Long John

As of today, I have crossed the halfway point of the final stage of book creation: shading/lighting.

Just as a recap, my basic stages of comic creation are as follows:

• Outlining
• Thumbnailing/Scripting
• Pencilling
• Inking
• Flatting
• Lettering
• Shading/lighting

So, when I say I’m halfway, I don’t mean I’m halfway through the overall process; I’m halfway through the final stage of the process which, in my mind, means I’m very close to being done. When I stop to think about it, I freak out a bit, to be honest.

I freak out not only because the gestation period of this book has been uncommonly long, but because it’s the last book of Long John’s story. While I’ve always known that the story would end, it’s kind of weird to 1. not only realize it’s here but that 2. I’ve actually gotten to the finish line.

It’s the end of an eleven-year process that I didn’t expect to take this long, but I wouldn’t have sacrificed any time if it meant compromising the quality of the books I have been making. With that in mind, the satisfying aspect of this last stage of the process is that the finished pages are looking as good as I expected them to look when I drew them.

While that might not sound like a surprise, even if I have an idea of what they should look like when I lay down pencils and inks, it’s still just an idea. Once they’re scanned and flatted, I approach each panel rather individually and it’s only when I finish adding shading and lighting to the page do I step back to see how it all fits together. More than previous chapters, I have looked over the completed pages of Chapter 6 with surprise when I see that they are working as intended with little tweaking or revision needed. As I said to Kyrun Silva (of Taurus Comics) earlier this week, “It’s like I’ve actually learned something over the last 11 years.”

So, I’m eager to keep pushing through these pages (genuinely, I think the hardest pages are behind me) so I can put the final stamp on not only Chapter 6, but on Long John as a whole.