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. Read more...
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?
Pixel artist extraordinaire Preston Mays (who really should be uploading more from his numerous works) sent me a private message over at Pixelation which read:
Am I ever! As I replied to him the only sad aspect of that is that when he might want to talk with other people of supposed metal tastes and he mentions such names, besides on King Diamond, he's going to get a lot of blank stares. The greatest Heavy Metal is usually the more esoteric type and that's also the least popular.
However, today we are celebrating 40 years of Heavy Metal! Cruel steel that rends pretenders apart and carves from the dull flesh inside a burning heart! A small youtube retrospective is in order, not so much in the esoterica but in the common stem of it all.
It all starts here. The said 40 years ago but was it really? It feels like yesterday when Black Sabbath cut off my head, drained my weak blood and replaced it with the occulted sulfurs that drive me to this day. Let us worship to the altars of the young gods
An ablation of blood to the elder sorcerers, erecting their monument that reaches to the stars
Let us dream inwards, let us live in ingress, stretching our elytrous wingspan until the cosmos seems but a reach away
Let our imagination swell with the only truth that there is no truth, nothing is real and everything is permitted. A theater of shadows dancing around burning fires
And weave a dark reflection on the mountains bare that mean to surround us
Let us rediscover what we have always possessed, a promise of better days
Bow to the kings of yesterday, they have given us wings to fly away. What have the phantom queens but deceived us? Read more...
This is pixel art. Click here to go to a magical place where if you click on an image it becomes 2x the size and if you hold down the ctrl button and click on it it becomes half the size again so that you may inspect the pixel placements.
If you are interested in this sort of digital art, read the whole thread to get a feel of where the community online is on tool-use and methodology. Even if some things go over your head perhaps you'll be intrgued to know more and then you can browse Pixelation and Pixel Joint in earnest and make up your own mind.
This image was started before I got the impulse to make the ZX comic, so that is more than 9 months ago but I got a final push to finish it yesterday. You see when I did the first 10 hours of work on it I was listening to an excellent audiobook version of the first Elric of Melibone book. I had read this book for the first time back in 1998, when I was thirteen and it had a profound and lasting effect on me. Sadly the audiobook ran out and with it my impulse to finish the above piece.
On a whim I downloaded the second audiobook of the splendid 'Sailor on the Seas of Fate', it is not done as wonderfully as the first one but it did provide an impulse to go back to the old piece and put the final 5 hours in.
It's funny to me how the image looks basically like 'some zombie'. I realized that's how it'd be perceived when I was almost done with it and it kinda annoyed me 'cuz I don't like zombies and I was going for a more occult 'avatar of death' thing but oh well!
Over at Illogical Contraption mr. Shelby Cobras has been kind enough to invite me to write about Greek metal circa 1990-2000 and posted it along a compilation of choice cuts of that period. Go download and listen and read if you're interested in underground Heavy Metal.
I don't write a lot about these things (and certainly not to that degree of detail) over here because the main focus should always be comics and how to live with them but who knows maybe some of you are also metalheads.
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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