Alien Boy - "Tara"
Continuing on the comics week theme, here's a one-pager I did in 2007 of my creation, Alien Boy. It feels kind of weird to talk about my comics work as something I "used to do," but right now, I guess that's the case. I ended up publishing three Alien Boy mini-comics and two full-size issues (there's some overlap between the formats). Unfortunately, over that span of time the comics industry got continuously more hostile to independently published books, and the bar for distribution kept getting raised further and further out of reach. I don't really feel any connection to webcomics, I'm not interested in reading anything longer than a few panels online, and even then I strongly prefer print.
I guess I'm an anachronism, in my art I keep things strictly analog. It may not be apparent here, but my letters and tones are both done by hand. There's this song by Ultimate Fakebook called "Real Drums," it's about hating computerized beats in rock songs. There's a line in there that really resonates with me, where the singer mentions the "borrowed blisters" of people who use drum machines. In the comics world, digital tones and lettering are achieved with borrowed blisters these days.
The other thing that might be interesting about this page is that it's actually two pages, butted together in Photoshop. It was a compromise (albeit a very functional one): when this would appear as a webcomic, you'd get half a page at a time, but the ratio is close to that of your computer monitor. By stacking two of them, it's the correct ratio for a print comic. The other benefits: the half-pages are roughly 9" x 12", so they're way more portable than the comics-standard 11" x 17" pages. Also, they fit on a normal scanner, which eliminated the need for a costly oversized scanner (or frequent, expensive trips to Kinko's to reduce pages down to a scannable size). The only real change it forced was going from a 3-tier layout system to a 4-tier one (basically using an 8-panel grid instead of a 6-panel grid), but I didn't mind that at all.
Tomorrow, my inks on top of a Jack Kirby page!
c.
I guess I'm an anachronism, in my art I keep things strictly analog. It may not be apparent here, but my letters and tones are both done by hand. There's this song by Ultimate Fakebook called "Real Drums," it's about hating computerized beats in rock songs. There's a line in there that really resonates with me, where the singer mentions the "borrowed blisters" of people who use drum machines. In the comics world, digital tones and lettering are achieved with borrowed blisters these days.
The other thing that might be interesting about this page is that it's actually two pages, butted together in Photoshop. It was a compromise (albeit a very functional one): when this would appear as a webcomic, you'd get half a page at a time, but the ratio is close to that of your computer monitor. By stacking two of them, it's the correct ratio for a print comic. The other benefits: the half-pages are roughly 9" x 12", so they're way more portable than the comics-standard 11" x 17" pages. Also, they fit on a normal scanner, which eliminated the need for a costly oversized scanner (or frequent, expensive trips to Kinko's to reduce pages down to a scannable size). The only real change it forced was going from a 3-tier layout system to a 4-tier one (basically using an 8-panel grid instead of a 6-panel grid), but I didn't mind that at all.
Tomorrow, my inks on top of a Jack Kirby page!
c.
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