Here’s the “trailer” for Realm Chapter 2… I hope it whets your appetite for the adventure (so-called)! Be advised that the trailer contains some minor spoilers, as any trailer does. Click to enlarge:
Realm Chapter 2 Trailer
March 9th, 2011Realm: Good News and Bad
March 8th, 2011
Realm Chapter 2 is inked and ready to be scanned as soon as I get a chance, so before very long it will be appearing online in all its glory. That is the good news.
The bad news is that I’ve decided not to draw any more chapters of Realm until I have the entire book in thumbnail form. Up until now I’d been doing Realm in a manner similar to that I use for Sunrise, in which I begin finishing early pages before the thumbnail outline is even complete. This works okay for Sunrise, as it must keep to a tight deadline, but it tends to cause some amount of discontinuity overall, as the story tends to evolve with the thumbnails. Since Realm is a very long story and is significantly more work than a given issue of Sunrise, I want to do this the right way. That means that I want to have the entire story finalized in thumbnails before I cut another piece of bristol board. So, expect some significant delays before Issue 3…but to be honest, even if it takes a year to finish planning, the delay could be less than that of Issue 2.
Circuit Reader 3: reMIND
March 1st, 2011Pacing is one of those things that no one notices unless it’s not working. It’s tricky to strike that delicate balance between too slow and too fast, and many webcomic writers never quite seem to get the knack of it. They particularly seem to fall prey to what is charmingly called “glacial” pacing, in which weeks’ worth of real time elapses while narrative time proceeds at a crawl. I am happy to say that reMIND by Jason Brubaker does not have this problem. Unfortunately, it has the opposite problem.
Kaboom!
February 24th, 2011
On the above recent Sunrise page, I struggled for a long time while trying to decide whether to use the cliched sound effect kaboom. This is supposed to be a serious moment, and kaboom conjures up superhero silliness just as much as biff and pow. At first I tried coming up with an original sound effect (I believe it said baWOOM up there for a while) but ultimately decided to go with kaboom, not despite its longstanding reputation, but because of it.
What I realized was that using an unexpected sound effect is a distraction. It calls attention to the sound effect itself, and draws the reader out of the story. Take a look at this sequence from Jason Lutes’s (highly recommended) Berlin: City of Smoke:
What transpired here should be fairly obvious: a man puts a gun to himself, and the big PAK seems to indicate that he fired it. The problem with PAK, though, is that it’s not a sound effect we typically associate with guns. When I read this book, I stared at these two panels for a long time, wondering if I was misreading them; if maybe PAK was supposed to indicate something different. I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, but not completely sure. Had it said BANG, I wouldn’t have skipped a beat.
Thus I decided to go with kaboom, even though it seems like a cliche. In a dramatic moment, I want my readers to be thinking explosion, not “baWOOM?”.
Sunrise: Three Years!
February 12th, 2011Well, it’s been another year. Sunrise officially began on February 12th, 2008, when this horrible-looking page was posted to the then-very-rough website I’d set up at the time. (The cover of Issue 1 appears to have been posted the day before, but was actually posted somewhat later, with the date adjusted to ensure correct position in the archive.) Now, some 230 pages later, it seems like a good time to look back and see what I’ve learned from this little experiment.
Circuit Reader 2: Namesake
February 3rd, 2011There is a type of story which recurs again and again. In it, someone is suddenly transported to another world, one which she had believed to be fictional. This is in some ways an offshoot of the fantasy-transposition story (that is, one in which people from the “real” world end up in a different world), but it also implies an interesting truth about writers. Writers create worlds through their work, but not even Tolkien-scale efforts can make these worlds actually exist, no matter how much their creators may want them to. I think stories like Namesake grow out of this frustration.
Circuit Reader 1: Outsider
January 5th, 2011The concept of being an outsider is an important one in science fiction. The idea of being the only human in a group of aliens is possibly the most dramatic example of isolation imaginable. For writers of SF it presents a vast array of possibilities to explore not just the possibilities of alien cultures but also what it means to be human.
In Outsider, Jim Francis enters into this longstanding tradition with an epic of war and politics, depicted through attractive anime-style artwork. Francis obviously spends a considerable amount of time on both art and writing, and the world-building is extensive–but does the story hold up?
Circuit Reader intro
January 5th, 2011Well, it’s a new year, and hopefully the blog will be better than ever. Along those lines, I’m reintroducing a feature I attempted a while ago on a different blog: Circuit Reader, a series of overly-lengthy reviews of webcomics in the style of The Webcomic Overlook. These take a while to write, so I can’t promise them very often, but I will put one up when the mood strikes me.
See above for the first Circuit Reader post, in which you will find out my feelings on Outsider by Jim Francis.
Re-learning Fluidity
December 18th, 2010My drawings are becoming tense again. At various times I’ve been able to loosen up and work more fluidly, but recently I’ve noticed that a certain stiffness is creeping in again, particularly in Sunrise. The drawings are taking a long time to make, requiring lots and lots of erasing, and ultimately coming off as fairly lazy and not particularly dynamic. This is partly due to the weakness of Sunrise as a very talky comic, but that is still not a complete excuse for the static feel it has had for most of its run. I’ve been forced to learn to loosen up again. It has been a revelation.
Women With EMP Cannons
December 10th, 2010As promised, here is my sociology paper on feminism in webcomics. I’ve now turned it in to my professor so I think it’d be okay for me to post it here. I’m afraid the formatting may leave something to be desired, but it is after all an eleven-page academic paper being forced onto a blog. Any sources which are online can be accessed by clicking on the in-text citation (with the exception of those for LICD, because mentioning it here is too much encouragement as it is). Read the rest of this entry »