And it's finally done! WOOOOOOOOOOOO! And this one was only months late instead of years, so ...progress?
Quick postmortem on this and a little about my last comic.
I had done a short comic with Costa Koutsoutis titled "The Doom of the Moors" Check out his prose work as well, it's really good!
Just looking at it as a finished product, I'm quite fond of it but it unfortunately came during a really bad time in my life.
It was my first comic with someone else, was super excited to do something different. Unfortunately, it was started in a the beginning of a severe depression.
Long story short. I've struggled with depression all my life. Had a lot of unfortunate events happen over the years and I thought I was dealing with them well and then my body decided I was completely wrong about this!
I've been in and out of doctors ever since, this lead to outrageous medical bills that we're still paying off, my wife also took ill for a year. We're in a better place now, but it was a nightmare that we're still taking care of to this day.
So something that should have been quick and fun became tangled up in this to the point where a project that realistically should have taken me two months, took around three years to come to completion.
Costa was super understanding and was more then a great guy during this whole time. We're even planning on doing another comic later in the year, but that's for another day.
A little bit after "Doom" was finally posted, Sven Straatveit (check out his work too! ) approached me about doing a short comic with him inspired by old horror movie hosts and thus "Mysterious Crocodile" was born.
Again this one had some personal bumps from multiple angles, but it came out during February 2015 after I had to stall it from a proposed October 2014 launch.
A lot of the problem was that I was/am trying to learn Manga Studio 5. I've never learned how to use Photoshop as it was always too expensive for me, so other then some brief dabbles with the previous versions of MS, I'd never done anything digital.
Most professional artist will tell you never say something isn't your "best work". And I agree. You stand by what you've done and do your best and try to better next time.
That said, I almost wish I didn't do this digitally as I think I could have done better if I just used paper and pen. BUT I also really want to learn how to do art digitally, so I stuck with it. I wish there were better tutorials on line for beginners, because even the better ones assume you've used Photoshop for years and base their tutorials on that. So more or less, I was trying to learn a program from day one, learning how to draw with a tablet all this new stuff that I sort of understand now, but put a bit of a monkey wrench in the works from the get go. Oops!
There is a lot in this comic that I'm super proud of and I think the finished comic is a super fun. I just tend to look at everything that I did wrong and obsess over it. (ah! depression is fun.)
The idea was to make it look sort of like an the house style of "Archie Comics".I used to want to submit stuff to Archie when I was younger and used to draw in that style quit a bit...20 years ago. I was really out of practice and I should have done more detailed model sheets. (something that I'm trying to do on the next one)
Also since I'm such a novice at Manga Studio, there are a few panels where you can tell I tried to run before I learned to crawl. Trying to be ambitious was sort of a problem that I will have to work on in the future. But over all, I like the way the character look and the over all tone of the comic.
I made it black and white and grey because I wanted it to feel like something you'd have watched on an old crappy tv in the attic on Saturday night years ago. And I think that works well here. when I finally have time to do another chapter with Sven I'm not sure if I will do that again, but it felt right for this.
But that's the short long story about how things went down. I hope you had fun reading it and it's not announced yet, but I think a friend is doing the next M.Croc adventure and I can;t wait to see what he'll do with it. Hopefully I'll be back to it down the road but I have a lot of work to do between now ant then.
But thanks for reading and for reblogging. It warms my heart and I appreciate very much.
See ya in the funny pages!
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