While I’m way behind finalizing the Madmartigan Sketch Friday process video, I was able to throw this together pretty quickly.
As always, this has a time-lapse of me drawing the video on the iPad Pro (via the app, Procreate) with commentary added over it revealing ideas behind the choices I made in the drawing.
I’m not the most competitive person, but I have been known to take up a challenge or two if it meant getting the opportunity to practice a skill. I’ve had fun with the 6 Fanarts Challenge a few times, and it’s always in the back of my mind.
Kyrun Silva (of Taurus Comics) sent me a new challenge that looked too much fun that I couldn’t ignore it. Created by cartoonist, Rich Smith, the Corner Box Challenge tackles a staple of classic (mostly Marvel) comics: the corner box.
While not pioneered by Marvel, I would say they are the ones most associated with the practice. These are rectangular boxes that would appear at the top left of a comic book’s cover that held the relevant information of publisher, price, and often publication month. Marvel even allowed artists to be experimental with the practice. The article, “The Lost Art of Comics Corner Boxes“, by Jessica Plummer on Book Riot thoroughly covers the history of corner boxes (and has a lot of great images and examples).
Being who I am, I had to tackle an X-Men corner box and the one from the original early ’60s comics intrigued me. I figured it would be fun to tackle those rudimentary costumes. Also, being me, I had to construct a narrative reason for the image.
To me, since they’re still new heroes at this point, Cyclops (Scott Summers), Marvel Girl (Jean Grey), and Iceman (Bobby Drake) have been surrounded not by supervillains but angry citizens who want to express their bigotry toward mutants. Iceman is a hothead (ironically) and Marvel Girl is already being coaxed by the power of the Phoenix Force (brought to a head in the fantastic Dark Phoenix Saga in the comics); they both want to fight back because they are legitimately feeling the threat of attack. Cyclops gestures to stand back, wanting to rely on diplomacy, cooler heads, and their shared humanity to get through the fracas.
This was a lot of fun (albeit time consuming) and I think I’ll try my hand at another a bit down the line.
In the middle of April, I inked the last line of Long John ever.
That’s not completely true; I have a cover to draw (though I might do that digitally) and I haven’t decide what I’m doing for extra content for the book (or if I want to try and fund a collected edition through Kickstarter), but as far as telling the story of this series, all the pages are done.
Strangely, the last pages I drew were not the last pages of the book. I remember drawing and inking the final page of the book and feeling…nothing. I told myself that the emotions would hit once the book was in-hand, but I knew deep down that there was something wrong with the flow of the back third of the book. It went a little fast, but I was already at 57 pages and knew that if I wanted to flesh out scenes it would have to be in two-page increments, which can be a lot. I had already added two more pages to the final scene because it was so rushed in my thumbnails that it didn’t hit as hard as I wanted it to. To add at least two more seemed to be asking for trouble.
I was also worrying that I might be adding pages because my brain wasn’t ready to be done with Long John, a story and process that has been at the front of my life for 11 years, more if you count when I started to really develop the character and story.
But when I put down the pages for a few days and came to those final scenes with fresh eyes, a two-page spread came to me and it was obvious it needed to be in the book, and felt like it had been there since the beginning. Honestly, it comes across as one of those images that I normally have early on, and part of the process of writing is to get to that image. But coming after it was all done showed that this book still had some surprises for me.
With the drawing all done, it’s on to the next stages of the process. I’m in the flatting phase right now—putting flat colors on the pages to separate characters from backgrounds, etc. It’s probably the most numbing and tedious phase of the whole process, but it needs to be done. I’m also doing another pass on the script as I do this, because looking at the pages in a different light brings the whole thing into focus a bit more.
So, there’s a fair amount of work to go, but it’s all coming together really nicely. On a good day you might even get me to believe that I’ve stuck the landing.