Winter Is Upon Us

Suddenly, this weekend it got cold. Last week was no big deal, I was still just wearing a windbreaker over my shirt and tie and feeling fine, but this weekend it felt like winter finally came down. It's a different kind of cold. I don't know what the exact temperature is, but there is a certain point where your pants start to be colder than your legs. That was Saturday night. All of a sudden my blue jeans felt a little frosty.

Good weather for staying inside and drawing comics.

And so...

THE NEXT BOOK:

As I was saying on Friday, it has been hard for me to get a feeling of momentum, a feeling of focus on my next book, Vengeance. I've drawn a lot, but so far I'm only really happy with the first few pages I drew. Everything else has just seemed muddled and confused. I've thrown a lot of stuff out.

I think one of the problems has been that I have felt a need to produce finished pages. I've been seeing the finished page as a sign of accomplishment. A day where I pencil, letter and ink a page is a good day. A day where I don't is a bad day. The problem with this is that I get lost in the specifics of a single page. I lose sight of the general narrative. Five supposedly good days of productivity result in five pages that don't hold together at all.

My new take on how to do the book is to take a big sketchbook page and layout a whole chapter on that one page. I'm hoping that by putting the whole thing down on one page I'll be able to see the story better. I won't get lost in the details of any one page and I'll be able to focus on the pacing, plot points and character development. I can worry about the details of a page later.

So here is the page layout for the second chapter of Vengeance.

And these are close-ups of what will be individual pages.

And these last few panels were drawn afterwards because I thought that I hadn't put enough emphasis on the fact that the main character (Palmer) can heal people with only his touch. These panels will be mixed in among the previous pages.

And for the record, all these sketches represent the fourth or fifth take on this chapter.