Timo and the Killbot go at it!

Part 3 of my 24 Hour Comic-Day project. A side story featuring Elke and Thor and their hunt for the mythical Daemor.

Part 2 of my 24 Hour Comic-Day project. A side story featuring Elke and Thor and their hunt for the mythical Daemor.

Oct 3, 2009 was 24 Hour Comics Day. The idea is simple – all over the world, people work for 24 hours to create a comic.

Day of the Daemor was supposed to be a small single episode of Petra’s Call, an introduction of two characters who will be joining the gang in the near future.

Day of the Daemor quickly ballooned into four complete episodes.

I’m really happy with how the comic turned out, especially for a 24 hour comic, so I decided to put our current story in Petra’s Call on hold and spend some time with Elke and Thor.

Day of the Daemor - a 24 Hour Comic

People have been into every aspect of the episode – the art, coloring, pacing, dialog, backgrounds – I’ve gotten great feedback on every side of the episode.

Below is a collection of ‘pages’ from Petra’s Call.

On the left are images from Episode 9, on the right are three of my favorite images from the earlier episodes. Even with a quick glance anyone can see there’s a big difference in the style, consistency, composition and overall feel of the pages.

Taking my time - and the work gets better.

While my process is always changing and I’m always trying new things, the biggest contributor to the improvements in Episode 9 is that I made one simple and major change:

I took my time.

Up until Episode 9, I had been working with tight schedules and was always pushing myself for the deadline.

“I have to get all of the pages inked in the next 2 hours – and then it’s done.”
“I have 2 mornings to get the whole issue penciled, if it isn’t done in time, it doesn’t matter, I’m going to inks.”

I needed to take more time and give myself more perspective on the work. This let me do a few key things that weren’t part of my process before.

A) Editorial feedback from my wife. I gave my wife 5 drafts through script to final art. She gave me a lot of dialog and pacing feedback that made a big difference.

B) Redrawing and redrawing some more. From thumbs to final inks, I spent a lot more time sweating the details. It took a lot longer, but it was worth it.

C) Taking a breather. Stepping away from the work to work on something else and coming back with fresh eyes. A big step here was doing the old ‘horizontal flip’ trick, where you flip the art 180 degrees horizontally, which exposes mistakes you wouldn’t have caught otherwise.

D) Putting in the extra time. Making a fully colored comic, plus setting up the site, Flash browser and everything else (you know – day job making video games, wife and kid, etc) takes a lot of time. I had set aside two hours every morning to work on Petra’s Call – and that was it. Now I am spending more evenings and weekends working on the comic as well.

All of these have helped me ‘Level up’ with my work on Petra’s Call and I am at a point where I’m a lot happier with the work I’m producing.

Now – back to the drawing.

Too Many Bots!

I need your help. This morning I sat down and jammed out a bunch of different bot silhoettes as the first step in designing the first bot that shows up in Petra’s Call.

The bot is going to be about 8 feet tall, expect it to kick a lot of ass and take very few names along the way.

There are things in each design that I like, so before fleshing out a design, I have decided to put it to a vote. Choose your favorite design (or two) and vote in the comments below.

It would be awesome if you could give me your favorite elements of the design too, so that if you like the big chunky fingers, I don’t change them in next step.

ex: “Dude – E is awesome. He’s got a big knife for an arm! Slice and dice baby!” (or, you know… something like that…)

Voting ends on Friday Sept 4th. Thanks in advance – much appreciated!

Writing, drawing, coloring and ‘flashing up’ each episode takes me 15-20 hours, and even with waking up every morning at 5AM (weekends too!) I can barely get them done. Factor in travel for work and it’s a slippery slope. A 1 week schedule also doesn’t leave a lot of time for the experimentation side of Petra’s Call and NRD.

Hopefully this change will improve the quality of the art, better features (the long awaited and much requested ‘jump to episode’ feature) and more experimentations in the whole experience, but it means that Petra’s Adventures will only be broadcast every other week.

Episode 8 – a story about a man and his soup.