Book of Lorn: The Sausage is Made # 1

Hello, noble and beloved patrons.

'Tis I once again, your humble and gracious Patreon guy, Carl, bringing you a report from the frontlines of the creation of the Book of Lorn.

Something you may not know about your pugnacious prevaricating psychopomp in Patreon land is that he holds an MFA in Sequential Art--no, really--and has been serving as Editor and Letterer on the Comics Section of the Book of Lorn. I have, in fact, been pretty deeply involved in the process from the beginning. I figure that you lot might like a lil peek behind the curtain of this process.

So the way the process worked with Episode 1 was this.

Pierce and his Story Editor Mike sent a first draft of the script. Scripting for comics is a tricky business, and it's a bit of a process to get the juices flowing in the right channels again when you take some time away. For example, in prose you can write as many words as you want to write, but a greater verbal economy is necessary in comics for contemporary readers (Golden- and Silver-Age comics are often more than a little verbose in terms of their narration). I made comments on this draft, then sent it back for revisions. A few rounds of this went by, and eventually, we arrived at something that looked like this.

The format we're aping for the scripts is the Standard Comics Script (SCS) created by Steenz and Camilla Zhang. It's shifted a bit from their original form, but that's acceptable as long as the artist can interpret it easily.
When I get a solid image for a page layout in my mind by looking at a page of script, I like to include it as a thumbnail sketch for the artist, since I can (sorta) draw. The one hyperlinked from the page above looks like this:

Clearly I'm not as skilled a draftsman as our artist Giannis is, but he was able to interpret the above scrawl well enough that he turned in this penciled version a short time later:

DAMN. I know Giannis' work pretty well--which is a big part of why we have him on this project--so I knew this would be good, but I didn't think his pencils would be THIS good. One of comics' unique capabilities is to show multiple moments in time spatially, as Giannis has here. You cannot do this with film, because film relies upon motion. This aspect of a still image conveying movement through duplication and juxtaposition is comics, perhaps, in its purest form, under the Scott McCloud definition of "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence."

But that 's Comics Theory talk, I don't want to give you a whole lecture on this. So from here Giannis moved onto inks, which looked like this when he sent them to me:

FUCK I love it when he does drybrush (the texture at the outer edges of the sky and bottom of the airCar). We realized (mercifully pretty quickly) that Our Lad Lorn needed a belt, something to break up the Enterprise-D style jumpsuit we'd agreed upon earlier in the process. So back to the drawing board for our long-suffering artist. I seem to have lost an interstitial file here, so I'm skipping ahead to show you the page with tones, which is just another step removed from the previous.

We basically went through this process for every single page (19 of them!) of the comics section, sometimes with more steps, sometimes with fewer. Giannis is a professional of the highest caliber, so it was honestly a breeze on my end. (I'll leave off discussion of the lettering process for right now, but if there is interest I can divulge theory on the topic at the end of Episode 2.)

This coming Tuesday, we have a special guest star here on the Shit Escalates Patreon, somebody you all know and love in a deeply problematic parasocial fashion. Yes, it's Taylor Swift.*

Tomorrow is advance access for the Joe Abercrombie Devils drop, about which you were informed yesterday. The stuff for this one is so cool, I may avail myself of certain goods.

Till then, Howerlini,
Hail Libertas,
Hail Yourselves,

c

*it is not Taylor Swift.