Quick Shots #2: “Bad Fit”

Nov26
by on 26 November 2020
Chapter 2, Page 18 – “Bad Fit” (click image to go to the full page)

Chapter 2, Page 18 – “Bad Fit”:

Chapter 2 was a tumultuous experience. Production was halted halfway through the chapter and wasn’t completed for a year. Some of the art in it got rushed and I wasn’t my most confident with the storytelling of it, leading to a lot of second guessing along the way.

However, I will say that the first handful of pages of the second half of the chapter (when I came back from the year away from it) are some of my strongest, with this page being a prime example.

The raw line art of this page.

In it, I got to play with a few different styles––from my standard cartoony style to a more rendered, moody style in the last panel, to playing with ideas from animation––which allowed me to craft some of my best visual storytelling.

A quick animated gif of the four middle panels.

I think about the four panels in the middle a lot and how well they work not only as a sequence but as a look in to Long John’s character. He’s the only thing with color, but not shaded because at that moment he has no depth––he’s just rage and selfishness, enhanced by his concern for his hat.

If anything, this page (and the few around it) really signaled the type of storytelling I would emphasize and improve upon in the following two chapters.

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Quick Shots #1 : “A Good Coat”

Nov20
by on 20 November 2020
Chapter 1, Page 16 – “A Good Coat”

Chapter 1, Page 16 – “A Good Coat”:
I’m still incredibly proud of the entirety of Chapter 1. But this page here (page 16) is probably my favorite of the bunch. For one, I felt all of the influences––spaghetti western, noir, Kurosawa––really come through but congeal into something unique. It’s also a page whose linework I love. Until this page, I never saw one of my panels and thought “I’m looking into the world of the comic,” but something about the angles and detail and character coming through every panel really made it feel alive to me in a way I had never felt about my work. Despite some perspective issues an unsure lines, it’s a page I think about often.

Here’s the isolated line art for this page.

Do you have a favorite scene, page, or panel from chapter 1? Share it with us in the comments! Perhaps I can reveal some creator commentary or behind the scenes information on it, too!

You can read the entirety of chapter 1 right now on the website, on the official Facebook page, or you can buy it signed and with a custom Long John sketch for a mere $8 on the Long John shop! Check it out!

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The Art of Inking

Nov13
by on 13 November 2020

This is a mild repost from before. My time has been so taken up by maintaining my day job that I’ve only been able to poke at a single comic page over the last two or so months.

That page, however, was sewn up this week and it continues a trend I’ve been noticing with the pages in this chapter––I am really liking how my inks look.

The digitally drawn thumbnail for the above series.

The thing is these nice-looking pages make me a little sad. There was a deliberate choice at the beginning of Long John to keep the inking sketchy and hatched and loose. The idea has generally fallen by the wayside, especially as more brushwork got introduced, and a more thick-to-thin animation-style line (akin to the linework of my previous comic, one which was very inspired by animation) has taken over.

Initial inks from a panel of Page 6 of Chapter 5.

The problem––if it’s a problem––is that I really like how the pages for Chapter 5 are looking. There is a difference between aesthetic and style––one is natural and the other can be forced. Artists aim for the sweet spot where the two intersect. Only five chapters in I feel I’m finding that aesthetic sweet spot not only with Long John but with my own style. I am finding the margins of my stylistic ease and find between those boundaries a very large field upon which I can play.

Final inks for a panel from page 6 of Chapter 5. Note the heavier outlines on the chin and the thick-to-thin brush lines on Long John’s right shoulder in the foreground. These are all photographs of the original lineart; the scanned art will be cleaner and clearer.

I guess I’m proud that it took me over 130 pages to learn this, since that amount of pages proved to me that I was liberal in my experimentation––testing to fences to establish my limits (for this story, at least).

In the end, this page is probably one of my most well-executed pages of Long John, artistically, despite the fact that it is actually kind of boring––a page to transition from one scene to the next. But it looks good, and I’m excited to see how this more confident inking manifests in future pages of a chapter that is coming together in a really concrete and clear way.

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