MAKING MONSTER COMICS

MAKING MONSTER COMICS raw scan panel 1

MAKING MONSTER COMICS finshed panel 1

I spent the weekend doing the lettering for the opening sequences from "MONSTER COMICS". I've been approaching these online strips with a particular gorilla warfare style process. Like my ink drawings, and performances , I pretty much just make everything up as I go along and hope for the best. The drawing and inking techniques that I use for the on-line stories however, differs drastically from those used in my fine art creations. When creating large scale canvas or performance artworks, extensive attention is given to the technical rendering. This is often achieved through the meticulous layering of inks and obsessively detailed line-work accomplished with fine point calligraphy pens. In contrast the online panels are drawn exclusively with technical pens and worked up on the computer. In fact these new online drawings don't even exist.

The samples above show you how I just take a quick sketch will some rough black fills and do all the inking, borders and text inside the computer. Now I don't get the same results as I do when I complete the entire drawing on the board (which is how I do the "HEY APATHY!" published comic book.) but the time it saves on production is more than worth the sacrifice. I am still having troubles with pixels and keeping the text legible during resizing, however I am certain that these issues are entirely due to my inexperience with image processing technology. I have only been working inside the machine for a year and am most certainly a novice. (I just started sizing images in pixels, I used to have pencil lines drawn all over my computer screen and did all my editing in percentages with guess work!)

When comparing the two panels, it is also of interest to note the messy and unedited text you see scattered all over the raw scan. I always do this for the first panel of any comic I am lettering. Then I realize that I am making a huge mess and wasting a lot of time. Once I get over the initial excitement of telling the story, I then turn to the word processor and actually write all the dialogue out . It is much easier to edit inside the flicker-box than it is to keep re-writing the text all over the page. Following the completion of the script I set some nice lined writing paper on the light table and get down to some serious calligraphy. I had one of those pen sets when I was young and got addicted to lettering for quite some time. Now I can use all those hours practicing classical lettering to tell strange and inconceivable stories about children eating witches, the Stone Troll Statue and a condo in Williamsburg.