Chapter Five Lettering is Complete!

All sixty-two pages of Chapter Five are now lettered and ready for flatting! Hooray! All the panel borders are in, too, and it's done the trick that you think I'd be used to by now: it looks like a real comic.

Here are some things I've been thinking about while I've been turning drawings into a real comic.

WHO NEEDS INSPIRATION?

Here's your friendly reminder that inspiration might be real, but if you wait to feel it before you do something, you're fooling yourself.

I was recently… encouraged… to develop a graphic novel pitch around an existing concept and characters. For many weeks, I had nothing. No ideas, certainly no inspiration. Then I gave myself one morning to sit down and do nothing but figure out what I might do. Going into that morning, I still had no ideas or inspiration. But I started putting things down, just notes or possibilities, and by the end of a few hours, I had the shape of something worth pursuing. More importantly, I took something that I was luke-warm on and made myself fully enthusiastic about it.

This whole process could not have been less inspired. Sometimes, you just got to sit down and force the pencil to move. "Everyone" says this, and everyone is right, and it's a wild lesson to re-learn every time.

PHOTOSHOP

Scanning and lettering means I'm using Photoshop again on an intensive daily basis, and honestly? I like it. I really like Photoshop. This feels like a dirty thing to admit, because Adobe's subscription policies suck, their wholehearted embrace of "AI" feels like a betrayal, and there hasn't been a meaningful update to Photoshop (for my purposes) since CS5 (fifteen years ago). On the other hand…

Recently we have been considering purchasing a digital piano for the household, so Kiddo might learn to play, or at least noodle around with music. Me, too — I'd like to plink and plonk on it. One thing I've learned about buying a piano is that you probably want a full-size key bed. If you learn how to play using all eighty-eight full-size keys, your piano skills are transferable to all other standard-size "real" pianos. If you learn on a keyboard with fewer keys, or with differently-sized keys, your hands develop a different muscle memory and it's harder to play on a standard piano.

Welp, I learned to play the piano on Photoshop, and when I return to using it, I feel "at home." I've tried Clip Studio Paint and Affinity Photo and Procreate and, most recently, Krita, and they're all perfectly great, but the keys are the wrong size and in the wrong place and I'd rather use Photoshop.

I can defend this in concrete ways — I like its brush handling, its macro actions, and its interface, and I find it feels more polished and responsive than its competitors, and more reliable too (yes, really). But the fact that I learned to do everything I do using Photoshop — and I got way too used to it — is so overwhelming as a part of the equation, none of it's really worth talking about.

If you are new to this stuff and haven't yet had Photoshop carved into your motor cortex, please, run away, run fast and far, swim to any other shore and learn the ways of the people you meet. For myself, it's too late. Maybe, once PDAP is done and I feel the wide expanse of opportunity open up before me, I'll try retraining myself. But I suspect not, and I'm learning to be okay with that.

[ Caveat: I am using Photoshop "2021," and I plan to continue doing so until this project is finished. Auto-updating software is a trick the devil played on us all. ]

ORPHANS

This can't possibly be true, but I feel like I've been encountering more orphans during this round of lettering than any before. I do not like orphans.

In typography, an "orphan" is any word that is left on its own, alone on a new line. This happens naturally because of the flow of text; sometimes that's just the way things turn out. Responsible typographers will do their best to eliminate orphans, perhaps by subtly adjusting the word spacing in the previous line until one word flows down to accompany the orphan.

[ Side note: this Wikipedia article claims the terms "orphan," "widow," and "runt" are sometimes used interchangeably. I can't argue with that — all I know is that the designer who told me about this concept used the term "orphan" for a single lonely word. ]

In comics, this problem is different and complicated because we're dealing with shorter chunks of text and, in general, the goal is to make nice oval- or square-shaped blocks out of all those lumpy words. Here's an undeniable orphan, the word "horse:"

That looks weird to me, and this is where the juggling act comes in. Do I want to re-flow it, so it's on two lines? Let's try that.

That solves the orphan problem, and the two lines are nicely balanced in length! Plus, it makes "Ataraxes," the subject of the dialogue, roughly central in the balloon. Neat.

I don't like the new balloon shape as much, though. It takes up too much of background; the previous, more-circular balloon was a more pleasing shape; and both chunks of dialogue took up three lines of text, which feels more balanced.

But that is how it goes.

Sometimes I'll re-write a line so that the text block looks better. I'll add a word, or take one away, or use a shorter or longer word in place of another, if it means I can get a nice round or square block of text.

But sometimes you just have to make do, as in the "I'm a midshipman" line above — it is an awkwardly-shaped lump of words, but rewriting it would ruin the simplicity.

And sometimes you just have to give up and move on. Which of the following two options looks best? (Assume I cannot rewrite this line.)

 … or …

I don't know. The first option is more circular — it fits the balloon better. The second option doesn't have an orphan, but the shape of the text doesn't suit the balloon as well.

Choices like this happen two or three times on every page.

That's what I've been doing for the last two weeks, and you know what? I kind of love it. There are many worse ways to spend your days than figuring out these minute, open-ended problems.

DON PERRO, MATCHMAKER

Twenty years ago, I went through the Capilano College Commercial Animation program. Don Perro, the head of that program (and teacher of many of its courses), died last year. In February, there was a memorial gathering. They held it at the Yaletown Roundhouse here in Vancouver. It's a large venue, which is smart, because a lot of people loved Don, including — as it turns out — myself. I spoke at the memorial, which I was not planning to do. I wrote about him on bsky, which I was also not planning to do. And I am writing about him again, here, because the more I have been thinking about him, the more I want to tell people about him and the impact he had.

Don changed my life. I discovered my love for animation in Don's classroom. Not cartoons, not drawing, not movies, not the industry, not design or storytelling or Flash or any of that other stuff, just animation. I love animating, and Don made it possible for me to realize that.

Would I have discovered that somewhere else? Maybe! But that's beside the point. It's so vastly beside the point that it is laughable. For me, it was Don. I think about him like you might think about the person who set you up with your spouse. He showed me how to animate, I fell in love with it, I became an animator, and it all led right here, which is a good place. (Of course, I don't animate any more, which A) I miss and B) let's not kid ourselves — the work I do do is not far-removed.)

I'm sad that we've seen the last group of students to go through a Don Perro classroom. It's a shame that young animators will not get to enjoy Don's kind and inclusive nature, and his patient attention, no matter how much he must have had going on at any one time. I hope the folks at Capilano are able to keep his spirit alive in the program.

I also hope that if you are the least bit curious about animation, or you know someone who might be, that you'll try to find a good foundational introduction to animation. It is not about drawing, it is not about using software. Animating — creating the illusion of believable movement and behaviour — is a skill and an art form all its own, and you do not need to know how to draw well to be good at it, and you do not need to learn complex software, either. Some of the best animators I've met are poor draughtsmen. Some of the best draughtsmen I know never quite clicked with animation.

Don marked a pivot point in my life, as he did for hundreds, maybe thousands of other students with cel paint in their blood. In his memory, and to reflect on this shining legacy, please help the animator in your life realize their truest self.

- - - - -

Back in PRACTICAL DEFENCE waters, I'm on to flatting! I'll be spending the next month or so preparing Chapter Five for colour. I hope you're excited for Chapter Five, because it is an intense one, and (if I may say so), funny, too. Expect me to show up with an update complaining about having to flat all the stupid trees I've drawn (they're surprisingly time-consuming, all those fiddly little leaves and bumps and trunks and branches).

Until next time,
I remain,
encountering more orphans,

TC