I've had two main characters that I've drawn a lot of pages of, Alien Boy and Zenjeff.  "Zenjeff" is a sort of hero/barbarian spoof, written by my buddy J. Nick Reddoch.  We initially did some mini-comics with the character, reprinted them as a full-sized comic, did another mini-comic, and then we finally hooked up with a company that was publishing comic strips to cell phones.  That might not sound all out of the ordinary now, but we were doing this three years ago, when cell phones had tiny, crappy little screens.  The technical limitations dictated the process:  they had to be in color and the lettering had to be enormous (if I recall, the largest resolution the panels were made for was 240 x 240) and done via computer.  From there, Nick and I determined that each strip should be 4 panels each (so that they could be rearranged into strips, instead of being read a panel at a time as on the phone), and I drastically simplified my art style.  There's no point in throwing a ton of detail in there that no one would ever see.  I really enjoyed that - it was a chance to really focus on the mechanics of storytelling without having to worry about flash and crazy layouts.

The strip ran for around a year (I think we did about 120 of them) before the company ran aground.  Here are a couple of strips from near the end of our run (the story's uncompleted currently, which is my fault and not Nick's.  I've got the scripts laying around, and if I took a couple of weeks solid, I could at least get this story finished).






In terms of technique, two strips would be drawn on one page of the Deleter manga paper (roughly 9" x 12").  I'd rough in the dialogue and the poses with a blue pencil, and unless there was something outrageously complicated, I'd go directly to ink from there.  For this strip, I'd use a Pilot Fineliner marker (they're cheap and not waterproof, and I have no idea if they're archival, but they were quick and the tip has a good amount of bounce to it) for linework and Sharpies to black out large areas.  From there, the coloring and lettering were done in Photoshop.  Part of the goal was to keep file sizes low, so I made no attempt to do anything beyond flat coloring.  Yes, I do suck at that sort of thing, but I felt I could handle color as long as it was simple.

If you want to read more of these, check out Zenjeff.com.

c.