Category: Process

(or: Why I love DC’s Wednesday Comics)

A big thing I want to do (and am struggling with) with Petra’s Call is to build each episode to stand alone.

The ultimate goal is that each episode will present a piece of the overall story that can stand on it’s own. If somebody has never read Petra’s Call before, they should be able to drop into any episode and be able to figure out what’s going on – and ideally, want to read more (you know – if dinosaurs and robots are their kind of thing).

This is the goal – and it’s a hard nut to crack. Take traditional comics – 22 pages long, about 6 panels/page – that’s an average of 132 panels in one issue of a comic. 132 panels to tell your story.

Petra’s Call has about 12 panels per episode, sometimes more, sometimes less, but 12 is:
a) An amount of work I can finish in one week.
b) Enough space to build a complete scene.
c) Not even close to 132 panels traditionally used to tell a comic story.

For me to figure out how to get these episodes to stand-alone – I had to look at the episode gap – the events that happen between each episode. In the first 5 episodes – Petra’s Call is very ‘moment-to-moment’. You are with Petra and Kodiak every step of the way. When you finish an episode, the next episode picks up right where we left off.

This changes with Episode 6.

There is a big gap between Petra having the Calling on the back of the T-Rex and Kodiak holding Petra on the river bank. What happened to the T-Rex? Why is Petra lying on the ground?

These are things that don’t directly impact the story – and as such, they don’t need to be shown. I can put them in the Episode Gap – the space where I let the readers fill in the spaces (for the record, I know what happened, but I’ll let you use your imagination).

Finding and deciding what goes into the episode gap is something that I’ve struggled with since I started working on Petra’s Call. It’s hard to find reference for dealing with episode gaps in short form. There have been a variety of different comic stories told in shorter formats, but they are hard to find. I figured I would wing it and find the sweet sport for how to build a scene out of 12 panels.

Then, almost as if DC comics was reading my notes on episodes, they release Wednesday Comics.

For those who don’t know, Wednesday Comics is a new project from DC comics which collect 12 one-page comics in a newspaper format. Each of the stories features a top notch creative team and in most cases, each one-page story can stand on its own.

For a guy struggling with the episode gap, this was like a gift from the gods. I could see how legendary creators put together a stand-alone story in 6-15 panels, making Wednesday comics the closest thing to what I want to accomplish with Petra’s Call (the sole exception being Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman comic in Wednesday comics comics in at 30+ panels).

Going through Wednesday Comics, especially the ‘man’ comics (Batman, Superman, Hawkman, Kamandi) has really helped me decide what I put on the page and what I leave to the reader’s imagination. Which in turn has helped me understand how I can reach the ultimate goal of each episode being able to stand on its own.

Episode 5 looks different from the rest of the episodes – a lot different.

When I first started working on Petra’s Call, I fell into a trap that a lot of creators fall into – I kept rewriting and redrawing Episode 1.

I would finish it, throw everything out and do it again because I had spotted a tiny flaw that apparently required a complete re-write. After spending two months working on Petra’s Call, I had 5 versions of Episode 1 at different levels of completion, but I hadn’t even thought about starting Episode 2. And for a comic that was supposed to put out one episode a week, that was a problem.

My art, writing, Flash Skillz and understanding of the medium were always improving, so I always knew I could do better, so I kept going back and starting from scratch – because I knew I could do better. My wheels were spinning – I was doing a ton of work – on one episode.

I had to start moving forward.
Continue reading “Episode 5 Commentary – Art Style Experiments”

In art school, you do a lot of figure drawing. A LOT of figure drawing. You start to figure out the human body, how feet work, how legs bend, the rough shape of a head. You figure it out because you do it all the time.

15 years after finishing art school, and not drawing a heck of a lot during those 15 years, I was rusty, but the days upon days of figure drawing are still in my system.

The thing we didn’t do a lot of in art school was dinosaur drawing. There was a dino-skeleton in the Biology building and one day we all went to the atrium to draw from reference. All of the nerds immediately sized up the big old skeleton. After 5 minutes of drawing dino bones, most people gave up and moved onto drawing a plant or turtle… I pushed through and tried to draw the damned thing, ribs and teeth and all.

The drawing was horrible.

After my miserable failure, I returned to the Biology building a few times to draw from that monster, but it always sucked.

At the time I was drawing every day – and mostly people. I would draw people waiting for the bus, on the bus, in class, in the lounge, in restaurants, everywhere. I was pretty happy drawing people.

Then the t-rex stepped in. And damn it all, I never could get that skeleton to look remotely good.

Now, for better or worse, I’m climbing back on that horse.

There are going to be a lot of dinosaurs in Petra’s Call. One is even going to be an important character. It’s not going to be easy, and at times, it won’t be pretty, but I’m taking this one on.

Chasing down your demons, even from 15 years ago, is hard, but what really scares me is when I have to draw robots, and then have the robot fight dinosaurs… While it’ll be super awesome and fun when it’s done, sitting down to actually draw it scares the crap out of me.