Hi, Folks!
Right now, I’m working on laying out pages 4 through 10 of issue 8. I took some extra care on these, and pre-wrote some working dialogue, and looked at the composition and timing from different angles. I’m not the kind of guy who can just toss pages off in a devil-may-car way, so I’m trying to make every scene, page, and panel better than what preceded it. I don’t always succeed, but I manage to raise the bar for what I can expect from myself.
For me, it’s got to be about getting new comic strips created and posted this week and next, because I’ve pretty much blown through my buffer. Working on covers, dr. visits, working on projects for other publishers, these have all conspired to bring me down to the wire. I’m thrilled with the outside work, and want lots more, but I need to get my own comic on a more solid footing. In a perfect world, I would like to have about two months of buffer strips done and posted at any given time. Now it’s time to see if I can make that happen.
I believe you are going to see, and perhaps have already seen, and evolution in my coloring lately. In the past, I believe I’ve been sometimes guilty of not having enough contrast to make the characters pop out against the backgrounds, but now that I’m more aware of this I’ve been working on that. Some of this has been as easy as messing with the color slider, finding what works best in a given panel, and some of it is taking a fresh look at a page in grayscale, making sure all the values aren’t too similar, making for a big, “muddy” mess. I’m learning!
Last night, I watched the movie “Boogie Nights.” Wow! It’s pretty adult, so don’t watch it if you are easily offended. Needless to say, I was knocked out. Sure, it’s a movie about the porn industry, the late 70’s, free-wheeling drug use, and a whole host of other bad stuff. But, it’s also a movie about misfits who form a very close family of sorts, about broken people who try to straighten up their lives. It’s also star studded, with lots of people who have since become household names, but were new faces back when this movie came out. I was quite impressed.
A few nights before, I watched a movie that was not as impressive, The Wachowski Brother’s movie “Bound.” I guess you could call it a stylishly shot lesbian mob movie, a sort of slick crime noir show. Truth be told, the only thing I really enjoyed about it was the relationship between the two women; they had a sort of odd chemistry that made them play off each other quite well. The rest of the movie didn’t do much for me. I know this movie has a cult following, so don’t hate me for not loving it. I don’t hate it, and I don’t love it.
Scott.
