The 100 Days project was a total success! I’ve got a tally down at the bottom listing all the stuff I got accomplished during the period and though I only got 1 completed comic out, the amount of scripting and prep work I did for my other projects is insane to me. It also gave me some real focus to which projects needed to get attention and which ones could go to the backburner. I’ve already decided that the next 100 Days project I do will involve a lot more artwork, since posting lengthy character descriptions and hacked up outlines is pretty much boring.

I do have a little news for those of you following Mourning Electric. I’ve decided to take it down a different avenue heading for print. After getting reactions at SDCC, it just felt like a webcomic was not the right format. I’ll keep the Zuda entry up forever, but the new version of the script is being tailored for a book.

To take the place of ME, I’m developing the other project that was originally headed toward Zuda, Vapor Trails. Keep an eye out for that soon (first picture posts tomorrow).

So without further ado (and broken up by project so it’s actually readable):

THE 100 DAYS TALLY

Pins N Needles:

Issues 01-03 written
Issue 01 – thumbnailed and in the middle of pencils
Pitch packet at 30% completion

Mourning Electric:

Short story finished and posted
New Script – 21 Pages
Story outlines done

Vapor Trails:

Script – Chapter 1 complete – 33
Character/Vis Dev Art (to be posted tomorrow)
Short script completed

I also wanted to talk a little about the whole Zuda closure and how it affected my work and this project. Scroll down past said big ass picture and click on the Keep Reading link for wall-of-text ranting! YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO KNOW, IT’S IN YOUR RACY NATURE.

Click to read the original submission!

Man, what do I say about this? I want to take a minute here and just explain how this whole thing played out.

So let’s talk about this project. I’ll do a post on influences and development later, suffice to say there was a lot of music involved. ME started sometime in the middle of September 2009, when I was trying to figure out what to work on. I knew I wanted to do a weekly and I was itching, like many, for another run at the Zuda deal. So I started work on it and finished over the course of the next couple months, pretty standard stuff. In the middle of it I realized that even if Zuda didn’t want it, I still wanted to do it. I really like this story a lot.

So I turned it in at the end of November, maybe the first week of December, I can’t quite remember. At that point, I knew it would be a wait so I sunk into some celebration. I did what I think a lot of newer creators do, and I didn’t work on anything for a while. That’s the thing I regret most now, but hey, you gotta learn sometime right?

And then the 3 months came up, I saw other comics that I knew had been submitted after mine coming into the competition. I figured, well they’re just looking for the right place for my comic now, it’s not right for the current competition. I sent a few emails to their feedback form to make sure my sub hadn’t gotten lost like some others I’ve known, but I never got a response. Right around February, I started getting antsy, but I wanted to be patient. That’s something that has to be expected in a business like this, with so much material going through so few people.

I had decided to let things ride with Zuda to see where it went. In the meantime, I started up another comic with a friend in the hopes for another contest entry. It was a fantasy/sci-fi thing based on a really old comic of mine. It was right in the middle of that that I found out about the competition end. They told us they were reviewing submissions in the queue, and I believe they did just that. But it meant another 3 months of waiting to see if mine would make it through to their new format.

Obviously, as with so many other really amazing entries, it did not.

And now I’m left knowing exactly what I knew 6 months ago. Mourning Electric needs its own site. It needs to be mine and mine alone, broken free of the Zuda format, the need for ultra-compressed storytelling. It needs to be its own comic.

So I’m hard at work on the new script, I’ll be redoing the pages in a new book-style format that will allow for more decompressed storytelling.

I appreciate the hard work of the Zuda staff and I’m definitely sad to see them abandon their efforts in such a hasty manner, but I want to thank them for giving me and so many great creators the inspiration to get moving on those projects they’d been sitting on. I hope you keep all em comin.

Somehow at 3 in the morning I am not thinking about taking snapshots of what I’ve been drawing for the last 4 hours. My bad.

I’m up to my neck in this short comic and planning for some upcoming changes in the daily life. After that it’s back to work on the Pins N Needles script and some planning on what to do with Vapor Trails now that its original destination has shuttered its doors.

The Mourning Electric short will be going up by the end of next week, I believe. 16 pages of black and white suspense. Get excited! The actual story will go up…some day. I’ve waited so long for a reply from Zuda at this point, it feels like a waste to pull it back and stick it on its own site. We’ll just have to continue being patient.

100 DAYS TALLY – END OF DAY 20 (21’s still goin!)
Goodbye Blue Monday #59 script – Complete
Mourning Electric side story – Pencils Pass 1 p1-16 – Finished
ME side story – Pencils final – 60% done (backgrounds and shadows)

The Mourning Electric short is on the way! In a heck of a way. It’s gonna be 16 pages of crazy black and white mindtrip. I’m going through with red pencil for all the characters first to get a grip on the emotions of the scene. After that I’ll be doing the backgrounds and laying out shadow blocking. Then it’s on to INKS.

100 DAYS TALLY – END OF DAY 9
Goodbye Blue Monday #58 script – Complete
Mourning Electric side story – Pencils Pass 1 – Page 1-8
Finished reading SHARKNIFE!! (that counts right?)

Hey my desk! Thumbnails and character sketches and a script to read from…this is how we comics

Jacob looks at a thing and complains about it, there is wrongness in him

Look at that kid! That is a kid.

We’ll be selling stuff for Goodbye Blue Monday and Pins N Needles, so you should come by and say helloooo. It is important to me that you emphasize the oooo on that.

We’re at table 1065 with our good buddy Zen. He will have comics about hot broads in pink. I know you much you people love that shit.

You better come or ELSE OR ELSE

I’d also like to announce that, while Zuda is deliberating over the fate of my dear Mourning Electric, I’ve decided to embark on a new minicomic sidestory. How exciting is that huh? A sidestory for a comic you’ve never read! Woooo. Check back next week for an update!

And lastly, if you’re a Fringe fan, go check out my Fringe comics on Twitter. They are an excellent waste of 5 minutes.

It’s filling my need for really silly quick thing to knock out while I work on bigger projects and that’s always welcome.

After some soul-searching and lots of floundering, Lindsey and I came up with a good plan for this year’s comic-making. I’m revisiting some old stories and turning out some new ideas. We’ll see where the road takes me.

For now, enjoy a momentary adventure into the mind of a killer.

The human neck, broken with the ease of a fresh biscotti

Last night it was Ghost Hunters International’s big GHOST OF HITLER episode. Rob and the crew taunted, cajoled, and bragged to the nonexistent Ghost Hitler. Of course they didn’t find him because they are retarded and the show is really fake, but at least their nerd-courage in the face of absolutely nothing dangerous made me laugh a few times.

Lindsey and I have a game we play during any of the Ghost Hunting shows, I would recommend you do the same. Every time someone says “What the hell was that?” you try to say it in as many different inflections as possible. It’s a surprisingly long-running game.

So that’s the GHI crew down there, Rob on the left, Joe Chin and his epic fuzzy cockroach chin ornament, and Brandy the goblin. Oh and the ghost of Adolf Hitler

What the HELL was THAT?

I’m also sketching some stuff for a short I’d like to do as an anthology submission. If you know anybody that is looking for an anthology submission, this one is a doozy. Promise.

Hey look people! These guys will be doing some serious comic talkin.

I’m hard at work on scripting out stuff for my In-Submission Zuda entry Operation Electric Eel Fighter. Wait now I wish that was really the title. Let’s all hope it gets in so I can finally stop teasing you about it.

I’m also at the drawing board trying to work through some materials for publisher submissions. This is a new process to me and looking through my existing stories has given me some clarity as to what I need to be working on in the moment. You see, most of my stories are long. I believe this is a good thing for when somebody is willing to give me a shot, because I have a large back catalog of compelling stuff to work from. However, as a newbie in this game, I’m pretty sure nobody’s going to hand me a deal for some 60 issue series.

So I work, and brainstorm. It’s my least favorite part of the process, but I stumbled onto some old piece of a short story and it looks like a decent foundation. Pillage your own memories for today’s victories.

In the meantime, I decided to amuse myself with some sketching and some Fist of the North Star on Hulu last night. This happened.

North Star Cross-Stepping Five Finger Smash, A Dining Room In Hell’s Servant Quarters Awaits You

To some MF’in FANART! I’ve done a whoole lot of drawing over the last couple of months, but nothing I can post right now. So this weekend I decided to put together some fanart for my favorite new obsession: Muramasa! I decided on Kisuke, since I haven’t finished Momohime’s story yet. I promise I’ll draw pretty ninja girls too.

As an added bonus and an apology for being away so long, I’ll walk you through some process. Since I am, however, entirely into instant gratification, here’s the finished piece first. You can hit the jump below if you want to see how I put things together.

Kisuke from Muramasa, lookin all stabby. Click for big!

Yay now for some self indulgence!

First off, I scanned the pencils since I always forget to do that before I go in with the ink. I keep mine pretty tight to the finished product so that I can remember what it is i was trying to get across when I started drawing. Red Prismacolor Colorerase are way better than those nasty old light blues and that is a fact.

I started with my nib pen and realized that the paper i was using bled when ink so much as got near it. So I switched over to a Prismacolor ink pen and just tried to vary my line weights. The nice thing about the red pencil is that once you’ve got your lineart scanned, you can play with Levels to make the black and white standout, then use Channel Mixer on the Black/White w/ Red Filter setting. It’ll pull the pencils out entirely and leave you with clean art.

After that I flatted in some colors. I actually flatted Kisuke in purple but I guess I merged his skintone layer onto the flat layer before I could save it so you’ll notice his skin actually has some detail on it. I wanted to keep his gi or whatever a single color so it’s all based on the same purple except for the stripe on the front. All his other colors are pretty much just the ones from his original game art. I threw a simple circle gradient in the background.

I did all the shadow in a blue that I made from the snow color and then Hue/Saturated down since it needed to be a little darker. It’s all done with a paintbrush tip with Opacity Jitter control turned on. I set that layer to Multiply and shadows appear! I started with Kisuke because I wanted him to be darker than his surroundings. Then I did a separate layer for the background.

Next I worked on the highlights and ground texture. The colors are pulled directly from the sky, drawn in with the same opacity-jitter paintbrush tip. I then went over with a very low opacity light grey to add some extra ambient light. Finally I stuck in a spotty texture on the ground in its own separate Color Burn layer so it would look a little more icy.

The final act was changing the outline layer to a dark purplish-blue because it looked radical. Throw all that stuff together and you got a ninja! bam.

The Maltese Falcon
I don’t know how in the world I got through my whole life without seeing this movie, but I can now say that 28 years is far too long to wait for such unadulterated excellence. I was planning on sketching while I watched and ended up swept into Bogart’s slick-talking ruse.

Mark & Olly: Living with the Machigenga
Ok I’d actually seen this before (I have all 3 seasons of their FREAKING FANTASTIC show. Go buy it on iTunes.) Mark Anstice and Oliver Steeds spend 3 months living with one of the Amazon’s incredibly remote indigenous tribes. It’s all presented in a wonderfully uncluttered manner and it’s pretty much the closest you get to a good documentary on TV. Let’s just say they led an exploratory party into my heart. So I did this little piece for the jollies of yonder excitmentes. That’s English for the fun of it. Trust me I am a master of English people.

Why in the world didn’t I put Gianna in this picture?

Thanks for stopping by.