jasonfranks

  

Things are quiet right now. I've been working away slowly ans teadily on a few things... some short scripts, the novella gig, lettering Sixsmiths pages... but I have nothing to show just yet.

I'm drawing my own story for Tango #9 this year. I've laid out 3/4 of the first page so far--3/4 because I've run out of 11x17" Bristol board and all I have left is a couple of pads of 11x14". The advertising industry went digital in this past decade and you now absolutely can not get Bristol board anywhere in Australia. Nobody imports it, no shops sell it.... and the American retailers who sell it online won't ship to Australia. I will probably ask sevenredblurs  to pony express some to me, but that will take weeks and I need to start this story now if it's gonna be done in time, so  will be piecing it together. But, let's face it, I was gonna have to piece the pages together anyway; I almost never manage to get eveyr panel on a page right first time and there are always redraws and fixes applied later.

I am actually planning on inking this story myself, too, which I am excited about even though I know it's a bad idea doomed to failure. Worst comes to the worst, I'll find a ringer or even submit the pencils direct--the added grit will probably serve this story well.

I will post some pencils and probably also some inks, when I get to that, so you can all watch me embarass myself.

Meanwhile, I need to go buy some new brushes. 

-- JF

Been a while since I posted anything  related to my graphic novel MCBLACK. I'm still working up some fixes in the closing sequences while I wait for Dave to catch up to me on the inks. Here's a new panel: the bottom tier of page 60.

I just drew the last page of pencils for my graphic novel MCBLACK.

It's fur years since I started writing it, three since I started the artwork.

While I haven't been working on it constantly or exclusively through that time, it has been hanging over my head for a long fucking time and it has certainly required more labor than any other comics project I've worked on.

I'm not quite at the finish line yet. I need to go through the last third and make some fixes and tweaks, I need to upload the files and send them off for inking, I need to letter them, I need a logo for the excellent cover that Ron Salas did for me. But the heavy lifting is behind me now, and with it the stress of the never-ending story.

Now I'm going for a run. I could use a bit of sunlight.

-- JF
 

It's like living inside a goddamn oven suddenly.

I don't remember the last time I was this sunburned. A wedding and funeral on successive days, out in the sun for longer than I planned, and even an olive-skinned bastard like me is starting to look a bit more like a radish.

I hate radish.

Last week knocked me around some; didn't manage to write much of anything. I did, however, get quite a bit of drawing done. I have page 67 of MCBLACK on the drawing board right now. If I had stuck to my original plan I would have drawn the last page yesterday, but I'm glad I didn't--the extra space has given me room for some good new material.

"Yeah, I've been beyond the Veil, too.
"I mean, come on. I know I'm weird, but you don't think I was born this way, do you?
"I've the Pearly Gates and the Big Rock Candy Mountains and  the halls of Valhalla and the end of the rainbow; the angels and the karma police and the elves and those skinny grey UFO-living motherfuckers..
"Far as I'm concerned, the only good part of the sweet hereafter is that you don't ever run out of ammunition."

Six more pages and it's all over.

-- The Radish King

He's sort of pest control when your chateau is infested with mutant cyborg bikers.


McBlack page 63 (above) is pretty much done. This puts the number of pages I still have to pencil in the single digits, which means I'm back on schedule for my late January finish.

Seamus is not in the script, which for this page reads something like: "Mick fighters their way up the stairs to the biker-exec with melee weapons."  Seamus earned himself a name and prominent feature on this page because I enjoyed drawing him. He doesn't have any lines.

I love henchman characters even better than your proper villains. Odd Job from GOLDFINGER, Mad Dog from HARD BOILED, Renfield in DRACULA:  characters that get their hands dirty on behalf of other people for money or out of some misguided loyalty. Seamus is the second henchman I've promoted from random drawing into an actual character. Neither of them get to speak any lines, but they do get to kick more arse than almost anybody else.

-- JF

Cleaning up issue #2 before the inker gets onto it continues to be my priority, and man, it's been a lot of work. I completely redrew page 29. Why? I'm not sure, the old page (which I finished 14 months ago) was quite clear despite having been jigsawed together from scraps and offcuts and redrawings. I really didn't change the storytelling very much at all. But the page looks much better and I'm pleased that I did it... I just hope that I don't have get the same bug up my ass for the other pages in the issue.  I was gratified that it didn't require any wacom magic to fix it... unlike pages 47 & 48.

47 was an easy fix; just a proportion issue in a panel that I had reused four times. I fixed it once and then rubberstamped it 3 more times; easy as pie. Thank christ I had archived the layered image.

There were four more problems pages. Two of them I fixed digitally--one of them with some quite extensive work in photoshop. It's a half page splash plus three panels. I cut panel 2 and extended panel 3 up into its space, which let me fix a perspective problem without redrawing anything. Then in the splash, I cut off the BG altogether and rearranged the foreground and the middleground to fix the perspective problems. I filled in the backgrounds with smoke. There's not as much information on the page as previously, but it looks much, much better. I did add a lot of hatching and texture, which looks quite good to my eye... but I'm positive Dave will throw it away and replace it with something that looks much better. Which is okay. The elements I know he'll keep look correct, at least, and the page makes more sense than the old version did because you don't have to fight with the screwed up perspective to work it out.

I was going to post the befores and afters, but I've realized that it will just make me look even less competent than usual. So here, below the cut, is the new half-splash for page 47. As you can see, despite all my effort, Dave still has a bit of work to do on this one.  I have no idea what the underside of an exploded monster truck looks likeand I'm clearly faking it, but you should have seen the expressionist mess I left on the original artboard.



I now have two pages left to fix. Page 38 requires a new panel, which will go in an empty space in the bottom right where I Was originally going to just have a black rectangle. Should be an easy one, it's a single figure.Otherwise it's a good looking page, I think. Page 42 is more difficult; I'm not sure what I'm going to do to fix the problem there. It's a 'breakthrough' page and the pictures look good, but the main gag just doesn't work they way I've put it on the page. Maybe I'll cut it altogether.

Bloody hell, this art caper is a lot of work.

-- JF

I've not been posting much lately, and certainly not anything work-related... but I have been working, gentle readers. I've been trying to narrow my focus and put a lot of hours into fewer projects in an effort to get them from 98% to 100% complete and, while I'm still going, I've made some good progress. New ideas are always more exciting than old ones that you've almost finished with, but I gotta put the hard hours in while I can. Should have an announcement soon; stay tuned!

In the meantime, one of the things I've been working on is my graphic novel/minieseries, MCBLACK. I've been cagey talking about this because, although I wrote the script three years ago, but the actual book has been vapourware until fairly recently (a very small number of you saw the ashcan last year). I wrote it in 2004, then spent a year trying to find an artist, then gave up and drew a few pages myself... then spent 6 months looking for an inker (the phenomenal  Dave Gutierrez.) Well, I've been on a pencilling tear, and I'm getting faster and cleaner, I think. I can see the end of the first issue and I'm quite excited to have a comics story that's longer than 10 pages on the way.