I'm just a Terminal Lance Corporal.

MaximasXXZ

I do what I want.



God it's been so long since I tried to digitally paint anything.

t i m

Popping by to give kudos on the great thread, awesome stuff man!

Also, if you like zombies, check out World War Z by Max Brooks. I'm sure there aren't many Barnes and Nobles over there, so if you haven't read it try and have someone send it to ya. Appreciate what you guys are doing over there, keep safe.

MaximasXXZ

Heh, thanks Tim, I appreciate it.

Funny you mention World War Z, my wife got it for me before I came out here, and I have it with me. I also have two copies of the Zombie Survival Guide--you can never be too prepared.

Kewop Decam

MaximasXXZ wrote: »

I do what I want.



God it's been so long since I tried to digitally paint anything.

I like the whole Creation of Man pose. Will there be someone on the other side?

Spoiler:

http://faculty.eicc.edu/ckrumbein/images/rome98-creation-of-man.jpg

MaximasXXZ

Yup, The Detective will be on the other side. For all intents and purposes, this is supposed to be a parody of the famous painting.

MaximasXXZ

This is slightly more ambitious than I was initially thinking.

MaximasXXZ

Okay I'm done for tonight. We'll see where this thing goes tomorrow.

Mustang

I love this, but why a detective? Is it a reference to something I am not aware of?

Shiekahn_boy

An actual cool version of Louise from L4D?

MaximasXXZ

Mustang wrote: »

I love this, but why a detective? Is it a reference to something I am not aware of?

Charlie the Zombie is a graphic novel I've been working on forever, it's two books. One is Charlie the Zombie, the other is The Detective. The Detective is in black and white, whilst Charlie is in color--for reasons I don't really feel like explaining.

MaximasXXZ

This painting is starting to personify "Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance" to me. I just dove into this, with no rough sketch or anything. It's becoming more difficult to figure out where the hell this is going and where I want the composition to go.

Mindsack

i like how its going so far, cept "guy with the deagle" left shoulder looks really weird, a bit out of place, and his tie disappears into his jacket

MaximasXXZ

Oh... yeh. He's not done, I just wanted to start working on the zombies before I got too caught up in his details.

And his name is The Detective, thank you very much.

Kewop Decam

I would like it more if you pretty much played heavily on the original



This has a heavy slant. You detective dude should be above the zombie in a symbolism of superiority like God to Adam. In that art piece, there are prefect slants from eye to eye, outside shoulder to outside shoulder and so on. I'd say lean heavy on that paintings construction and fit it into your creation.

You also said you had no preworking for this drawing. Well, what's stoping your from this being your preworking? You've learned enough through this and if you started over you would have the practice and understanding of the piece to make some killer and awesome I would think.

MaximasXXZ

So I've been given the opportunity to start making "Terminal Lance" in strip form for the local paper. I wanted to run it by the good ol' AC first to see if you had any input before I submit it. The drawings were done by hand with Photoshop work on the panel lines, speech bubbles and text. This will be in the base paper, circulated only within Marine Corps Base Hawaii. So... with that said, all the jokes are going to be military relevant. I'm hoping the humor can pretty much be understood universally, but I think it will appeal more to Marines and Sailors (as it's supposed to).

Let me know what you think.

deadlydorito

well its cool but...

i thought you were making a sexy zombie scene!

earthwormadam

I think it'll be difficult for this to grab anyones attention besides your demographic, but it sounds like thats mostly the point anyway. It's kinda cool to see a strip aimed at a group you'd never think to see a comic geared at. That being said, the lines are nice and clean, and it's not about 2 stoners and their wacky adventures so I approve and want to see more. I'm guessing you have to get these approved and that you can't make strips about touchy military subjects?

Also I think actually drawing out the speech bubbles might make it look a bit less less rigid.

Asamof the Horrible

watching the zombie painting make progress made me laugh

so good, keep posting more

MaximasXXZ

Adam, it's a small demographic for sure, but I think it could appeal to most of the military as a whole if it happens to catch on. To this day there hasn't really been much in the way of military-based comics. The whole idea is largely inspired by Gunny Wolf's "Sempertoons", but with the idea of being slightly less crappy and slightly more relevant to today's junior enlisted population.

I'm hoping a larger paper like the Military Times series will pick it up eventually and it will get further distribution. But right now, I'm just trying to get it off the ground here in Hawaii. I'd consider turning it into a webcomic as well but I don't have any web-making abilities to speak of.

As for the zombie painting, I was working on that in my last couple weeks of Iraq. When we started packing up I kinda just let it slip by, I might finish it some time but right now I've got too much work on my plate for it! >_<

Edit:

Also, does the joke work? I was considering adding a fourth panel with the senior Lance saying, "Isn't it awesome?!" And the new Marine saying, "...so awesome." But I thought that might be too much. I'd like to keep it 3 panels but seeing as I haven't submitted it yet I could change it.

MaximasXXZ

#2. Now that I have 2 done I can actually submit it. Let me know what you think.

Edit



I felt the need to add another speech bubble...

Kendeathwalker

I didnt even notice the Um.. speech bubble until I started playing the "can you tell the difference between these two pictures" game.

Your lineweight is pretty uniform, which makes things difficult to look at because it gives everything the same level of importance. I have two suggestions to remedy that. One vary the line weight. or two keep it the same and push those simple values to really silouhette bigger shapes and make things read faster. Or option 3.. do both of those things.

Im from a military family so these make me smile.

tynic

I'm not really sold on the camera angles here, the 'back of the head' shot isn't usually very visually appealing (there are occasional exceptions, see here ). Also there seems to be a jarring juxtaposition of careful and sloppy - the uniforms and people are drawn with care and attention, but the environment and objects (desks, doorframes, etc) have skewed, wobbly lines and just generally look poor. I would advise choosing one or the other - put more energy into your drawings and don't worry about the detail, or neaten up all the lines.

A third stylistic choice that bothers me is the lack of shading - I mean, that's a valid decision, or can be, but you've gone for relatively detailed environments and so they read very flat - I'm not getting any sense of depth out of the second or third panel, because there's all these lines but no clear sense of space.

Word balloons and font choice are a whole nother thing and I'm not really the best person to crit these, but I think Tubesteak did a neat tutorial on effective dialog balloons once, I'll see if I can dig it up from the bowels of the internet.

edit: all i can find is this, which is not really what I was thinking of - ok, well, I guess the main thing is that the lineweight on the balloons is so close to your drawn lineweight that the tails get lost. Also, tangents on the tail placements in a few of them, and the placement of the 'um' could be a lot better, as ken points out. And finally: Comic Sans blech.

earthwormadam

I like that one more joke wise.

I agree with above that you should try to achieve similiar line quality in both the characters and the backgrounds. Also the world bubbles could use some work. They just look very computer generated right now, especially for instance when you're connecting two of them, like in the um bubbles.

Still though I think you have something and should keep pumping em out.

MaximasXXZ

Thanks guys, all of these are very valid points and I will look into them for future strips. The lineweight thing was a big thing in my head when I was making it, I tried to vary it a little but it doesn't show through very well in the finished piece. Shading was another decision I wasn't sure on. I hate doing hatching with ink, but I felt like solid black shadows would be too much.

The bubbles thing is hurting me I know, my Illustrator isn't working, my Photoshop is. The tools in Photoshop are pretty lame for these sorts of things. I'm working on getting my Illustrator back up.

MaximasXXZ

tynic wrote: »

And finally: Comic Sans blech.

I'm not, and would never use Comic Sans.

Nappuccino

What you have picked is equally as bland though...

tynic

MaximasXXZ wrote: »

tynic wrote: »

And finally: Comic Sans blech.

I'm not, and would never use Comic Sans.

Sorry for impugning your font habits! But whatever you did use, it's kind of enh.

MaximasXXZ

I'll see if I can't find a better one. I was thinking doing like a typewriter thing for the whole military aspect of it, but at the same time I didn't care that much.

MaximasXXZ

So here's a new logo I'm working with. I tried distressing it but I couldn't really get it to look right. I'm thinking with the comic being somewhat cartoony, distressing it isn't really necessary. Let me know what you think...

MaximasXXZ

Word up dawgs!

I seem to come and go around here quite a bit. I've been pretty busy with my site http://terminallance.com (a webcomic for Marines)

Anyway, I did this sketch for work and I was hoping someone could help me out with it. I don't consider myself to be very proficient with charcoal, I felt extremely clumsy the entire time I was working on this and I just wanted it to be over after a certain point.



If you can't tell, it's Martin Luther King Jr. I was asked to make a Black History Month poster for the base and I figured I'd do a sketch to sell it better. Didn't quite come out the way I hoped, it may or may not make it in the poster. It's not a horrible sketch but I'm picky with the things I have out to the public.

Anyway let me know what you all think. I could use some help on this, I know there's some charcoal bubs around here that are better at this madness than I am.

MaximasXXZ

WIP of something I started up today... I cropped this pretty bad, the original is at my work computer. I'll see if I can't get the full version tomorrow.

Sgt Carl

MaximasXXZ wrote: »

#2. Now that I have 2 done I can actually submit it. Let me know what you think.

Edit



I felt the need to add another speech bubble...

This is hilarious. Hoo rah!

MaximasXXZ

Speaking of which, I took everyone's advice here and found a new font for the strip. It's the one I've been using for the last 7 strips.

MaximasXXZ

Thus far... I dunno if this will go any further without additional input.

MaximasXXZ

So I recently started drawing the speech bubbles of my comic by hand. I wanted to see what you all thought about it, as opposed to the digital ones I was doing before.

Here's tomorrow's strip, with speech bubbles done by hand:



Here is a previous strip with digital bubbles:



I'm debating on which one I want to stick with. My wife likes the digital ones, other people like the hand drawn ones... Help me out!

Mustang

I like the digital ones...also, what's a POG?

Gafoto

I know I'm way late to the party but that Dirty Third girl has got some monster gams.

Kendeathwalker

hand drawn.

Paradise

Maximas, that MLK charcoal is great. I don't know why you're talking about "clumsy".
"I just wanted it to be over after a certain point." Everybody gets that feeling sometimes.

You might want to define Martin Luther King's shoulder a little more. Make it look a little more solid. That's the only thing that might need changing.

edit: my vote is for hand-drawn

MaximasXXZ

Mustang wrote: »

I like the digital ones...also, what's a POG?

"POG" is an acronym meaning "People Other-than Grunts," basically everyone in the Marines who didn't join as an infantryman. The comic is mostly centered around the Infantry Marine's point of view (i.e.: mine)

Yeah I heard the Dirty Third thing a lot back when I made that like 2 years ago. What can I say, I like em thick.

As for MLK, I stopped working on it. The project is over with and like I said, I do feel really clumsy with charcoal. Also, all I had at my disposal were the charcoal stick thingies, I think if I had some actual pencils I would've felt like I had more control.

Thanks for the feedback. My strip is catching on quite a bit, I know probably no one here understands it but the terminology is all everyday stuff in the Marines.