MANGA DRAWINGS !

ALTERNATIVE COMICS Samurai Characters

HEY APATHY! ALTERNATIVE COMICS SAMURAI

Some days move quicker than others, and that speed seems often correlated to the amount of things one might desire to accomplish. It feels as though I just awoke, and although I had an extensively productive 12 hours, it also feels as though little was done. I spent the morning working on the animation project ( funded by the Ontario Arts Council. Following the drawing session I retreated to the park to get in some reading. At the 2 hour mark my thoughts turned from research to the my chores on the computer so I returned home and started scanning pictures. My day was then interrupted by nature as my stomach grew thin. Alas with no groceries, dinner became a two hour venture. After shopping and cooking and cleaning (though not fully) I finished a comics scribble that had sat untouched for two days and finally got back on the computer where I had really hoped to work on my HEY APATHY! Character's page for the website. It's now fairly late, so I doubt I'll put the pages together 'til the morrow so I'll do some rough previews here before I give in.

  

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HEY APATHY! is an ongoing ,monster comics investigation of the city, the people and the strange interactions which make up life in the big city. Samurai is a wandering Ronin often spotted in the down town core. His mission, although cryptic, seems to revolve around a quest to battle an ominous entity personified as a gigantic technological eye. As Samurai tracks the creature, numerous miniature and diabolically technological optics attempt to disrupt his investigation. As his pursuit gains ground Samura encounters many weird denizens , some who wish to help and others who wish him harm. Although the Samurai himself is not entirely certain of the motives behind his quest, he learns more than he ought to upon meeting an elder and a group of misfit vigilantes working out of a computer repair shop. The old man entangles the Ronin is a plot of resistance against the mad mechanizations of the modern world with promises of information and certain resolution to his hunt for the giant computerized eye! Read the whole story in HEY APATHY! Book Two.

JUNIOR the MECHANIC. Junior was born in the downtown core of the City of Gears. At an extremely early age Junior began developing mathematical, scientific, and mechanical skills of an unprecedented nature. However Junior’s abilities seemed to come at a strange price. Junior's enhanced insights extended far beyond chemistry and mechanics so that his understanding of politics and anthropology were nearly unbearable at the age of nine. Before his tenth year, Junior started hiding his gift and withdrew himself playing the quiet invalid in the back of the class. Despite the facade, an older gentleman hired Junior to work in a computer repair shop before his first year of high school. With his concerned parents blessing, Junior moved into the repair shop and has been quietly fixing computers ever since.

The Witch. Argenta, another of the Old-mans adopted vigilantes, was born of an occultist coven notorious for having quarters near the docks. The terrible cult had been responsible for many unspeakable deeds and rumoured to partake in the ritual of human sacrifice. During the Christmas Season of 1986, the diabolic club attracted a lot of attention as a result of numerous fires corresponding with a spree of vicious kidnappings. The City's Guardians connected the incidents before the fires raged out of control. Amidst the terrifying telepathically induced hallucinogenic battle, One of the Guardian's rescued a small orphan. Though at that younger age he'd no idea what provoked him to adopt the child, today the Old Man realizes that this potential sacrifice was one of their own. Fortunately as a result of her extraordinary up bringing, Argenta only uses her manipulations to prevent others of her lineage who still seek new and dark times.

HEY APATHY! is a cross genre anthology of interconnected parables involving the strange denizens and unusual occurrences from the city of gears! The entire mythology is told from the perspective of a young street artist (me) as he documents the events of the chaotic mega-city. All around the metropolis a bizarre epidemic is inflicting the citizens. Strange technological tentacles are assimilating mankind! The mechanizations appear of out the sky, out of nowhere, and from the insides of peoples minds. Can a group of unique and heroic characters prevent the dehumanization? We'll find out when I actually finish drawing all the books. see more at http://www.heyapathy-comics-art.com/

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.