Long John

This was another “key frame” image I had at the start of the development of this chapter. As discussed before, the ending of the chapter (and, by extension, the entire comic) changed in a variety of ways before landing on what we ended up with, but this resting of Hellrider Jackie’s body to the waters of Mono Lake was always going to be there. I’m really happy with how this page ended up delivering on the promise of the idea.

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Something that has surprised me as I’ve been posting these pages is how some pages hew very close to the drawing in the thumbnails. I almost forget that I drew these things and just sit back impressed with how closely the thumbnails were followed. By that I mean that poses are nearly identical and framing in the panels is nearly identical despite the fact that I’m eyeballing all of it.

I’d like to make it clear, I don’t draw Long John digitally. I draw the thumbnails as very low resolution pictures on the iPad and then print them out and hang them on the wall above my drawing board. Then, looking up at the thumbnail, I draw page on the table with a pencil. I say that because a lot of artists––and this isn’t meant to be demeaning; whatever process allows you to draw your comic and get it done is okay by me––use their thumbnails as the pencil stage, and put them on a layer over which (on a separate layer) they lay down their digital inks. To be fair, there are some pages where I drew the pencils digitally and then printed them out and inked them by hand. But there is always a physical page at the end of it. However, those instances are in the minority, so I guess it speaks to the efficacy of my process that my final pages end up following the thumbnails closely. Good to know for whatever comes next.

The thumbnail drawing for this page. Click for larger version.