Sick Sick Sick!

I've been totally sick for the last few days. It's not so bad that I'm quarentined or anything, but it's definately annoying to work. So I did some inking because drawing is too frustrating with a sore throat and stuffy nose (Sduffy Ndose haha). American Virgin issue 12 is moving right along, Adam's not too happy about it though.



On the East Coast, I'm slowly chugging along. When a book is 160 pages long and you are just starting to draw the first 5 pages there is just this rediculously overwhelming feeling of dread. Of course the whole book is scripted and thumbnailed, but jumping in is a whole different story. Here's a particular page I started but didn't finish because I couldn't find a pencil to really lock in the upper half of the picture.



The detail shows a little more of what's going on under the water...



This series is a lot of fun to draw, mostly I get to draw a lot of monsters which is awesome. After book 3 (the end!!) I won't have another story with monsters in it for a while probably, so I'll take it while I can get it. (Draw it anyway..) I consider this book "practice" so I can become a more serious writer, since my writing skills are definately not up to where they should be. I mean, look at Paul Pope who has been writing his own stories for his entire carreer!! I've had some great experiences working with writers but I'm feeling like it's time that I should learn for myself. I know that I know how to tell a story, it's mostly pushing myself not to decompress so much, and to get better at dialogue and structure. Which I'm learning a lot on East Coast Rising. Enough anyway to embark on more challanging and sophisticated comics anyway!!



A lot of people have complained that East Coast Rising seems too much like a kiddy book, since the violence is all just silly, and there is no swears and the jokes are all cheezy and mostly stupid, but I just wanted a simple treasure-hunt story that could be enjoyed by all ages. I could have written it without the treasure element at all, and had it been a 3 book epic of everyday life at sea with some giant monsters. I love the parts in the book that are about cooking, cleaning and all that mundane stuff. To me it was the most fun to write and draw (besides the monsters). Book 2 is coming together a lot easier than the first, story-wise. I have a feeling book 3 will be the most challanging, although I know how it will end and all of the major conflicts (more monsters!! yay!!) the hard part will be putting all of the elements together and tying up every loose end.



I also hated "Dead Man's Chest" because after I watched it I felt like I storyboarded the whole movie. The worst part is that I storyboarded parts of the 2nd book early last year that actually happened in the movie, so now I'm debating if I should change parts of my story because it's too similar. Aughh stupid movie.

After this series is finished hopefully it will allow me to take on my future books with gusto and organization!!! Heh!! I've got a few planned for the future, both with Vasilis Lolos. One book hopefully I will be able to talk more about these next year, it's a story we are working on together. I'll be writing most of the script and he'll be doing most of the art although I'm sure we'll help each other out with our chores. We're not sure on a publisher yet, but hopefully one will rear it's ugly head and we can finally decide on a format (haha!)

I wonder what Yanni would say about all of this... hmmm, why don't we ask him?

blllurb blurb!

So i've been slowly working on the second East Coast Rising, which is fun because until now I've only had a chance to do thumbnails and script. Now I'm starting to take chunks out the art, but slowly since I still gotta keep time with American Virgin. Not to give away too many spoilers, but here is an image from one of the opening pages.



American Virgin 12 is in progress! I'm only inking the first six pages on this, and then Jim Rugg is taking control of the inks for the rest of the issue, and hopefully an issue or two after so I can divide the time between my two projects a little more equally. I'd like to get East Coast Rising volume 2 out by October 07, I know it's long in between books but I am drawing for two you know!!! Two comics that is!!! HAh!!!

Vasilis and I have been cooking up some new stories, hopefully after he finishes Pirates of Coney Island and starts taking chunks out of The Last Call (his Oni book) we can start working on them. I'm so excited for comics!!!! COMICS!!!!

In the meantime I'm still in Athens, it's lovely here! It's been cold and snowing back home ha ha, so I'm glad for the nice weather and all the kafe. I'll be moving when I get back to the US, so I'm taking this time to relax and focus on work. And enjoy the sea and the rock!!!

Riddle me this!

This was the fastest cover I've ever done. I particularly like the fruit salad "Grapes and Mango" look of this, it makes me hungry. It came out pretty good, I'm satisfied anyway. It only took a few hours too. Pirates of Coney Island is by Rick Spears and Vasilis Lolos.

Techinically I finished American Virgin 11 today, with the edits! :D Also started on issue 12 today. Here's a panel from today's work!!



We went to draw with some other people today, it was a lot of fun. Drawing with friends is always best, it really makes time and art fly by! I really love drawing, but I love it even more when there's other people around. Comics are awesome, any way you look about it!!! Except deadlines, they can be a party pooper sometimes, ha ha! I'm doin my best though!

Blogs: The Revenge!

So I wrote this pretty good entry but whenever I tried to post it blogger just "happened" to be down or "couldn't" find the page, or for whatever reason and it got lost (Of course Vasilis has no problem, why is that? Blogger hates me!). Ugh I hate spending time on something and it ends up being worthless. It took a lot of encouragement but I decided to try it again!!

Basically the story goes that I had this blog before but it was kind of boring so I stopped posting, it didn't really seem to have any point and I took it down. The other day Vasilis decided to redo his blog to be totally comic-centric, which I think is a great idea so I'm going to try it too and see how it goes. I've been wanting to do something comic-y with this blog anyway, we'll see how it goes this time around. Vasilis is very inspiring.

Now you might be asking, because I thought about this too, why even bother with a blog? I have a pretty good website and a deviant art account, both of which serve kind of the same purpose. Of course my website is mostly for information about my comics, and doesn't have so many illustrations (that's what I use deviant art for, although sometimes it's a bit juvenile-- sorry dev art.) I'd like this blog to be more about comics, sketches and stuff and hopefully in the future it will get enough traffic that I can retire my deviant art account in a year or so. I'd also like to find a way to incorporate this into my website, but I'm really too lazy right now to figure out how.

For now I'll see if I can update this consistantly and keep it interesting for you guys. And on that note, for today's trick I'll start it off with a bang. Here's an example of my start to finish process on American Virgin (issue: future! hehe)

Thumbnails are a pretty straightforward process, I get the script and then I figure out how would be the easiest way to translate this information into a sequence. I love thumbnailing.

Pencils are pretty straightforward too. I used to thumbnail really big so I could blow them up and use the thumbnails as rough pencils, it worked for a while but I got tired of tracing for pencils and then again for the next step...

The inks! Okay it's not just tracing, it's like redrawing with guidelines. Inking is actually pretty easy for me, 80 percent of the work happens in the first two stages for me anyway, the arrangement, where to put the blacks, how to direct the flow of action so the page reads smoothly and all that. Anyway, I love inking.

Even after the inking is done things change, I've already done some editing to these panels in photoshop that doesn't show on the jpg above. Like in the first panel, I made Cindy's hand a little smaller by resizing it. And I might have tweaked Adam's eyes, or cleaned up some muddy borders. I don't remember, but this pretty much sums up how I spend my days and nights!! :D

Hope you all enjoyed it, and I hope that I can keep up the energy to do this blog thing this time, and I hope that blogger keeps allowing me to post. It's been pretty finniky and mean to me.