Take It Or Leave It

Just wanted to let everyone know that a comic I co-create with Mark Rudolph of CV Comics begins updating today. It’s called The Galactic League of Marshals, and it’s a fun little sci-fi adventure that runs 8 pages. It updates every day this week and finishes up on the last weekdays of January.

The interesting thing about this particular comic is we try to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, with some character development, all in 8 pages. That’s not a terribly easy task. But as Mark and I have talked about in our Art & Story Podcast, putting limitations on oneself is a neat way to activate the imagination. I hope you guys enjoy the results!

Here’s an interesting anecdote in regards to Art & Story discussions. As stated in some recent episodes, Mark and I are working on a new story for Sugary Serials. The way we usually work is, Mark comes up with a lot of the costume and other visual designs, while I focus on the inner lives of the characters and other thematic elements. In this new story we’re trying to land a more “animated” style, so I’m taking Mark’s initial costume designs and paring them down to a simplified style. Then the interesting thing happened–a character named Farz, a character whom I’ve done some sketches of recently, became the topic of the first redesign.

Here’s the thing worth noting. Upon seeing Mark’s initial sketch of her, I decided that she would be a rough-and-tumble, no-nonsense sort of mechanic. Pretty, but in a Sigourney Weaver way. Mark noticed that my turnaround of Farz didn’t quite capture that “pretty but tough” character that he and I had talked about. I thought she looked plenty tough, and I was ready to write his criticism off. Then my wife agreed with him (and wives are so often correct), so I took another stab at Farz:

I thickened up her waist a bit, and made her jaw more angular. I have to admit that both Mark and my wife were absolutely right. I was relying on standbys that I normally turn to when drawing feminine beauty, forgetting that it has many inflections, forgetting that Farz should be both pretty but rugged.

The moral is that when we collaborate we should listen to the input of the other parties involved, and we should never rest on our comfort zones. I would never have thought to make Farz’s jaw so angular, but after making it so, she looks much more true to the inner life that I had suggested she had. That’s the fun of collaboration–providing that we don’t let our egos get too involved in the process.

Working on some more expressions for a new character. I’m struggling with having her be both pretty and also a bit of a sassy, street smart kind of gal. I think I have something here, but I’m noticing that the expressions are all a bit on the angry or contemptuous side. What I’m having trouble with is getting the oilier, Frank Rizzo-esque part of her personality to show.

What I’m noticing is, as soon as I get her expressions more in the range I want, I lose the attractive aspect to her character. That’s what happened with last week’s take on her. I’m wondering if I need to do some full-body gesture studies to find what I’m looking for. Maybe some looser, slackened, less-dignified poses are what I need to sell her inner life.

Yet another one of those frustrating parts of getting the best acting out of your characters. I’ll keep playing with this and post what I come up with here.

Today’s sketch started with a pose. I just began drawing a human figure, not knowing who it was going to be. Once I had the figure roughed out, it seemed to me that it was sort of a flying pose. I could’ve made it one of my characters. Maybe Torpedo Black. But no, this body was too buff to be him. And I don’t have many other characters who fly. Looking up at my bookshelf to see who this flying person could be, I landed on some He-Man storybooks I keep around.

Thus came this sketch: A random pose and a glance at a bookshelf. I’m trying to think if I’ve ever drawn him before, and I don’t recall ever doing so. Maybe when I was a kid, but even then I think I was more interested in drawing characters like Trap Jaw and Skeletor. Humans bored me.

Working on “finding the character” in some new designs for that story Mark and I are developing. I don’t do a lot of this, which might be a reason why a lot of my characters visibly evolve in my comics stories. That said, though, I think that an evolution of how you draw a character is going to happen, so I try not to fret about it.

This is what I was doing with those posts about Farz last week–exploring gesture, expression, trying to find out who the character is. I’ve found that it’s sometimes a mix between what you intend and what you get when it comes to characters. A lot of unintentional things happen at the drawing stage, and happy accidents can wind up informing new twists in the character. I’m going to use these daily sketches to try to do more of this. We’ll see if it improves the acting in my comics.

I was reading some old Cloak and Dagger comics this weekend when I came across that Bonkers Candy/Robot-Watch mail-away advertisement (Shawn Robare has a great write-up on the Bonkers ads, including the one I’m talking about, on his Branded in the 80s web site). I used to have that watch. I remember as a kid fantasizing about what this guy’s personality would be.

I don’t remember for sure what I finally decided on. I’d like to think that I was at least clever enough to think of him as the Autobot with OCD, that he’d be totally a slave to a schedule and to-do list. But I probably looked at how bulky he was and thought of him as another tough guy on the team. I remember really digging characters like Brawn because he was so small, yet he was the second strongest of the good guys. So maybe this “Robot-Watch” character is like that.

Anyway, I thought it was a good example of how the imagination can be activated by the most unlikely things. A watch got me thinking about characters and what I like about them, which, as we’ve talked about on the show, is a form of analysis to help you build your own characters. If you design a short, squat character like ol’ watchy here, is he going to be a little brute like Brawn? Is he going to be a fastidious bean-counter? How about an effeminate neat-freak? Heck, you could take this into Hans Christian-Anderson territory and try to personify inanimate objects. That sounds like Writer’s Workshop kind of stuff, actually.

Oh, and one final note from the desk of the “I Love Art Tools” department: I didn’t realize until I was halfway done with this sketch that I had grabbed some different paper than I typically use. This paper has more of a tooth to it, so the pencil lines look a little more textured. I hadn’t intended that.

I’m in the middle of a comics project where I’m drawing in a slightly more realistic style than I’m used to. While it’s a lot of fun trying to push the edges of acting moments without falling completely into cartoon abstraction, it can also be somewhat stifling. What’s more, I’m trying to put in some hours on the next book about my characters from The Front, where I use my more developed and cartoonish style. I’m worried that if I stay too immersed in one style or another I may lose touch with idiosyncrasies that make either style work. I probably worry too much about it. Anyway, that’s the reason for today’s quick sketch of Thirsty and Sam.

Working on some character designs for a new comic I’m creating with my wife Anne over at Boum! We’re going to try our hand at a tribute to the old romance comics of the 50s, but the characters are dinosaurs. We did the same thing with our Rocketosaurus! comic. It was roughly the Apollo 12 Mission, but we replaced all the characters with dinos.

I don’t do many anthropomorphic comics. Come to think of it, these dino books with Anne are my first. So I don’t have a whole lot of thoughts on the difficulties and special concerns when making them.

I have noticed some weird things, however, that give me more insight into character designs like Porky Pig. When we designed Al for Rocketosaurus!, we had to give him pants as part of his astronaut gear. Woudn’t make sense to send a dino into space with only half a spacesuit. But in Rex’s case here, he felt less dino-ish with pants and shoes. You need to see his crazy chicken feet in order to sell that he’s a T-Rex. If you give him shoes, it crosses over to cartoon land entirely, it becomes purely anthropomorphic, more man than dinosaur. If that were the case, we felt we’d lose some of the drama that we have in store for these characters. I think that makes sense.

Decided to do let my subconscious do the talking this morning. I have no idea who this guy is or what he’s about. The inspiration was a conversation I had with Hoov and Shawn Robare on the Saturday Supercast about Max Steel’s Robo Force (man, that’s a lot of links!). We were debating whether or not that toy line was any good, and my argument was that any villain with guns for eyes is a good villain. Thus today’s sketch is born.

Completed 05 November.

Ah, Dick Kourage. My absolute favorite character from The Front. And probably the hardest to draw. Not that he has too much detail or anything–quite the opposite. What gets me every time with him is his face. I usually wind up erasing it at least a couple of times every time I draw him.

Given that I’ve drawn him hundreds of times, you’d think I’d get more of a finger on his expressions. But there’s something about his face that makes it difficult to capture his inner life properly. Maybe it’s because his face is a little more cartoony and abstracted, so less lines have to deliver more information. In cases like that, getting even a little off model shows right away (Mark and I touch on this a bit during our Big Honor segment in A&S #5, when we talked about Carl Barks). It could be that, because he’s one of my favorite characters, I tend to stress too much about it. Whatever the case, I both love and hate drawing him. That’s a good thing, right? Means I’m engaged in the process.

This sketch was done on 01 November, 2007.