Hmmm. There’s something familiar about today.

Could it be … Friday?

These Days …

I’ve been on vacation since last Friday. It’s been a good week to be on vacation here in the Pacific Northwest – we’re getting lots of rain. Since my plans were to finish the physical art for the next Mighty Nizz story and sort my old comics, staying indoors was not a problem.

Unfortunately I have the attention span of … one of my cats. If that.

I sorted the magazines that have been sitting unboxed on shelves. Now all the various series are stacked together rather than mixed in. I open the long boxes of comics that had been sitting, sealed up, since my brother shipped them from California twenty years ago. (I’ve been saying I had eighteen long boxes for so long I’d never bothered to actually count the boxes. There are only twelve boxes. I have no idea where the “eighteen boxes” number came from.) I got as far as doing a quick skim through each box before putting the lids back on and setting them aside again. I saw comics I’d forgotten that I had. I saw comics that have never been collected and probably never will be. I’m not nostalgic. Not for comics as they were when I was collecting them. I don’t buy monthly comics anymore. I buy graphic novels and series collections. I like books with spines. Those old comic magazines (one comic writer calls them pamphlets, another calls them flimsies) don’t sit on bookshelves. They’re not durable. But the art and story should be preserved. I have four days until I have to go back to delivering mail. I could actually sort the boxes in that time, if I’m willing to be quick and ruthless.

Yeah. Maybe.

As for working on Mighty Nizz art …

See “Red Storm Elegy” later in this newsletter.

Innsmouth Independence Day

Today I’m showing off my illustrations for the July 4th occurring adventure in The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection, written by Oscar Rios, published by Golden Goblin Press.
At a good old fashion New England Seafood Boil, on a beach in Innsmouth, the cousins gather to celebrate the 4th of July.  However, young Alice has a plan and needs her cousins’ help. She asks them to help her break into her great grandmother’s abandoned mansion to look for the family’s genealogy records.  She wants proof that her ancestors worked as privateers for the Continental Navy, so she can apply for membership in the prestigious Daughters of the American Revolution.  However, for some reason her family has forbidden her from exploring the family’s history. The cousins soon stumble onto dark secrets and are faced with difficult choices in the shadows of the decaying seaside town.

Red Storm Elegy

About ten years ago I was commissioned to illustrate a graphic novel. A friend of mine had decided that he finally wanted to make a go at a career writing comics. The best way to show a comics publisher that you know how to write a comic is get an artist to illustrate one of your scripts. So he commissioned a few artists to illustrate a few of his scripts. For me he’d come up with a fun gimmick idea – a “sci-fi samurai western” in which all the dialogue was in emojis.

I drew about a hundred pages of the story. The hundred is approximate. The writer wrote and I illustrated a number of revisions, including a couple of different endings. He had someone color the first 28 pages. We tossed the emoji gimmick. Eventually he decided that the story wasn’t anything he knew how to finish. He gave me the rights to use the art to create a story of my own, if I could think of one.

I put the physical art in a drawer. I kept scans of the art on my hard drive. Occasionally I’d open the files, look at the art and try to think of a story that I could tell with the art as it was, without having to draw anything new. I always came up blank.The plot of the story was more something the writer had come up with than something I would have thought of on my own.

Last week, after I’d been practicing with my Wacom tablet in Clip Studio Paint, I opened the files again. I thought, “Maybe I can do something with these. I’ll probably have to do some editing and maybe draw a new page or two but …” While I delivered mail, my brain tossed around ideas, thought of ways to reorder the art, considered new motivations and relationships between the characters. By Saturday I had a vague idea how I might use the existing art to tell a story that worked for my sensibilities.

First I wrote out a basic outline of the plot, using as much of the existing art as I could. Then I renamed all the files and put them in a new folder. Having a new name made it easily to consider the art as something new and malleable. Then I reordered the art to match the basic plot I had worked out. I created blank pages to fill in the places in the plot where I figured I’d need new art. I ended up with this –

Counting the blank place holder pages told me that, if I kept to the outline I’d written, I’d probably have to draw 31 new pages. I say “probably” because some of the existing pages would need a little redrawing and I could see how some of the pages could be rearranged.

Thirty and one pages. Plus God only knows how much correction and redrawing and editing and …

And so I looked at the Google Sheets document I’d created when I was trying to figure out where to place my original art based on my new plot. And I started writing dialogue. I didn’t worry about whether the dialogue matched the outline as long as it drove the story forward.

I’m thirty pages in and I’ve shaved four pages off my outline. Which means I’ve got some drawn pages that will need to be rearranged and some art that might not get used at all. And I’m okay with that. I’m not going to do that editing or draw any new pages until I finish the script and do at least one rewrite.

My working title is Red Storm Elegy.

This is Dove, my protagonist.

She’s not someone you want to piss off. A few someones have done that. They’re going to be very sorry.
I’ll be posting updates on my progress as I go.

Along with any progress on anything else that catches my attention.

I hope your week has gone well. I hope that your world has some happy places in it.

I hope the next seven days give you what you need.

See you next Friday!