Ninety Minutes of Thumbnailing (or: A Day at the Aesthetician)

One of the pieces of advice that I've heard given to beginning podcasters is "record three episodes, then throw them away and record your real first episode." This is ostensibly so you can learn your weaknesses and discover your shortcomings, then start fresh with the awareness necessary to overcome, minimize, or combat those shortcomings. It's great advice and it applies to making YouTube videos, too.

Welp, I don't have time for any of that, so here's the first-first, real-first, number one process video I put together.

You asked, and I (frankly) could not help myself, so here it is. All ninety (90!) minutes of it. And that's edited-down!

One useful quality of this video may be in reassuring other artists that hey, we all dither and go back and forth on decisions and ideas. We also forget to put things in that we meant to include. If every other process video on the internet makes a comic artist feel like, "I'm not working fast enough, or I'm not confident enough, or I don't work with the smooth grace of my favourite artist's Instagram clips," well, now there's this. It may leave you with more questions than answers, but isn't that a good thing, really? Motivating a little curiosity? Let's say yes.

I hope all the people who said, "yes please, do a process video," are happy with themselves. ;)

Seriously, though: if you watch the video and have questions, please send them to me so I can address them next time. Like, I showed it to one friend and he said "I want to know how you choose your panel shapes and page layouts" which is a question that I do not answer in this ninety minute video about designing panel and page layouts.

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Elsewhere, I've been reading comics again.

First, please allow me to recommend Kyle Starks' and Chris Schweizer's SIX SIDEKICKS OF TRIGGER KEATON. Full Disclosure: in a self-defeating but symbolically supportive move, Chris is a patron of mine and I'm a very happy patron of his. Chris has a distinctive drawing style, I think it's fair to say. One aspect that impresses me over and over with his drawings is how solid they feel, and how strong the character design and posing is. That would be one thing, but since Chris' style is also so—I don't know how to describe it, except sometimes I feel like I'm looking at an optical illusion, but a satisfying one—since it's like that, I feel like the easy readability and solidity is a double-win. And Chris is so thoughtful and creative in his work, it's always rewarding to spend time with.

Chris, I hope you do not mind my stumbling around as I try to pay you some very specific compliments.

If you want to give TRIGGER KEATON a try, note that it's not for kids, and there's some challenging subject matter in there.

I've also been reading Jeff Lemire and Tonci Zonjic's SKULLDIGGER AND SKELETON BOY. It is both grimmer and darker than typically floats my boat these days, but oh man. Zonjic's layouts and drawings are so good that I feel spoiled reading this book. Again, everything reads clearly and everything feels solid. (Since I keep throwing around that term—"solid"—here's what it means to me: the characters take up real imaginary 3D space and occupy an environment that is well-considered, consistent, and believable.) But there's more: the visual storytelling is also clever, most often without drawing attention to itself.

I say "most often," because there are also straight-up clever pages like this. It's a two-page spread from near the end of the book, and the "SNAP" back-breaking panel is positioned  on the gap between pages. That's clever as hell. I Laughed Out Loud.

And then there's this spread (also from the end of the book, sorry!), where the panels alternate blue and red colouring, which obviously says "police are here!", but also creates an intense, disorienting feeling AND appropriately underscores a making-a-binary-choice scene. Note also that the blue-red rhythm is not deployed with strict adherence 100% of the time—I can imagine having the idea, "it should alternate red and blue," but then the smart choice is to break it up—see the bottom-middle panel on the right-hand page—providing a visual rest as well as making that panel subtly stand out.

Those are just two examples from a six-issue series that's got a ton of really great visual ideas happening. Like I said, I felt spoiled, I felt lucky to be reading a comic so powerfully illustrated.

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Meanwhile!

I've finished one pass on the thumbnails for Chapter Three of PRACTICAL DEFENCE. They're done! It's about forty pages long! I'm going to continue thumbnailing Chapter Four literally right now, then revisit both of them together!

Having learned a lot from my first process-video-making-process, I'd like to do another, showcasing a fight sequence from Chapter Four (and ideally being more succinct in the process, without it feeling too much like those sped-up videos you see everywhere, which for my money are not especially satisfying). I might try to record that next week. It takes up more time than I would like, though, so I don't intend to make it a regular thing.

But also I'm getting a COVID vaccine booster in an hour or two—if it lays me out like it does for some people, maybe I'll just be counting the speckles in our popcorn ceiling. :) Worth it!

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Everyone look after yourselves!

TC