Notes from the Field: The Chosen Path II

Shane here again with another installment. As you may or may not remember from last time I talked a little about phases of a project. In my estimation there are three.

The START, the MIDDLE and the FINISH.

For years I considered myself good at the Start. I'm an "idea" guy, someone who had concepts and takes on story and character development. This extended beyond comics into other aspects of my life. I was good out of the gates but when it came to the Middle, the newness wore off and it became WORK!

I'm not afraid of work, but it really made me consider the Start a lot more. An idea is nothing without execution, and even with execution the end product just might not be that sexy. But I'd never know until I completed something. So suffice to say I wasn't much of a Finisher either.

An analogy that comes to mind is fitness.

The thing about it is, you won't get anywhere with exercise without some sort of conditioning. You have to build upon a routine that makes perserverance and practice it's core. Say you want to lift weights...you go in the gym and you start bench pressing and before you know it you've torn a shoulder muscle. This happens often. Then you learn about warming up...preparing the muscles to achieve the output you ask of them. So fine you warm up the muscles and you have a good Start on weight training. But what's this...you're tired and beat after 3 sets. Stamina is what gets you through a workout. Building stamina will help make the work out experience last longer and you'll gain more in strength and endurance.

So to put it in terms of doing any type of work, I find that preparation for a project is essential. Mapping out the big picture will help give me a vision of where that end goal is and how to pace myself. While I'm doing pre-production on a project (in the form of concept art and marketing graphics) I figure out how much art is required to do the project. From years of experience and "conditioning" I know what I'm capable of handling now. Finishing projects has helped me understand this better. And the only way I was able to finish a project is by scheduling my time.

How do I schedule my time you may be asking?

I figure out how much time it takes to do each task by breaking down the very basic elements of a comic project. Thumbnails and roughs, I can do anywhere between 30 thumbnails and 5-10 roughs a day. Pencils, I can do between 2-4 a day. Inks 3-4 a day. Colors...well colors are a little more tricky...I'm still trying to harness that one. I like color so much that it's hard to be satisfied with the first pass. So basically 1-2 a day is safe. I got this information by tracking my time based on a work week where I had a steady amount of freelance. Because let's face it, you still gotta make money.

With this info, I usually will put this into Microsoft Project. Here I can track and check off each item as I finish it. The beauty is it serves as a guide and a goal marker. With each page done, I have a visual of how close I am to the finish line. It's really the only way for me to stay focused. That and it helps to be working on only the "BEST" ideas you can afford to. The process of comics is so time consumming that I don't want to look back on my life and see a slew of books that looked like everyone elses.

You only get one shot at this so make it count for something.

Next time, I'll go more in depth about THE PROCESS and hopefully share some examples of how I work. Stay tuned.

=s=

Story Behind The Writing: Part 2

I have a hard time writing small stories. I have written a couple of short stories in my day, and it has never satisfied me. I'm a gluttonous writer, I absorb a lot of information before I sit down to write, but that data also provides me with a lot of energy, and I invariably keep building the plot up, cranking up that preverbal dial, pushing the concept itself far beyond what could be considered a short story (for better or worse!). The Overman could have worked well as a short story, by focusing on one of the characters. But no, that wasn't enough for me, I had to throw in several complicated characters, all of whom are driven by unique goals. All of those goals collide in the end, but I won't give away details about that.

The main character, Nathan Fisher, was there from the beginning. I pictured him as a middle-aged thug, a corporate bounty hunter who acknowledges the ruin of his life and exists as little more than a slave. He has no purpose, no goals, and no ambitions. He is sloppy and brutal, but does his job. He is an everyman who is thrust into awesome responsibility. This theme is also present in my current book Champion Of A Lost Universe. That similarity wasn't intentional, but I don't have a problem with re-using themes that interest me.

In The Overman, I wanted to deconstruct Nathan's life even further, pull him down into a desperate existence, and then sit back and see if he can save the day in the end. Again, no spoilers here. Writing can be a frustrating job. But when I've created characters that are fully realized in my mind, it becomes easy work at that stage. The best example of this for me was my first regularly updated web comic, The Last Odyssey. The characters were based loosely around my experiences playing Dungeons & Dragons with a group of like-minded friends during my high school years. The characters were already somewhat developed, in that I relied on some of the character traits that my friends had already introduced into the mix. Years later I re-examined those characters and realized that they could be translated easily into comic form. That book was drawn by the seat of my pants, so to speak. I was learning how to best present a comic book online, so there are several instances where the size and format of the comic changed, and I never relied on a pre-written script. I had a plot outline only, and even that was subject to change. By the time I had my footing, I realized that the sword and sorcery theme had somewhat run its course for me, and there seemed to be an over-abundance of that stuff online anyway. But it was fun, only because the characters seemed to take on a life of their own when I was drawing them.

The Overman, as expected, is a different animal. The characters always seemed to have limited options in what they could do, because right from the beginning they have a pre-destined path. It's like a long march across a battlefield, and the enemy is in clear sight through the entire journey. The characters, deep down, know what is going to happen. The reader can hopefully sense that as well, although it might remain undefined, like a shadow on the horizon. Even though the characters of The Overman are locked, in a way, in a horrifying roller coaster ride, they have surprised me by their actions. They are all strong personalities, and in a way, firmly took over the wheel from me and introduced things I hadn't considered when I was preparing a first draft. Shanes depiction of them has also helped in a great way, he's captured their personalities and contributed to their evolution through the years.

I think the best characters have to surprise their creators at some point, turning down a different path than what was originally planned. When that happens, it's a sure sign that the reader will also be surprised. And surprises can be good.

Notes from the Field: The Chosen Path I

Somehow I manage to sustain despite how long this production has taken me. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have those days where I'd wish it'd all go away and I could get back to my own stories and universes. Without being overly melodramatic I think I'm hardwired for the survival of this project, much in the way a prisoner of war may hold one small truth.

That I will someday make it.

When I started out in comics at the tender age of 12 (yeah, I know what you're thinking, how serious can a twelve year old be?) I couldn't believe how taken I was by all things comics. It was like a combination lock snapping that last set of numbers that opened up the possibilities of my future. I realized at that point I could "choose" to do what I "wanted" with my life. I have to laugh however, as most of you know how hard it is to do this "craft" and how much money and time you will spend on it, before you make a single dime. Some might say we're all throwing our lives away. That, akin to Japanese Bunraku puppetry, where a puppeteer along with a 3 person team will spend 15-20 years alone working only the left hand of the puppet, and many successive years learning the other parts until decades later they become head puppeteer.

Somehow, someway the spirit of the art prevails in us and we make our way through all obstacles.

After some point it becomes a mission and then later an addiction. Then the lines blur and years past and progress is made. More to the point, The Overman is almost more about my growth as a human being than as an artist. What seemed unattainable at one time is coming into focus. There's been many attempts at Everest, where people will turn back a very short span away from the peak because it was the right thing to do. And despite the journey, I really hope I don't have to make that kind of decision. At least as long as I live and breathe I will always come back to what it is I want to conquer in my mind.

Now, despite all those deep thoughts. It's hard work. I constantly find obstacles getting in the way such as other projects, freelance and life. Like anything I do the best I can with what I have, and I spend the real quality time on the work. If I'm not doing good work, or I'm not into it, I really give it a good push, sometimes that's enough to get through. But if I'm destroying more than creating, then I move on to something else entirely. That's where writing and drawing other projects come into play. That's where it's nice to focus on what drives my economic engine, the freelance! Because no matter what I'll always come back to what I love to do.

From my experience I know there are three phases to any project. The START, the MIDDLE and the FINISH.

Some people are really good at one of these three. Sometime they're pretty good at two of them. Rarely is anyone excellent at all three. What part of a project speaks to you most? Stay tuned, I'll talk more about these three phases and what I've learned about myself and about overcoming many of the foibles that I have during a project.

=s=

Story Behind The Writing: Part 1

Because I already maintain a daily updated blog (Monday-Friday) over at websbestcomics.com, I've decided to drop in here on the weekend, and will do my best to make sure I write something here each Sunday. Web junkies, surfers, whatever you call them, are creatures of habit. I include myself as one of these kind of personalities, the people who visit the same dozen web sites every day.

I don't expect that to happen with this site just yet, but it should, once the true marketing wheel begins rolling. When that happens, I hope to make you completely dependant upon a steady diet of The Overman. In fact, my goal here is to get you familiar enough with the story so you'll not think twice about purchasing the book when it hits shelves in December 2007. I won't pretend that my blog posts aren't a thinly veiled marketing scheme. I won't lie to you, either. I'm here to sell this story to you, and I'm here to candidly explain exactly how The Overman came to be, it's evolution through the years, and it's current incarnation, which I am certain is now fully developed, mature and capable of stunning you into wanting more of it. I won't be writing about the story itself. What you'll get is the 'story behind the writing'. It's sort of like describing in intricate detail the components of some vast, purposeless machine, it's cryptic instructions and warnings written in psuedonyms from an alien language.

The Overman was a concept without any motivation. I had nothing to go on when I first started writing it, other than I wanted to convey the notion that the computers we all took for granted could be primitive lifeforms, struggling to become self-aware, struggling to let humans know that they had souls.

In fact, I think it possible that computer consciousness, while extremely primitive, would already be far too complex and alien for us to recognize. Take a look at the human brain and let me know where the soul is located. It'll be big news, trust me.

If computers were given the kind of spark that also mysteriously empowered early Man with self-awareness, how would we react to it? And would we even notice? How many centuries would pass before humans recognized that life had somehow sprung up within these machines, or that these machines have redefined what it means to be alive? Certainly there is no tangible proof of the soul, and we must rely on the unknowable to resolve that question. Could computers secretly embark on the same kind of spiritual mission, reaching beyond the sum of their parts, much in the same way we humans do every time a decision is based on the available data around us?

Computers today are still incredibly stupid. They rarely seem to understand even the most simple questions we put to it, and have a knack of giving us the wrong answers. We still have to deliver every single shred of information to them in a series of zero's and one's. For all the bells and whistles of today's computer technology, they are still crude in comparison to the workings of the human mind. Even so, there are robots all around us, performing many of the tasks we no longer have time to do ourselves. They may not look like the robots of Star Wars, but they do exist. I'll prove it to you. Call any large company and you'll be on the line with an actual robot for at least five minutes. Of all of the science fiction concepts that have involved robots and androids, who would have thought to predict they would not be evil or suffering from a superiority complex. No, in the real world, robots are just...annoying.

If all of the great science fiction ideas are taken, it's simply a matter of re-introducing those questions in a new way, with the expectation that the answers will not be forth-coming.

Notes from the Field: Production III

Hey all, Shane here again. This time we take a look at ink coverage and understanding how to avoid some possible pitfalls.

If you haven't gotten The DC Guide to Coloring and Lettering Comics by Mark Chiarello and Todd Klein I suggest you check it out. It's a great book and I wished I had taken a look at it before I started book one of THE OVERMAN. But since I did not and am a firm believer of not messing with the process once you've begun something in earnest, I have run into my own spat of troubles. In it you would have found a very sound way to color comics. Of course I learned a different way, that maybe some of you have tried.

Here are the very basics.

In Photoshop layers you can set your blackline to Normal, Dissolve etc. I set it to Multiply so the white is see-thru and I can color underneath. Seems reasonable for the most part but when you start compressing layers, the color underneath the linework will be far more dense. The mathematics behind multiply is basically the value of the color on top which is the blackline (the letter K in CMYK) times the color value underneath.

Let me try to explain what happens to me and why this is a problem specifically with my technique.

When I sandwich any colored layers below the blackline in the Layers panel all I should see is color...and no blackline. I'll select all the black on the blackline layer with the Wand Tool set to 3. I'll go back to my sandwiched color layer underneath. I'll goto Select>Modify>Contract by 2. I'll fill that with white on the color layer. Next I'll open the Channels box which will consists of a CMYK layer and 4 seperate layers for each color C, M,Y and K. Your color picker in your tool box should be set to default black and white. On the CYAN Layer I fill with 60% black, on the YELLOW layer 40% black, and on the MAGENTA layer 40% black. When that's done, I make sure my blackline layer is turned on in the Layers palette as well as any coloring effects (glows, lineholds, etc.) and then compress those, so the final image is at the top of the Layers palette.

This would constitute a finished color file. But hold on...grab the color picker and open up the Info Palette.

Check your black areas and you'll see the numbers are outrageously high. Go ahead add them up...they'll be around 340%. This will cause the ink to smear, the paper to stick and the pressmen to curse a bluestreak. In my case, since I have a textured painted look to my work, I can take my saved CMYK .TIFF of this colored page and convert it to RGB. Then I convert it back to CMYK. What's happening is the blackline dissappears in the RGB version and assimilates into the Red, Blue and Green. When you switch it back to CMYK, it has to create a black plate and grabs the darkest darks to create it. There's probably a more technical way to describe this, but in the end what it does is creates a file where the darkest ink coverage is 300% and not a bit more.

Okay...if you're not sleeping by now, then you must be getting something from this. Believe me, it'll pick up. In the weeks and months to come I'll talk about the process as I'm dealing with it on a daily basis, and I'll even go into areas of pre-production, presentation, pitching, collaboration and general industry experiences. So stay tuned, you might just find something in your size.

=s=

Notes from the Field: Production II

Shane here with another installment from the trenches.
So I spent the weekend up-resing the first book of THE OVERMAN. What had happened was I had inked and colored a back-up story for Fear Agent #7 months earlier and when it finally printed, that's when the truth sank in.

300dpi is not a very good resolution to print at.

The fine linework was muddy and even with it printed on slicker stock it just barely held it's own. It was more painful to see the jagged anti-aliasing of the borders on some of the angled panels. Needless to say, I was in a rough spot. Talking with Allen over at Image helped. I asked him how bad off it'd be to upres the book to 400dpi, a more acceptable resolution. He said considering that the work had a "painted feel" it would probably be fine.

Since I'm not one to go halfway I wanted to make sure everything was as good as it could be. I didn't just upres the work and call it good. No, I went in with my 1200dpi linework, and resaved it out at 400 dpi, then overlaid new texture layers to make sure the "painterly look" wasn't going to fluffy and mottled. Those two items are the bulk of what you see. The color underneath is effected by the texture in such a way that it doesn't hurt the transition from shadow to light.

So I finally have my colored 400dpi file...and acceptable printing file. I still had a problem with my old files that I did with my new ones. I was getting ink coverage that was totaling over 300% in any given area. Any pressman will tell you that's too much ink. It'll smear and/or stick the pages together if you don't do something. In some cases the pressman will back off on all the inks, leaving the color much lighter than intended.

So now what: How do I track down what I'm doing wrong to get my ink coverage down?

Stay tuned...I swear this will get interesting even if you learn something along the way!

=s=

Notes from the Field: Production I

Setting out to create a comic is never as easy as one might think, even after years of experience in the general art field. I'll be going over some of the technical issues behind the creative process that make this art form "special" on many levels. While their are many books that go over what you should do, I still feel like there is information that'll slip through the cracks.

So it goes with the first issue. While our goal is to finish all five books before we even solicit them, it means we have to put each and every issue to bed before moving onto the next one. The first issue I'm quite positive is usually the hardest.
The challenges I'm faced with are numerous. It's a 32 page book, and those who are not familiar with pagination (the front-to-back numbering of pages) sometimes find it a challenge to decipher. A 32 page comic actually includes in the page count the covers inside and out. Those count as four pages, and the rest of your story has to fit in 28. Trying to explain that to Scott was tough, as I'd get confused myself. He had to adjust the script numerous times accordingly. Here's a template that I made to help us layout the book and see it. Since we're both artists, this was quite valuable.

As boring and technical as this may be, understanding it helps free me up to be more creative.

The other part of the battle is the publishers printing and production methods. The best way to understand that is to go right to the source, the print production manager. Image is a staff-wise a small operation, but they handle a lot of books. So I decided to ask other creators the questions I had regarding, coloring resolution, output, and other small technical things. What I found is a bevy of different answers, and some similar ones. As far as final file outputs for color, 400 dpi was the lowest anyone should color their work. That's a big issue to me as I've colored the first issue at 300 dpi. I guess I had been under the wrong impression for some time. Better to find out now then get 5 issues down the road.

My biggest fear was: Am I going to have to recolor 28 pages?

In my next installment I'll go over what kind of hole I dug for myself, and how I got out...or am working on getting out.

=s=

Welcome To The End Of The Future.

Although our official marketing campaign in support of The Overman hasn't been unleashed yet, we are slowly, quietly gearing up the website and bringing additional content online over the next few weeks and months. As such, this blog is the latest addition to the site, and while it operates as a 'stand alone' marketing tool for us, it also connects with www.theovermancomic.com, so I hope you'll take some time to jump over there.

Shane and I will be dropping in here from time to time. As the writer, I'll likely be here often enough so you'll start to get an idea of the long history behind The Overman, glimpses into it's earliest incarnations, and it's mind-numbing transformation over the last 18 years or so. There is much I plan to share with you, and I know that Shane has been chomping at the bit to start posting various pre-production sketches and other incredible examples of his work (although I know he doesn't want to reveal TOO much too soon).