I've been getting caught up on my web based news outlets, one as far back as August. I like to think of it as a sort of time travel because I know of developments in stories that didn't come to light at the time of the webcast and it refreshes my memory on the context of stories developing now.
This time traveling lead me to the idea that I should test one of my insecurities. That insecurity being that I have not really improved on my ability to draw and tell stories through static images. I was going to make a sequential review of all my work. The problem with that plan is that a lot of my comics have broken links since my new server is case sensitive. So for now I'll start with the first two...
Cement Truck 2001 ( http://nilgravity.com/Cementtruckpainted.html )
This is the one comic I can definitely say I drew BEFORE discovering Scott McCloud. Cement truck was my first comic intended to be a webcomic. I might have guessed I didn't read McCloud's books because the pages are taller than they are wide as printed books are. Crawlers and my Congressional Campaign comics are tall but they are designed to scroll downward.
The concept for Cement Truck is that his is a post-apocalyptic superhero. I still like the idea of someone who could have saved the world being born too late. To help convey the desolation of his world I was going for an earth tone ink wash. The idea might have worked better visually if everything but Cement Truck was washed out. So while I think that there are a couple of interesting things going on with the technique it wasn't successful.
At the there still wasn't a whole lot of artists using different media in comics so despite some really horrible anatomy and other issues I've had some art directors really interested in the work.
One thing I feel my new comics have lost is the way I break borders in these pages. I still use the technique but it seems to be especially effective here. There is even one panel where bits of debris fly over the word balloons. It's a really clever trick that I can't believe I have never used again.
Looking back at this I would feel better about being a much better artist now but on the other hand I drew and painted all eleven pages in one weekend. It was part of a rotating online comic anthology and I cranked this out to show the others seven pages a month wasn't unreasonable. And come to think of it Cement Truck was supposed to come out in chunks of 7+ pages. This was years before Freak Angels. Maybe I am an innovator.
How Kyle Got Detention ( http://www.nilgravity.com/kyle01.html )
This comic was originally a short story written as a group project in my high school English Comp. We were given a phrase and had to write a story around it. My recollection of the process was that the girls came up the idea that the main character would be confused about his sexuality and the rest of the brainstorming was me coming up with homoerotic dialogue that they had the ovaries to commit to paper.
I am still very proud of making the whole story a set up for a punchline- and that punchline being hidden in the title. It works very well as a joke but probably not so well in this presentation of the story. Also I am a little disappointed that almost all the homoerotic dialogue is gone but I did create the comic without having a copy of the original story.
The comic was drawn only shortly after the Cement Truck one but the anatomy and drawing is better. I was already on my mission to create different faces in my comics. I have fought having a standard nose on all my characters like a lot of comic artist. I also tried to have the female characters have different body types.
Looking back at this I do see I have made progress in faking backgrounds and at actually drawing them when it is needed. I took my time on this one and I would say Crawlers shows I've improved. It also has me wondering if I did myself a disservice by worrying about having a standard way of drawing people then changing the haircut to be different characters. Style is developed by the artists shorthand for representing things. I should have learned to draw one person the right way and then work on making sure the characters have different noses, jaws, etc.
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