CorporateLogoThe toilet knowshow I feelRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
Aw, and I was all set to make a joke about moshing
CorporateLogo on
Do not have a cow, mortal.
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GustavFriend of GoatsSomewhere in the OzarksRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
So I'm putting my Bald Knobber on the backburner. Just decided to integrate him to my webcomic down the line. However I started another little project, and have made loads more progress on it.
Basically it started from a friend I have who is always telling stories. He never begins or finishes them, but just jumps from the middle of one to the middle of another. They are always insane, and always completely unbelievable. Yet all the while he is completely enthralling just to here him gab on about whatever he gabs on.
The premise is pretty much Dukes of Hazard meets Twin Peaks. Skip Solomon is a self styled greaser scumbag. His brother, Lou, isn't much better, but he has a fairly good head on his shoulders in comparison. The two share a somewhat strained bond over a 69 Chevelle that their father left them. One day while working on it, it falls down on top of Lou killing him. Ever sense his soul is stuck in the car, and whenever Skip gets in the driver seat, the spectre of Lou plays a sort of backseat driver.
To keep it true to the guy who inspired the stories, every issue starts in the middle of a serial. You never see the first part, or even the final part. You just jump in somewhere in the middle, and it ends on some kind of cliffhanger. The next issue would just jump into a completely different serial. Granted the stories will completely be self-contained and still have closure despite the false serial nature. If your a Venture Bros. fan, think Escape to the House of Mummies part 2.
The setting is an actual town in Arkansas named Harrison. It's considered one of the most racist towns in the south as well as neighbor to some of the worst meth areas in the state. It provides a sort of dark area, and since I'm aiming for some backwood mysticism mixed with dirty realism and all coated with dark humor, it's pretty ideal. Plus I used to live close to the area, so I can easily get references to make sure the town is accurate.
I've got the first issue relatively mapped out. I'm kind of working it by the seat of my pants to keep that sort of one-upmanship story-telling that I'm shooting for. But it will introduce all of the main characters, and have some short flashback sequences to clue the reader in enough as to the history of Skip and Lou.
The first story is Statutory of Limitation and deals with Skip trying to escape Doomsday Phillips (an antagonist who might only show up at the beginning and end of most issues as a running joke) after making out with his underage sister. I figure I'll introduce Daisy a sort of faux-hippie girl that serves as a sort of love interest, and most of the back story.
Here's some of the pages I've got made up so far. Complete with mock cover =D
I have some other plots in mind-
-Meth Dogs- A lot of dogs of Meth Lab owners end up going feral from the fumes they inhale. So I'm kind of merging them with hellhounds and bringing in some bizarre supernatural drug culture stuff.
-Bootlegging- Since a few neighboring counties are still dry, Skip can go all Smokey and the Bandit and try to bootleg. I'm even thinking this might be a great place to have the Bald Knobber's ghost character chase them around.
I kind of want to develop a sort of continuing mythology with a lot of spooky, but completely white trash elements in it. Plus car chases.
Anyways what do you guys think? I'm a little worried it might be a little too derivative and a maybe a bit too ridiculous at points. It's definitely a completely different project than I've ever attempted before. Especially cars, never really drawn those in great detail. So much more difficult than I thought it would be.
Gustav on
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TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
edited March 2011
That art is really nice, the people are small but it's universal and it gives the book a nice visual aspect. It catches the eye yet still allows for both storytelling and action.
The car on the last page needs bigger tires, but I agree drawing cars can be a pain in the butt, especially when you get down to the wheels.
As far as the premise goes, I like it. As long as you stick to the premise of done in one issues, the hook of the story shouldn't be a problem. I would say either lose the racist town angle or limit how it's used, simply because it's such a standard trope in comics it feels overused even if this town really is racist. The meth angle is one that I would use simply because it hasn't really been used by comics yet as an underlying theme in dealing with small towns.
But if you ever made it for a webcomic, let us know and I'd bookmark it.
TexiKen on
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GustavFriend of GoatsSomewhere in the OzarksRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
I'm figuring the racism will just come in as a couple clansmen themed antagonists. Like an actual wizard Grand Wizard or something silly like that. The current Grand Wizard's son still lives in Harrison if things haven't changed. Though there could be some story stuff to mine out of it being a sundown town. Hm, I'll have to work with that.
The meth stuff though, I really wanted to tackle that. The webcomic I do now is about contemporary Ozarks life and folklore, and I always felt I was cheating by never bringing in meth or the serious drug abuse stuff. It's seriously a plague out there. However I never could find a way to bring it in without creating a complete tonal invasion.
And thanks on the compliments and notes! I'll keep an eye out on the wheels. This really is my first attempt at drawing cars, so I've got some speedbumps to take on.
Look TLB, me drawing Earth-3 versions of Amazo and Gold from the Metal Men, clearly takes precedence over drawing El Chimichanga or whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing.
Seriously though, I'm almost done with page six of my Kookaburra story. So I just need to pencil four more, ink the whole mess of them, tone and letter them, and then I'll start in on Chupacabra.
Also totally co-opting the Kookabura for Juan's Australian adventures.
It will turn out that, along with eating babies, dingos are also gun-runners that sell drugs to pre-schoolers
I am more than fine with this.
I'm thinking that, once I wrap up Kookaburra, Chupacabra, and then that eighty-page crime comic I wrote a while back, I want to do a sort of webcomic anthology thing, where I tell short (ten-twenty page) stories, that all take place in the same universe, and occasionally cross over.
I'm half-ass brain storming, ironing things out, connecting several of my little sequences into a story, trying to visualize panels. I wish I knew where my Idiot's Guide to Comics was, or my Peter David Writing Comics book was. I have a rough idea of what I want to show, but I don't know what length I should aim for. 16 pages? 22? 8? And it needs to be both a contained story arc (beginning, middle, end) and an introduction. A good comic should leave you satisfied in some way, but also wanting more.
Start in media res. Guy gets punched in the face. Establish that he is in really little apartment, he was in there with a girl, she got smushed. Guy's a high tech low life, he was doing drugs with this girl, who doesn't really matter now, but her death will have ramifications later. Guy fights back, loses, gets shot by a space ship and thrown off a huge apartment building into future stacked lanes of flying cars rush hour traffic.
Guy gets hit by flying cars and trucks, lands in the middle of a stand off. He flattens the Good Faction's reinforcements. He lands on their van from above, smashing it and killing everyone inside. Guy somehow talks his way into being the reinforcements. The head bodyguard for the good dudes stands on Guy's neck as he sprawled out on top of the smashed van, and escapes with the Good Faction, fleeing to a space port.
I'm struggling with stuff. Show the punch' connecting with Guy's face. don't show the punch connecting. I've seen it both ways, but that comic course I read online and linked here a while ago said not to do it. I guess this is something I would work out with the artist in the future...
I'm working on an ongoing series with 2 other guys, have been since 2006. We've completed six issues, but we aren't able to produce issues on a regular basis, or in the frequency we had hoped. We've decided to take what we've learned and reboot it into a 3 part graphic novel. We think it'll increase our chances of getting published/being more marketable.
Tell me what you think if you have time to read it. the-stronghold.net is the name of the site we're posting it on. A local guy helped us publish the first issue in 2007 but then 2008 happened and we lost Diamond distribution, and just slowly ran out of money.
I'm working on an ongoing series with 2 other guys, have been since 2006. We've completed six issues, but we aren't able to produce issues on a regular basis, or in the frequency we had hoped. We've decided to take what we've learned and reboot it into a 3 part graphic novel. We think it'll increase our chances of getting published/being more marketable.
Tell me what you think if you have time to read it. the-stronghold.net is the name of the site we're posting it on. A local guy helped us publish the first issue in 2007 but then 2008 happened and we lost Diamond distribution, and just slowly ran out of money.
Your art's terrific, no doubt about that (though I'm personally not a fan of painted comic art). My biggest problem with your comic is that terrible Flash interface, that makes reading your comic a chore. I only read a couple pages, but I'll download it all sometime and give it a serious read-through.
I know you said you want to be published, and make graphic novels, but I think it may be more prudent to just serialize your comic online, and then sell print collections, like a lot of other webcomics. Most small publishers only pay you on the back-end anyhow, and serializing it online allows you to cultivate an audience that will actually buy merchandise and such. Plus, there's always the possibility that if it's successful enough, you'll get picked up and distributed by a publisher, as with Dr. McNinja or Axe Cop.
Anyhow, here's the final version of this thing I posted yesterday:
There's a version on my blog, sans grainy yellow filter.
I just wanted to drop in and say hi to this part of the forums (I mostly hang out in the AC) as I myself am an aspiring comic artist and writer. I'm 16 right now and I'll probably have shitloads of questions as I get done with my current boring-ass education, so expect to see me again.
Anywho here's the only decent comicpage I've got online which was a quick thing I did last year for the fun of it. Deviantartgallery
Tell me what you think if you have time to read it. the-stronghold.net is the name of the site we're posting it on. A local guy helped us publish the first issue in 2007 but then 2008 happened and we lost Diamond distribution, and just slowly ran out of money.
Total respect for putting something together and actually getting it out there. However. The writing on this thing is incredibly difficult to follow, and the art's ambition is completely mismatched to that of the writing.
The problem with the writing starts with the prologue. As visual media go, comics are particularly suited to non-text presentations of their backstory. A couple of pages of art is about as cheap as it gets production-cost-wise, but even that's not necessary because I don't actually need to know the information in your introduction to understand the story. You spend the first couple of issues just giving backstory that isn't even relevant to the story at hand. It is important that you get me interested in your story before you dive into the home life complexities of your young female Jewish superhero. Understand that if she's not the interesting part - and obviously at the outset of your story she's not - then you need to put together more than a long fight scene to tweak my interest.
Back to the prologue, though: if you do intend to use text to introduce your series, it had damn well better sing, and the prologue to this first issue does not. I'm not sure how to communicate that more precisely. If you read your text back to yourself, perhaps you'll hear it. The words in the first paragraph are dark and aggressive, but they aren't backed up by anything concrete. You don't build to anything. It's just information delivery - big bads, small resistance, here comes earth.
An information dump is a bad choice here, and it is followed up by far too much backstory and not nearly enough story. Worse, you reiterate your opening prologue within this backstory, and we don't meet an actual character until something like 15 pages in. And when we finally do meet a character, we learn nothing about her and we get this line:
I am their miracle. Everything they've waited for. I am their messiah. Enthroned in the sky--and from my right hand comes salvation.
First of all, there's been no waiting. You haven't established a sense of time passing whatsoever. If that's why there were 16 pages of nonsense leading into this moment, you need to reevaluate every frame of those pages to build in actual change. It should take a page, maybe two, to communicate deep change over time, but none of the pages preceding this moment accomplish that feat. The way to make time pass is with silence. You have gunfire and action built into every panel, and it totally removes any sense of time passing.
Second, you take four full panels to communicate this, yet not ONE of those panels actually reveals the character. Nor does anything on the next page. Or the page after that. It takes FIVE full pages to see the character in action, and that ends on a cliffhanger. Your character, your setting in fact, is not interesting enough to pull that off. For some people your art might be, but that's a big chance to take.
For me, if the first two issues here are the first third of your graphic novel, I'm regretting my purchase.
I know that's harsh, but seriously, unless this settles down rather quickly the grandiose style and shakycam perspectives would drive me up the wall. This isn't a literary comic, obviously. You're not playing with high themes in here, not yet at least. So pare it down. Get rid of about 90% of the first issue and you'll have at least fixed the pacing problems. Then work on toning down the grandiosity to about 20% of its current level. If you must have an extended fight scene, for the love of god end it after the two have traded blows, don't try to lure me in with the promise of even more unfounded nonsense combat.
I don't even know what to say about the pregnancy vignette. Did that really seem like the best place to tell that story? What do I, the reader, need to know from that story in order to understand the present action? If the answer is "nothing", then why is it placed where it is?
So, it's a mess. I don't know what else to put in there. Since you've completed this much of it, I'm guessing you're strong enough to withstand one detailed crit. At the same time, I hope it's of some use to you, if only in future projects.
Posts
Some of my friends are on Zoloft. You could try that?
Basically it started from a friend I have who is always telling stories. He never begins or finishes them, but just jumps from the middle of one to the middle of another. They are always insane, and always completely unbelievable. Yet all the while he is completely enthralling just to here him gab on about whatever he gabs on.
The premise is pretty much Dukes of Hazard meets Twin Peaks. Skip Solomon is a self styled greaser scumbag. His brother, Lou, isn't much better, but he has a fairly good head on his shoulders in comparison. The two share a somewhat strained bond over a 69 Chevelle that their father left them. One day while working on it, it falls down on top of Lou killing him. Ever sense his soul is stuck in the car, and whenever Skip gets in the driver seat, the spectre of Lou plays a sort of backseat driver.
To keep it true to the guy who inspired the stories, every issue starts in the middle of a serial. You never see the first part, or even the final part. You just jump in somewhere in the middle, and it ends on some kind of cliffhanger. The next issue would just jump into a completely different serial. Granted the stories will completely be self-contained and still have closure despite the false serial nature. If your a Venture Bros. fan, think Escape to the House of Mummies part 2.
The setting is an actual town in Arkansas named Harrison. It's considered one of the most racist towns in the south as well as neighbor to some of the worst meth areas in the state. It provides a sort of dark area, and since I'm aiming for some backwood mysticism mixed with dirty realism and all coated with dark humor, it's pretty ideal. Plus I used to live close to the area, so I can easily get references to make sure the town is accurate.
I've got the first issue relatively mapped out. I'm kind of working it by the seat of my pants to keep that sort of one-upmanship story-telling that I'm shooting for. But it will introduce all of the main characters, and have some short flashback sequences to clue the reader in enough as to the history of Skip and Lou.
The first story is Statutory of Limitation and deals with Skip trying to escape Doomsday Phillips (an antagonist who might only show up at the beginning and end of most issues as a running joke) after making out with his underage sister. I figure I'll introduce Daisy a sort of faux-hippie girl that serves as a sort of love interest, and most of the back story.
Here's some of the pages I've got made up so far. Complete with mock cover =D
I have some other plots in mind-
-Meth Dogs- A lot of dogs of Meth Lab owners end up going feral from the fumes they inhale. So I'm kind of merging them with hellhounds and bringing in some bizarre supernatural drug culture stuff.
-Bootlegging- Since a few neighboring counties are still dry, Skip can go all Smokey and the Bandit and try to bootleg. I'm even thinking this might be a great place to have the Bald Knobber's ghost character chase them around.
I kind of want to develop a sort of continuing mythology with a lot of spooky, but completely white trash elements in it. Plus car chases.
Anyways what do you guys think? I'm a little worried it might be a little too derivative and a maybe a bit too ridiculous at points. It's definitely a completely different project than I've ever attempted before. Especially cars, never really drawn those in great detail. So much more difficult than I thought it would be.
The car on the last page needs bigger tires, but I agree drawing cars can be a pain in the butt, especially when you get down to the wheels.
As far as the premise goes, I like it. As long as you stick to the premise of done in one issues, the hook of the story shouldn't be a problem. I would say either lose the racist town angle or limit how it's used, simply because it's such a standard trope in comics it feels overused even if this town really is racist. The meth angle is one that I would use simply because it hasn't really been used by comics yet as an underlying theme in dealing with small towns.
But if you ever made it for a webcomic, let us know and I'd bookmark it.
The meth stuff though, I really wanted to tackle that. The webcomic I do now is about contemporary Ozarks life and folklore, and I always felt I was cheating by never bringing in meth or the serious drug abuse stuff. It's seriously a plague out there. However I never could find a way to bring it in without creating a complete tonal invasion.
And thanks on the compliments and notes! I'll keep an eye out on the wheels. This really is my first attempt at drawing cars, so I've got some speedbumps to take on.
Tumblr Twitter
maybe
Tumblr Twitter
WHERE'S MY GODDAMN CHUPACABRA PAGES, MUNCH
Seriously though, I'm almost done with page six of my Kookaburra story. So I just need to pencil four more, ink the whole mess of them, tone and letter them, and then I'll start in on Chupacabra.
Tumblr Twitter
Also totally co-opting the Kookabura for Juan's Australian adventures.
It will turn out that, along with eating babies, dingos are also gun-runners that sell drugs to pre-schoolers
I'm thinking that, once I wrap up Kookaburra, Chupacabra, and then that eighty-page crime comic I wrote a while back, I want to do a sort of webcomic anthology thing, where I tell short (ten-twenty page) stories, that all take place in the same universe, and occasionally cross over.
Tumblr Twitter
I am coming up with a second story now.
Once I figure out the villain, it'll be cake.
I know it will feature the sasquatch mafia and a banshee femme fatale
Tumblr Twitter
Start in media res. Guy gets punched in the face. Establish that he is in really little apartment, he was in there with a girl, she got smushed. Guy's a high tech low life, he was doing drugs with this girl, who doesn't really matter now, but her death will have ramifications later. Guy fights back, loses, gets shot by a space ship and thrown off a huge apartment building into future stacked lanes of flying cars rush hour traffic.
Guy gets hit by flying cars and trucks, lands in the middle of a stand off. He flattens the Good Faction's reinforcements. He lands on their van from above, smashing it and killing everyone inside. Guy somehow talks his way into being the reinforcements. The head bodyguard for the good dudes stands on Guy's neck as he sprawled out on top of the smashed van, and escapes with the Good Faction, fleeing to a space port.
I'm struggling with stuff. Show the punch' connecting with Guy's face. don't show the punch connecting. I've seen it both ways, but that comic course I read online and linked here a while ago said not to do it. I guess this is something I would work out with the artist in the future...
This sounds like a challenge to me.
Gonna prove you wrong.
Just gotta finish my thing with blank
And then work on a script with a buddy
It is called Night of the Assisted Living Dead
finish our thing
we haven't even done the first issue yet you jerk
you're in this for the long haul, asshole
You the one doing the big work
You the Kano
That's right
you are just the fill-in artist
who is scripting 90% of the damn thing
You do the 90% of crap and I do the gold
And also polish your crap
I hate you so much I have to hate through interpretive dance
It is a thing I am accustomed to
My brain is just so boss
(do it)
Tell me what you think if you have time to read it. the-stronghold.net is the name of the site we're posting it on. A local guy helped us publish the first issue in 2007 but then 2008 happened and we lost Diamond distribution, and just slowly ran out of money.
I like the art aesthetic, and the writing is decent
I know you said you want to be published, and make graphic novels, but I think it may be more prudent to just serialize your comic online, and then sell print collections, like a lot of other webcomics. Most small publishers only pay you on the back-end anyhow, and serializing it online allows you to cultivate an audience that will actually buy merchandise and such. Plus, there's always the possibility that if it's successful enough, you'll get picked up and distributed by a publisher, as with Dr. McNinja or Axe Cop.
Anyhow, here's the final version of this thing I posted yesterday:
There's a version on my blog, sans grainy yellow filter.
Tumblr Twitter
Anywho here's the only decent comicpage I've got online which was a quick thing I did last year for the fun of it.
Deviantartgallery
JordynNolz.com <- All my blogs (Shepard, Wasted, J'onn, DCAU) are here now!
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
JordynNolz.com <- All my blogs (Shepard, Wasted, J'onn, DCAU) are here now!
Also sorry 'bout the jorb there.
Total respect for putting something together and actually getting it out there. However. The writing on this thing is incredibly difficult to follow, and the art's ambition is completely mismatched to that of the writing.
The problem with the writing starts with the prologue. As visual media go, comics are particularly suited to non-text presentations of their backstory. A couple of pages of art is about as cheap as it gets production-cost-wise, but even that's not necessary because I don't actually need to know the information in your introduction to understand the story. You spend the first couple of issues just giving backstory that isn't even relevant to the story at hand. It is important that you get me interested in your story before you dive into the home life complexities of your young female Jewish superhero. Understand that if she's not the interesting part - and obviously at the outset of your story she's not - then you need to put together more than a long fight scene to tweak my interest.
Back to the prologue, though: if you do intend to use text to introduce your series, it had damn well better sing, and the prologue to this first issue does not. I'm not sure how to communicate that more precisely. If you read your text back to yourself, perhaps you'll hear it. The words in the first paragraph are dark and aggressive, but they aren't backed up by anything concrete. You don't build to anything. It's just information delivery - big bads, small resistance, here comes earth.
An information dump is a bad choice here, and it is followed up by far too much backstory and not nearly enough story. Worse, you reiterate your opening prologue within this backstory, and we don't meet an actual character until something like 15 pages in. And when we finally do meet a character, we learn nothing about her and we get this line:
First of all, there's been no waiting. You haven't established a sense of time passing whatsoever. If that's why there were 16 pages of nonsense leading into this moment, you need to reevaluate every frame of those pages to build in actual change. It should take a page, maybe two, to communicate deep change over time, but none of the pages preceding this moment accomplish that feat. The way to make time pass is with silence. You have gunfire and action built into every panel, and it totally removes any sense of time passing.
Second, you take four full panels to communicate this, yet not ONE of those panels actually reveals the character. Nor does anything on the next page. Or the page after that. It takes FIVE full pages to see the character in action, and that ends on a cliffhanger. Your character, your setting in fact, is not interesting enough to pull that off. For some people your art might be, but that's a big chance to take.
For me, if the first two issues here are the first third of your graphic novel, I'm regretting my purchase.
I know that's harsh, but seriously, unless this settles down rather quickly the grandiose style and shakycam perspectives would drive me up the wall. This isn't a literary comic, obviously. You're not playing with high themes in here, not yet at least. So pare it down. Get rid of about 90% of the first issue and you'll have at least fixed the pacing problems. Then work on toning down the grandiosity to about 20% of its current level. If you must have an extended fight scene, for the love of god end it after the two have traded blows, don't try to lure me in with the promise of even more unfounded nonsense combat.
I don't even know what to say about the pregnancy vignette. Did that really seem like the best place to tell that story? What do I, the reader, need to know from that story in order to understand the present action? If the answer is "nothing", then why is it placed where it is?
So, it's a mess. I don't know what else to put in there. Since you've completed this much of it, I'm guessing you're strong enough to withstand one detailed crit. At the same time, I hope it's of some use to you, if only in future projects.
@oldmanhero .programming .web comic .everything