You know that comic that I've been working on? The one that I finished? Well, fuck it- it's not going up. I've been lettering it, and I've decided that it sucks. Really sucks. It's not what I want to use to start off the series. Sorry to keep jerking you around like this, but I'm onto something here, and I'm not getting off it just yet.
So I'm starting over from scratch. This time the goal of the comic is to establish the world of Metafiction and how it works. I'm writing a script- actually, I wrote a script, but I'm ditching it to go in a new direction. The previous script followed an ordinary man who tried to figure out what caused his coworker's suicide, and stumbling upon Meta's (that's going to be Ace's name in the one-shots, by the way) gallery, to discover that life as he knew it was one big comic book.
I was on the right track, but when I started drawing it, I realized that the parts before getting to Meta's gallery were pretty boring. And besides, I want this to be a quirky, fourth-wall breaking series, not Grant Morrison's Animal Man (which I should really read one of these days). The plot this time will revolve around a concept so ridiculous that even the characters in the story can't suspend their disbelief, leading them to discover Meta's gallery. I haven't written up the script yet, but that'll probably be done tonight. Then I'll get right to drawing and lettering.
And since I've been such a jackass with this so far, I'll post the pages here as I complete them.
That leads me to the second thing I wanted to talk about. I'm a freaking lousy inker. Now, I bring this up a lot, and that usually stems from a lack of self-confidence or laziness. This time, I'm adamant about it- I'm going back to pencils.
While I was on vacation, as I normally do, I picked up a small pad of paper and a set of mechanical pencils to busy myself when I wanted to draw. I discovered something- I'm a whole lot better off with a 60 cent pencil than I am with artist pens. I didn't notice when working on the comic because I knew that I would erase/ throw away the pencil work, so I didn't really go into detail with it. But there's a whole lot of energy to my sketches that I'm just not capable of getting in ink. Let me show you some examples.
Here's Angela, Richter's niece- Origin's replacement. (Part of the reason the chapter sucked was that he didn't seem to care or even think about what happened to her since I didn't plan on putting her in until I had to make the story go somewhere)
And in pencil:
It's on lined paper and I didn't clean it up at all, but you can still see how much more energy and emotion there is in it. So that's that. I'll leave you with a few more samples. Expect to see comic pages a few days from now.
The inking here turned out a lot better than usual, though. (Paper on the left sucks- smudges fucking everything)
And here are some designs (which you may not have to wait too long to see):
Okay, so Keefe's exactly the same, but I always liked his design. I finally have a Machete that I like, something that's been bugging me forever. Leena's jaw's a little fucked up here, but you get the idea. And Isaac looks so cool that I want to write a bigger part for him. Rosalie's image is based on the cover to Sia's Some People Have Real Problems CD. I still haven't designed a Vanessa that I'm happy with, yet. I need to get cracking though, because her character is pretty different in the series' context, and I can't wait to use it.Maybe I should team up with someone to ink, but if I were you I wouldn't count on it. Besides, I can pencil three pages a night with no problem. So that's always a plus.
And if Megatokyo can get away with it, anybody can.
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