Book features:

1. Issues 1-10, naturally
2. The existing pages of the canceled issue “The Bargain”
3. Both April Fool’s Day jokes.
4. Selected excerpts from original online commentary
5. Brand new retrospective commentary unique to the book
6. A complete guide to the comic’s easter eggs

Click here to buy it. ‘Tis fun either way.

Size of dot reflects character’s proximity to camera. Orange line indicates the character’s duration within the series. Characters who never appeared on a cover: Stephenson and Ritchie.

Color swatches show basic palette of cover art. Apparently the best way to imitate a Sunrise cover would be to use a lot of gray, a little sky blue, and desaturated colors.

Not a real hangar, obviously… a couple hours in Blender and I’ve thrown together this lovely digital hangar which has already saved me endless frustration. For those of you unfamiliar with the technology, this is a digital 3D model which the computer can render from any angle. Of course, the excitement doesn’t end with accurate perspective, because this is also a lit model! Take a gander:

My “people” are made of blocks, yes, but still, it’s nice to know where all the shadows fall.

With this in hand, I can go back to my paper and ultimately produce this:

Accurate perspective and realistic lighting, with no cursing or sobbing required. Computers, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s give them a big hand.

Quick, what’s the difference between Calvin and Hobbes and Star Wars? Naturally, the two have so little in common that the question hardly makes sense. The comparison which I’m trying to draw, though, is this: Bill Watterson ended his series early, when it was still in its prime, while George Lucas’s epic continues staggering along, soiling its legacy a little more with each installment. While I’d like to see more Calvin and Hobbes as much as the next guy, I have to admit that I’m glad Watterson ended it before it turned sour.

You can probably see where this is going. I am going to be ending Sunrise following the completion of Issue 10. This was not an easy decision for me to make, and I’ve given it a lot of thought. Sunrise has served me well. When I started it in 2008, the only long-format comics I’d drawn were my Zark stories. I hadn’t taken any figure drawing or illustration classes yet. I wasn’t yet reading graphic novels(!). Now, ten issues later, my artwork has improved dramatically and my writing has followed suit. (How strange to think that the most recent issue was more than twice as long as the first!) Sunrise has always been primarily a learning experience for me, and I’d like to think I’ve learned its lessons well. It’s time for me to graduate.

But why graduate now, when it’s only just becoming strong? Well, to be honest, I’m getting tired of it. The episodic format doesn’t interest me as it once did. I want to move toward working with long-form stories (e.g., graphic novels) and Sunrise does not lend itself to that. Secondly, I’m interested in moving away from genre fiction. While I do have some ideas for a sprawling space opera (and Realm of course) I think it might be fun to do something about the real world for a change. Finally, Sunrise has some inherent limitations that become more pronounced to me with every issue. It too often tends to have very long passages of dialogue, and in many cases there are no opportunities for interesting visuals. As I’ve said previously, Sunrise is based pretty closely on Star Trek, and Star Trek is not a comic. This kind of storytelling works much better on TV. In short, Sunrise is wearing thin, and I’m ready to try something new.

Which is, of course, what this really comes down to. While Sunrise is ending, I have numerous other projects, at least one of which will move up to take the spotlight that Sunrise is currently occupying. Realm is one possibility. I’m also planning a graphic novel which might be well-timed to start soon. And, dare I mention it, a silly science-fiction gag strip which I may run in the interim. Suffice it to say (and this cannot be stressed enough) I am not leaving webcomics. Sunrise or no, I will be making something, so do stop by and see what it is. Naturally there will be further announcements as the time grows near.

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that Issue 10 is going to be awesome. It’s got airships. It’s got action. It’s got drama. It’s got over 70 pages. It’s also the most Tintinesque issue yet, so some of you will appreciate that I’m sure. So don’t be glum. Buckle up and thanks for coming along for the ride.

Jonah Robinson, Raven, Albee… how can I ever forget them?

1. Realm chapter 1 is now available to be read online.
2. The Zarks, which I invented while drawing on a half-hour car trip, are now nine years old.
3. The area of a circle is equal to the radius squared times 3.14159265358979323846264 . That is the extent to which I memorized it when I was in my teens. Yes, I know what Toothpaste for Dinner says. I make no apologies for the actions of my teenage self.

Tomorrow a new issue of Sunrise will begin, in honor of the ides of March I guess.

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?”.

As I may or may not have mentioned once before, the origins of Sunrise lie with a short run of comics I did for a Vacation Bible School in summer 2007.   It was called The Zeppelin Brothers and Their Cousin Clara, and followed the titular characters as they flew around the world in their nameless airship, reinforcing the daily scripture lessons. (Depicted: Wednesday.)

For some reason this comic maintained a certain intrigue for me, or at least the idea of a comic set on an airship did. Late that year, around December or so, I began work on a new comic. My central idea was to take the formatting of Star Trek and set it in the past (ironic since the original Star Trek concept was a frontier show set in the future), and place the characters on an airship.

In preparation for writing this essay I went through my old Sunrise design documents. I can’t actually remember what the first thing I did for Sunrise was, but these are at least fairly close. This is the sheet where I wrote down the basic core concept of the series (in addition to some concepts for the captain’s uniform), and on the back was a list of brief character sketches:

As you can see, the whole concept was still based around the premise of the ship being so incredibly controversial that no one wanted to work on it. That idea faded away pretty quickly. It was hard to come up with something controversial enough and Astor’s antagonism became a better reason for the undesirable crew. (Admittedly the undesirable crew aspect has faded away a lot at this point, too.)

While we’re on the subject of the characters, let’s look at that early character sheet. We have “Captain” (Robinson), “Financer” (Kindler), “Pilot/Helmsman” (Neil), “Airship Designer” (Blanchard), and “Poet” (Lila). Wait, Lila was supposed to be a poet? I didn’t even remember that. And she was the most intelligent of the cast? Huh, usually she just seems to be the most easily-angered. It’s tough having an unappreciated superhuman intellect I guess. I find it odd that Lila at the time seemed more important than, say, a chief engineer, but I was really just stumbling around in the dark at that point. In any case, you can see here the character designs that would still be pretty prevalent throughout Issue 1 (after which they took on a different flavor than that implied here).

Regarding Issue 1 I don’t have all that much to say, as I have no real recollection of how it was conceived. I wrote down a paragraph of exposition detailing its events and just winged it from there.

Let’s take a look at the original art:

(Compare to inked version)

At the time I started work on Sunrise I hadn’t yet taken any figure drawing classes, and boy does it ever show. Jeez but these people are weird-looking. Other aspects of the craft were also wanting, for example the fact that I wasn’t using any rulers, which sometimes  caused problems when drawing the panel boundaries in later.

Let’s just ignore the deficiencies of the early art for now. I’ve complained about that a million times before. Instead let’s take a quick look at the history of the artwork in Sunrise:

• Issue 1: Digital inking with crosshatching, some simulated with tiling patterns and some really laboriously drawn by hand. Digital crosshatching was a really stupid idea, so I abandoned it at the end of the issue.
• Issue 2: Originally shaded with gray tones, but I thought these looked too futuristic for my historical premise, so I replaced them with halftone patterns after that style solidified. (I can’t easily fix Issue 1 because of bad work methods I used at the time.)
• Issue 3: The first issue to use the halftone patterns. They were kind of messy at first but got nice later on.

After Issue 3 the art stayed pretty much the  same for a while. Due to my fascination with Jeff Smith’s complete lack of shading, I tried to reduce the amount of grays until there were none left in Issue 7 (which was also the first issue I attempted to ink non-digitally, although that only lasted a few pages). As it turned out I’m not Jeff Smith and the unshaded pages look pretty flat. ( Der-Shing Helmer convinced me to go back to shading after I asked her for criticism.)

This brings us back to Issue 8, which is the first issue which I’ve inked and lettered in real life. I’ve been using some really terrible paper (cardstock from Staples) for no better reason than because it’s cheaper than bristol board.  Despite that foolishness, the art is overall better than previous digitally-inked issues, and for the first time I can look back without cringing (most of the time).

As far as writing goes, I think it’s gotten stronger too, with the exception of the dismal Issue 7. The even-numbered issues have typically been better than the odd-numbered ones so far (just like the Star Trek movies!). A quick run-down:

• Issue 1 was the “pilot,” basically. A lot of rustiness is to be expected. The characters all behave kind of stiffly and the script doesn’t know what to do with itself. It’s really a lot like the first episode of a TV show, with confused actors muddling their way through a weak story.
• Issue 2 sees the comic coming more  into its own, with a relatively intriguing story and better “performances” from the characters.
• Issue 3 is somewhat weaker, with odd pacing and Lila Astor, who always ruins everything. No issue can be based on Neil and Lila and still be successful, because they are the weakest characters in the entire cast. Neil is just an archetypal adventuresome young man and Lila is just a grouchy person who plays a cello sometimes.
• Issue 4 is still a favorite of mine. It’s told in two parts, the first of which is the mystery about the drifting airship and the second of which is about the dilemma of the spies. The ending is perhaps a bit rushed, but I think altogether the whole thing worked out pretty well.
• Issue 5 has two plots, one of which is about the movie and one of which is about the exploding things. While they do meet in the middle, the point at which they meet is also the point at which the explosive plot ends, so the integration is not really very good.
• Issue 6, or “the music theory issue” as I tend to think of it, is fairly strong, about equal to Issue 4. Its main weakness is the plot point  “Neil Needs Confidence in His Musicianship,” which was completely unnecessary. The issue probably would have been stronger without it. I do like the way Ashbroch’s plan for posthumous mischief is portrayed though, especially as Haeckel introduces an unpredictable element which Ashbroch surely would have appreciated.
• I’ve already talked about Issue 7 and why it was a disaster.
• So that brings us back to Issue 8. I think this is the strongest issue so far, with well-developed guest characters and a well-paced plot that runs far longer than any previous issue has.

Sunrise is, first and foremost, a learning experience for me. Attempting to list everything I’ve learned from it would be futile, but let’s see if I can’t hit at least a few good points:

• Use drafting tools. It will save you lots of trouble in the end.
• Inking digitally is probably not worth it. I’ve saved lots of time since I went back to traditional inking, and it actually looks better. Don’t bother trying to do digital inking unless you have a Cintiq or something, and even then it’s probably a mistake.
• Letter by hand too. It looks better.
• Plan out the story as much as you can before starting to draw. For Issue 8, I have a full written script, a page-by-page breakdown, and thumbnail drawings of each page, complete with full dialogue. I also rewrote parts of the script even after the issue had started to run.
• Don’t move ahead with a story you’re uncomfortable with. This mistake was central to the problems of Issue 7.
• Try to find a style that looks good and is within your skill range. Don’t try to do something more complicated than you’re capable of.
• Remember to keep the drawings interesting for yourself and your readers. Don’t just draw talking heads over and over again.
• Don’t give up. This is a problem-solving process, and all  snags are just problems with solutions. Find them.

That’s all for now, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading Sunrise these past few years, and look forward to seeing you around for future issues and whatever new things may come.

About a month ago I noticed that my loose sketches tend to be fairly fluid and even accurate despite the fact that I draw them without any penciling (that is, going straight to ink). Compare this process to Sunrise, where many images are drawn several times over in the penciling stage because I keep making mistakes. I realized I drew the sketches without any real concern for quality, and for that reason, quality was often higher. The painstaking process of penciling Sunrise had led to two problems: an increase in mistakes due to  slower drawing, and a sense of drawing as a chore, which understandably leads to a great decrease in image quality.

I’ve also been re-examining some pages from Zirconius, the comic series I drew as a teenager. (Don’t forget that the complete Zirconius is available for only $12.00! Too late for Christmas but still fun.) These are interesting because the majority of them were drawn before I had any artistic training at all and hadn’t really read any comics beyond those in the newspaper. Despite my relative inexperience, Zirconius artwork was quite dynamic, with elaborate panel layouts, motion, and character positions.

The interesting thing about Zirconius was that these pages were not drawn at all carefully. I had a big green clipboard (hollow, with pencils and paper stored inside) on which I would typically draw the pages, often while sitting on the couch. Though I worked in pencil, I rarely felt the need to erase. (The pages were never inked.) Due to the lower standards I had at the time, Zirconius was typically more dynamic than the stiff poses and inflexible panels of Sunrise.

The last piece of the puzzle fell into place recently when I did some quick studies for a new Realm character (these may appear online at a later time). I worked very quickly and loosely, in a way that I have become unused to doing. The results surprised me: the images were fluid and fairly accurate considering that I was working without any reference at all. This is what really drove me to try working the way I did on Page 27.

Here’s how Page 27 was made: Instead of my usual slow and laborious method of penciling, I resolved to get the initial drawing done as quickly as possible. I drew the panel borders as I usually do and blocked in the art in the same way I’d done the Realm sketches. I tried to stay fluid and embrace the drawing as something fun rather than something to be finished. I tried to get it right the first time by staying loose and free, and erasing rarely. You can see the original pencils and final page here:

I think this experiment worked out well. The result stays within the rigid Sunrise panel structure  but still manages to be more free; closer to the Zirconius style. I didn’t get into comics because I wanted to draw Albee’s head over and over. I got into them because I like drawing, and I think it’s time I remembered that.

And a final word regarding the story content of this page: Geez, Norton.

First and foremost is Flashlight, the photo series formerly known as Glimpse. The entire series is online now, so do check it out. (I hope to make a “behind-the-scenes” post at a later time.)

Other updates include a photograph of a dirtpile, a photograph of a ventilator intake (Myst fans particularly ought to check this out), and the logo for The Sextons’ Guild.

Also note the new header, in which I experiment with the logo I designed recently (never before seen online).

Oh, and there’s a new page of Sunrise too. Read it >

The test is as follows: A work must have (1) two or more female characters (2) who talk to each other (3) about something besides a man. Sounds simple enough! Let’s see how I fare.

Sunrise. (1) Yes. (2) Yes. (3) Yes. Verdict: Pass! There are a few examples, mostly from Issue 4, but some from other issues as well. Still, it couldn’t hurt to try harder, as I do notice that these examples are few and far between.

Realm (1) No. Verdict: Fail. Back to the drawing board for Realm. Luckily, I haven’t plotted out the entire book yet so there’s still plenty of time to revise.

Zirconius. (1) No. Verdict: Fail. This is not an entirely fair application of the test though, as the Zarks are basically genderless. Still, they are referred to with male pronouns so I suppose this still counts as a violation.

Let’s look at some recent short stories (not available online, unfortunately).

“Imagine the Violin.” (1) No. Verdict: Fail. Only one female character, and she’s going insane. Sigh.

“Constance.” (1) Yes. (2) Yes. (3) Yes. Verdict: Pass! A story about two women who talk to each other, and only briefly about a man! As clear a pass as anyone could want.

“Real Space Experience.” (1) Yes. (2) No. Verdict: Fail. Quite a few female characters, but they never speak to each other. Granted, there isn’t a whole lot of dialogue in the story, but it’s still a violation.

Let’s look at a few other things.

Barnacle Bert in “Hands Up, Jellyfish!” Oh, no. You can’t be serious. Ah well, here goes: (1) No. Verdict: Fail. But– but–two of the jellyfish are female, and they’re talking! I think! No, wait, if they are talking they’re probably talking about Bert. Argh. Well, at least the anglerfish is female.

The Violinist. (1) No. Verdict: Fail. Having a female protagonist is not enough to pass the test.

Remnants. Some of you may recall this novel from a few years ago, which was available online for a while. Let’s see how it fares: (1) Yes. (2) Yes. (3) Yes. Verdict: Pass! Finally. Flawed as this book may be, my brief foray into it just now yielded three Bechdel-Test-worthy conversations. Yena, the female protagonist, talks to Mrs. Tamila (a grouchy customer), Rimel (an utter imbecile), and Morica (the villain). All loathsome characters, unfortunately.

Just to round out the number to an even ten, we’ll look at “Lander,” my astronaut story that probably a few of you have seen. (1) No. Verdict: Fail. Sigh.

So, to summarize:

Works examined: 10

Works passing Bechdel Test: 3

Score: 3/10

Ouch.