual emboss on the edges was the difficult (read: boring) part. I have to say that sometimes I wonder if these expansive ideas I get before I start some pages, when realized, make a discernible difference for the reader at the end. I mean, could I have just slapped a vector map of Paris on there - or indeed, any map of any place - and called it a day and nobody would have complained? I wonder about self-impressed notions about what is 'cheap' and what isn't, sometimes.
On the whole, I'm fond on the page but I'll be fonder once I fix the things that need fixing on it, at the end of the journey. The blog is steadily - and scarily - catching up with me, by the way. This is page 16, and I'm on page 22... I hope it doesn't ever completely catch up and I have to draw the page that will go on monday, during the week before it, if for no other reason than how that'd mean I've slacked off for a month and a half somewhere in there...
-Helm
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EDIT: ... but then again it's kinda sad to have a 'read more' link that leads to nothingness, so let's at least have a status report: I'm finishing up page 21. I've sat down and made the overview of the rest of the story. The comic is going to be about 44 pages. So page 22 is the absolute middle. I've gone back to the 'two pages a week, almost' method of working now that the summer is over. This means I'll be done with this in 3 * 4 * 2 = the end of January, which is on-schedule for how I expected things to go.
I also expect I won't keep my schedule of two pages a week ALL the time, and also after I'm done with the whole thing I'm going to take it from the top and do slight alterations and edits on all the pages: some bad font-work, some flat faces and other small things like that (this is where all the feedback you've given me in this blog will be the most useful) so let's say that by the beginning of March this will be done and ready to publish.
I'm going to try to publish it both in Greek and in English, this time, so god help me. At least if all goes well loyal readers and humans who just happen to be non-Greek heathen savages will have the chance to get the artifact version of the story.
I leave you with this concept, in light of the upcoming elections here in Greece: they who align themselves with an ideology completely fashion out of themselves a concept, an idea. And an idea is always something less than human.
-Helm
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That dress is pretty revealing!
And that huge piece of jewelry pretty tacky if you'd see a combo like that in real life, but I think she gets away with it in a black and white comic. Plus, she looks pretty great in that first panel, so full of desire and hope.
He didn't even change clothes.
Rocky panels for a rocky start!
-Helm
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This is a composite trace from a few photographs of down-town Athens, assembled in a way that suited my aims. I mean, the vantage that looks towards the Parthenon doesn't have these exact buildings below it, but these exact buildings are the ones I found most pleasing from my trip to Google Image.
Talking about Google Image, man what a useful thing for artists that need reference. Back before it most serious artists had tons of magazines stacked in a corner, fashion, IKEA catalogs and the like just to have a reference archive. That's probably gone, now, the ever-constant process of digitalization.
This page was really tortuous to draw because I kept feeling like I wasn't making any progress, right up close to when I was almost done with it. Can't explain it very well.
-Helm
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