Let's Get Back to Work

The premise is this: A faith healer is wrongfully executed and seeks revenge from beyond the grave.

It's an idea that I have had kicking around my head for a few years now, and finally, officially, I have begun to produce some finished pages.





It's fun to start a new project because there are so many possibilities. However, it can also involve a little bit of stress because the decisions that I make now are decisions that I am going to have to live with for the entire time that I am working on the book.

Some of my decisions are pretty well thought out. For example, I want to be able to work on this book anywhere. I want to be able to produce a finished page in my house, at my friend's, in a bar, in a coffee shop, in California, or in New York City on my way passing through. To do this, I'm dropping the big sheet of bristol board and giving up the nib pens, brushes, and bottles of ink. This book will be done at 9x12 with brush pens and microns.

Other decisions are kind of made up on the spot, and these are the ones that can make me a little bit nervous. An example of this would be the squiggly panel borders which I have decided to do on these pages. I like it now, but will I like it in fifty pages? Will it be annoying? What about those squiggly background lines? Am I going to be a fan of those later. I feel obligated to keep them in order to maintain stylistic consistency throughout the book, but is it good style? Stylistic consistency is great, but consistently shitty style is, well, shitty.

We'll see. Anyway, it's exciting to get back to the panel to panel work.

Comments

sthazam said…
I like the squiggly borders and backgrounds. The borders are rough as befits the West. The backgrounds leave to the imagination, what is not necessary.
Dan said…
I like hand-drawn borders in general, and generally you don't really notice them. That said... it looks like the borders here are kind of aggressively squiggly, like a sine wave or something. That's going to seem more like a statement. I bet you could moderate that as needed, without losing consistency (or calling attention to the variations), but it's a good thing to consider now.