Chapter Four Inking - When a Plan Comes Together

As usual please select your preferred level of SPOILER SPICE:

🌶️ - Minimum spoilers. If you're scrolling and you see an image, GET OUT!
🌶️🌶️ - Medium spoilers. Enjoy the post and its images, but do not look at the image carousel above!
🌶️🌶️🌶️ - Full spoiler spice. Browse that image carousel! Take in every detail of the inked pages!

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"Director Commentary"

Last week I asked whether anyone would be interested in me revisiting and reviewing my earlier work on Delilah Dirk. Thank you to the folks who responded!

Of course now I have the problem of "how do I present this." 

My first thought was to simply make posts with annotated photos. Personally, I almost always prefer reading posts. But I have what I need to record decent videos, and it might offer qualities that you don't get from making a writeup.

I'll think about it.

In the meantime, have you seen other people do this? How did they present it?

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Battles With Our ISP, or Lack Thereof

I had to call our Internet Service Provider on Monday to renegotiate our plan. I always find that sort of thing emotionally exhausting.

Can we all just agree that they should just charge a certain price for a certain service, and that it should be fair, and no one should be able to call up and say, "I would like to pay less," and then they say, "nah," and then you say, "okay I will cancel my service," and then they say, "okay here's your service for two thirds of the price you would otherwise be paying." It seems unjust. Real mob business.

I wouldn't mention it, except I'm hoping someone will comment along the lines of, "we don't have to do that where we live. That sounds barbaric." And I can just feel like goodness prevails somewhere.

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Back to Pratchett!

If you were here over the last year or so, you might remember how I binge-listened to every Terry Pratchett book I could get from our library. So I was interested to run into this recording of a chat between Neil Gaiman (a collaborator and long-time friend of Pratchett's) and Rob Wilkins (Pratchett's personal assistant, who transcribed many of his books). Obviously it's interesting if you're already into Pratchett, but even if you're not there's some fun insight into collaborative writing and some genuinely moving snapshots of Pratchett's writing philosophy.

You may also enjoy this talk with Neil Gaiman. The topic is "why we need fantasy," but it ends up being more generally about writing and also more specifically about Gaiman's take on fantasy. But I suppose if you're going to get anyone's take on fantasy, you could do a lot worse.

In that last chat, Gaiman suggests the notion that keyboards make it easier for people to write work that is too long, too "inflated." I want to poke at that, because I wrote a novel that was way (waaayyy) too long and I'm a big proponent of National Novel Writing Month, which emphasizes producing a specific quantity of writing, with no other consideration. But let's talk about that next week.

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Inks!

^ Last week I posted a panel and said, "I think I handled the foliage wrong." This week, I tried to do it the way I thought might be better. I left the tree's foliage white (because it is up-lit from the glowing mist on the ground) and painted the sky dark. I think the results are useful, in that they're a good base for colouring, but I hoped they might be more self-sufficient, less reliant on colour for total success.

This was a theme for me this week: does the page stand on its own, or does it look incomplete without colour?

For example, I finished this page (below) and thought, "now that's what a comic page is supposed to look like." It'll look good in colour, but I also find it nice to look at just as it is.

This is not always the case. Sometimes I look at a page and think, "everything I need to be on the paper is on the paper, but the page will not look 'right' until it is coloured." That's just the way it goes.

^ Very happy with this expression, even if the pupils are a little off. Aaaand the mysterious ornate blade is back!

^ Also very pleased with Dad's pose in this small panel, even though the line of the house is making a bit of a tangent with Dad's belt.

^ I don't always let tangents slide. You should have seen this one before I corrected it. It was a real clunker.

When I white-out ink lines, I am always transported back to Grade 8 art class, when my (comics enthusiast) teacher Mr Ecklund brought in an original page from an Aliens comic. The art was performed with watercolour paint, and I was shocked that when you looked closely, you could see several spots where the artist had used white-out to either correct errors or make highlights pop. Of course, on the finished printed page you don't notice that it's white-out, and this left me with this tiny epiphany about the art-production process. I was thirteen, and I guess I assumed that professional artists were infallible or something, because that memory lodged itself in my bones. It was a peek behind the curtains. Anything is allowed as long as it supports the final effect for the audience.

^ And one last one that I like, just for the drawing and the expressions.

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Earlier in the week I posted on social media, 

Legitimately excited to get to sit down and try to arrange ink marks on this paper to create the illusion of space, time, and human drama.
For all the intense bullshit of this industry/art form, sometimes you feel spoiled.

The fullness of this feeling of good fortune is hard to communicate. Was I simply relieved about how things went with my ISP? Maybe, maybe not. It's not the first time it's popped up, though it was particularly strong.

It's American Thanksgiving right now, so I'll say I'm thankful for the people, privileges, and circumstances that mean I get to spend a few days a week at my drawing desk, doing whatever I can to create The Illusion of Life, putting down little black marks and little white marks in the hopes that they somehow — mysteriously, magically — add up to a believable, entertaining, and meaningful story.

And thank you, Dear Reader, for continuing to support this project. It is as much a delight to share this process with you as the process is itself.

Until next week,
I remain,
spicy,

TC