New 1-Pg Comic: Dr. Robert Fisher, N.D. (Nerd Doctor)

Warts and all. If this had been done for publication in Dork or an anthology, it would go from my scanner over to Sarah's computer for her digitally clean and fix up. I wouldn't have hand-lettered the white-on-black in the title, but in old-school, 1990's, 8 a.m. get-it-done fashion, I wanted to just get this thing done and out of my way. I also wouldn't have pasted down lettering patches, which I'm sure have left the usual artifacts after scanning. Look for the thin lines around some of the text. There's a bunch of them. And it's super-possible there are typos and missing punctuation, you can go over these things a hundred times and still miss something (you may remember the utter shame that was "Campire".)

Like the recent Fun Strip and the Cat Help strip I posted earlier this year, this is something that has sat unfinished for years while I worked mainly on scripts. I don't even like it his one all that much, but I couldn't toss it after the time spent. And getting some actual comic pages done feels pretty good. I like a few things about it. It's okay.

There is another version of this that I will post along with the rough layout at another time (for backers at whatever level that stuff is). The first version was done on really poor quality paper, at a smaller size. I almost finished it but became frustrated with the paper, it was bleeding and hard to do corrections on. I scanned the page, blew it up with the printer, and traced it off on the light pad. As it turned out, the paper I transferred it to was bigger, but not better. Paper quality has sucked and gone downhill for as long as I've been buying. Affordable paper, I guess. That's a different post. But the new paper also bit. I played with panels and drew a few lines over many months and recently it started to look like it was nearly finished. I decided to run through it, and the lettering that wasn't done was a disaster. The humidity from the summer rains affected all the paper I had out in the studio, this crapola sheet of garbage became even worse to ink/letter on. So I did a lot of sloppy corrections,some multiple times like a doofus, rather than letter new text on a separate sheet for Sarah to drop in and patch digitally. Sad to see how much the eyes and the hand can't be relied on like back when. Reading glasses, can't get used to them while drawing.

I know enough to be able to zoom in and erase artifacts and clean a page up, and maybe do some very small corrections -- although my compulsive nature means I spend hours on things that should take less than hours. But I don't know how to drop elements onto the page as patches or enlarge something to scale or move lettering or a character's mouth or eyes around or reverse black to white. Sarah always handles that (there's an inked drawing I did that she's working on now) but her schedule doesn't allow her to be doing HOF stuff with any real regularity. There's a lot to deal with here, and I'm trying to work so I don't have to call her up to my office with questions or saddle her with work that isn't for print/publication. So please excuse the rawness of this strip. But it is a good example of what my stuff looked like back in the day before getting polished and worked on. Lettering even more up-and-down and screwy that usual, white lettering done on the page (and badly, thanks to my hand shaking a bit these days from a-gettin' older),  doing patches directly on the page, etc.

Anyway, hey, a page done. It's not a joke more than a concept, and it's minor stuff, but it's another page and it's nice to finish them, especially these days. Maybe something for the Dork #12 project. Which means it'll have to get revised, that lettering, especially.

I like the effect in the last panel, though. Except it might make you think he's some celestial goofus, but he's not*. Whatever, it was fun and took very little time.

Back to commissions!

*Neither is the Nerd Detective or the Nerd Coroner, for that matter.