Good Omens Process Talk
One of my favorite things about working on the GOOD OMENS graphic novel was getting to draw the interactions between Aziraphale and Crowley. All the body language moments. This is one of the favorite things about comics.
Naturally, I had to avoid the show and not follow anything they were doing there, and was hard to get the amazing performances of Tennant and Sheen out of my head! But I think I managed to carve out unique characters. What a thrill to get to work on this!
Forever grateful for this amazing experience!I did the book in pencil and ink, and later colored it in Photoshop. I did the majority of the pages myself, but did work with assistants at times. I usually do the primary color, but a flatter - which is a technical job - really helps out as well. I still do a lot of my own flats anyway, I can be very controlling about end results.
One of the great joys of working on the GOOD OMENS graphic novel was being able to bring things to visual life that the show did not do.
I absolutely LOVED the show, but I decided to stick as closely to the original text as possible while whittling down a 400 page book to 200 pages. A real task, believe me.
I wrote the script with virtually no direction as Dunmanifestin (the Terry Pratchett Estate) put their entire trust in me.
I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I nearly cracked under the weight of that responsibility. No kidding. I also had very little art direction.
It's not that I've never worked without direction before - I do almost all of my space opera graphic novel series A DiSTANT SOIL without it. But GOOD OMENS is a classic, it's iconic, and people were depending on me. I felt the weight of millions.
Anyway, getting to bring back the Motorcyclists of the Apocalypse was a real treat and I bought motorcycle models for each rider. I got a little neurotic about this whole scene, actually, and I ended up spending more time planning it, worrying about it, and even hired an assistant - the brilliant conceptual artist Miles Tevis- to help out with a portion and then I ended up redoing a chunk of what he did anyway.
If I'd just knuckled down and faced it, it would have taken half the time, but I wasn't thinking clearly. I was pretty sick during production of much of the book.
As a cartoonist, I admire artists for their fabulous comic cover art. But there is a lot of heavy lifting in doing 6 or more finished pictures - all of which must work in context with one another and move the story forward - on every page.
The hard work is in the interiors. But if I had my druthers, every page would take a week!
I kept a close eye on descriptions of characters in GOOD OMENS and stuck to the text and my inner eye, but Pollution is one character with whom I took a little liberty.In his first appearance, he is described as being forgettable.
But a guy with pale skin, white hair, and white clothes doesn't seem very forgettable to me, especially if he's working on an oil tanker!
Maybe that's part of the magic of who he is; something everyday that blends in and poisons us. We know it's poison, but we don't notice the persistent, silent evil magic in our lives.Later he is described as looking like a romantic poet, so the liberty I took here is making him wistful and willowy and tubercular.
This is one of my favorite pages in the graphic novel. I spent way too much time coloring it. When he appears again in his romantic poet clothes, I lavished time on the color again. It took longer to color some pages in the book than it did to draw them.
The dominant digital comic coloring styles of today tend to be either flat or airbrushed-looking. I chose to use a lot of texture in the GOOD OMENS graphic novel.
There is a lot of texture in the air of this scene in particular to suggest the particles of pollution. Pollution makes for great sunsets!I used a color jitter and a scattering digital painting tool to get these effects. I'd never used these tools before, and I love them. I must try them again.
The trash in the lower right corner is an altered pile of photos of...well, trash.
There was so much time between the start and the finish of the book, when I wanted to use that effect again, I pretty much forgot how I did it!
I loved the kid actors in the GOOD OMENS show, and was very nervous about designing them for the GOOD OMENS graphic novel, because those kids were just so wonderful!
But I think I hit close to look intended in the text, especially with Pepper and Adam, who is described as looking like a young Greek god.
I especially loved working on the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There are a lot of advantages to dreaming up costumes and scenes in a comic: you can afford to make really complex transitions, create wild effects. These would be incredibly costly on film.
The drawback is getting extremely complex costumes and sets on point from one panel to the next. The more complex the costume or set, the harder it is.
I recall discussing this with a famous Hollywood costume designer who wondered why so many superhero costumes were so simple.
And I said...because we have to draw it 10000 times.
He'd never considered that!
Most of the scenes in the GOOD OMENS graphic novel are fairly short, but for every shot there is a time cost, and for 90% of that time, I was doing the labor myself. So one panel could be a few hours...or a day's work!
It depends entirely on what's in it.
I'm always asked "How long does it take to draw a comic book page?"
For a lot of creators, they hit that one page a day goal. They do the best they can in one day. If you're working on a monthly book, that's the way you have to go.
But for me the answer is, "Well, what's on the page?" It's a big reason I don't work on monthly books. I take whatever time it takes to do the page, whether it is 10 hours or 60 hours! The only thing I'm thinking of is, "Is it right?
I really loved the Tadfield scenes in the GOOD OMENS graphic novel. And I tried something on these pages I don't believe I've ever done before. I painted a long panorama shot of the town and then just moved the scenery back and forth, enlarged it or reduced it in Photoshop as needed. I sketched all the figures in in pencil, inked them, then dropped in the background behind them. Combining them in Photoshop saved hours of time and tedious repainting. As the scene moves on the sky changes as the sun sets and Armageddon approaches. So I retouched the sky and buildings in eech shot without repainting every single panel wholesals. This is basically how animation is done. It not only looked better than if I'd redone the same background over and over and tried to match the colors and exact placement of items in each panel, it saved a lot of time.
It's awards season and I'm so out of it I forgot to vote for the Hugos even though I'm at guest of Worldcon this year. Hi Ho.
If you enjoyed the Good Omens graphic novel, consider the work when you vote in the Ringo Awards which you can nominate using this form HERE and in the Dragon Con Dragon Awards, nomination form HERE. Thanks! I did the writing and art - no, no one wrote that script but me, thanks, no matter how much some people seem to think I get magical help from fairies or something.
I wonder if P. Craig Russell has this problem...
