It's lucky for us that Long John decided to chill out right in front of this helpful wall.
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Sketch Fridays #87 – “Call Me Home” Page

Apr30
by on 30 April 2021
Sketch Friday #87 – “Call Me Home” page 5. Click for a larger version.

While work on this short story has been slow going in some ways, it persists in the back of my mind every minute of every day. It’s not a matter of if it will get finished, it’s more a matter of when. With my day job taking up so much time and wanting to keep the fifth chapter of Long John on track, I’ve had to put “Call Me Home” on the back burner for a bit as I prepare to jump headfirst into Long John once school lets out for the summer.

As I piece this story together, I’m learning a lot about drawing comics digitally––becoming much more familiar and comfortable with it along the way. To the point that making comics on the iPad seems less an exercise and more a possibility. This has grown to the point now that I’m inspired to come up with new stories, other stories that I want to tell. As with any person hit with the euphoria of inspiration, it can be hard to not drop everything you’re currently working on to play with the new ideas.

In the process video for this page, I discuss the fun challenge of drawing these pages, though. They are the things that keep me coming back to it because the art here is more about suggestion and implication than detail and accuracy. It’s an even more extreme version of the limits I gave myself with Long John‘s limited color palette; it’s like I’ve imposed a limit on visuals as well––how much story and scene be implied with few lines and shapes of color. Whether it’s a success or not depends on when it gets finished and in the hands or screens of readers.

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Sketch Fridays #86 – Faces

Apr23
by on 23 April 2021
Sketch Friday #86 – “Faces” drawn in Procreate on the iPad Pro

Even though the academic year comes to a close and I’m busier than ever making sure everything hits its goal, I’m actually finding that I’m able to carve out time here and there for a lot of developmental stuff. In addition to getting layouts on Chapter 5 done, I also have three other projects at various stages of development, all of which I’m very excited about.

One of them is still very nascent, but I have a scene that involves an older gentleman that goes through a range of emotions. Though I’m not necessarily thinking about drawing this project myself, the idea of the comic has been so energizing I just wanted to throw some faces onto the page (the iPad) and come up with an expressive face to take through those emotions.

My most favorite things to draw are faces, so this ended up actually being a nice catharsis for the stress my day job is giving me––something I need to remember when I feel like I must sit down to draw but can’t think of anything to draw (I’m not a natural “sit around and sketch” kind of guy). The challenge is coming up with a base face (the face that’s to the left of the middle drawing was the first one I did) and then trying to draw that face in a range of angles and emotions while also staying “on model” (meaning it looks like the same face from drawing to drawing). It was an exercise, so it’s not perfect, but it is actually something I find fun to draw.

I guess that’s a difference with me as an artist from a lot of other comic artists; I don’t really tend toward making finished drawings aside from comic pages, it’s more the action of drawing and problem-solving that keeps me coming back.

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Sketch Fridays #85 – The John Walker Conundrum

Apr16
by on 16 April 2021

I gave Long John the surname “Walker” for two reasons. First, I was very much inspired by the 1967 John Boorman-directed, Lee Marvin-starring noir film, Point Blank. The movie itself was an adaptation of the Richard Stark novel, The Hunter, which kicked off his series of novels starring the hard boiled anti-hero, Parker. Many of those books were adapted into graphic novels by Canadian artist, Darwyn Cooke––a book series and an artist whose influence on my cannot be understated. While The Hunter and other Parker novels had been granted adaptation licenses, the one thing Stark (“Richard Stark” was actually just a pseudonym for novelist, Donald Westlake) wouldn’t license was the name of the character. That is, until Cooke came along. Because of that, in Point Blank they named the main character “Walker” since they didn’t have the right to use the name “Parker.”

Second, In the Mono Valley, there is a town called Walker north of Bridgeport (more of that to be seen in Chapter 5). So, there are local ties (there is also a town of Bishop south of Mono Lake, but now I’m giving away too many secrets) as well as pop culture ones.

All that being said, I had no idea there was a Marvel character named “John Walker” before I created my troubled hero. As a youth, I only read books that had an “X” in the title or were made by the founders of Image Comics, so I was woefully ignorant of 97% of comics at the time. I bring this up because the Marvel character “John Walker”––apparently also known as U.S. Agent––has appeared in the new Disney+ Marvel show, Falcon and the Winter Soldier as a trouble replacement for Captain America, and I should say I received more than a few texts after he first appeared. Currently, I don’t subscribe to Disney+ and I have only minimal interest and even less investment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so the most I know about Marvel’s John Walker is his pretty neat costume, actually.

So, in honor of great minds thinking alike (though, I guess I should have had him holding a bottle of Johnnie Walker, too, if I had been smart about it) I drew the above comic to make some of my friends laugh.

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