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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Sketch Fridays #84: Long John Portrait

Mar12
by on 12 March 2021
Sketch Fridays #84: Long John Sketch. Made in Procreate on the iPad Pro.

Things are really busy with the day job, but I’m slowly plugging away on Long John when I have time. The goal right now is to have everything ready to go for me to jump right into drawing pages once summer break starts for me in May. So, I’m bouncing right now between the chapter outline, thumbnails, and scripting. My basic process goes has me start with one of those and, when I get stuck, I bounce to another, which tends to get me out of most jams.

Generally the first thing I do is a chapter outline, though I call it a “Pacing” document which lays out numbers for each page of the book and I write out what generally happens on that page; it’s less a summary and more a reminder of what this page needs to do to be an interesting page and to move the story forward to the next page.

A look at my “Pacing Sheet” for Chapter 3. It helps me get ideas out, but it’s not doctrine, as you can see there are some major details toward the end that are very different from the final version (click for larger version).

From there, I tend to jump right to thumbnailing. I used to print out custom sheets that have four pages-worth of thumbnails per sheet, but I’ve since moved that to the iPad, which makes things go much faster. With slower expository scenes, thumbnailing can spiral into self-doubt, at which point I realize I need to work out the conversation a bit more than a bullet point of “They talk about things,” at which point I sit down and script out the pages I’ve done so far before tackling the scene that’s got me stuck.

I say all of that because there was a scene in the first half of Chapter 5 that I was kind of avoiding because it’s a lot of exposition that I wanted to sound natural, it leads into the rest of the book, and I knew drawing it was going to be kind of tough. So, I kind of put it off thinking that stress would cause creation; I have learned over the years that is not the case for me––stress just creates stress.

A look at the thumbnail template I use on the iPad. These are the first three pages for the short story I’ve been working on, “Call Me Home.” (Click for larger version)

So, I rammed my head against the scene and finally had a huge breakthrough a few weeks ago. It’s not going make drawing it any more fun (it’s indoors in a big fancy house, so lots of perspective drawings and set dressing which takes forever), but it’s the biggest hurdle I had in the chapter and I’m excited to get time to sit down and thumbnail the rest of the chapter out.

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Sketch Fridays #83, pt. 2 – Frog & Cyan Garamonde

Feb05
by on 5 February 2021
Sketch Fridays #83, pt. 2 – Frog (from Chrono Trigger) & Cyan Garamonde (from Final Fantasy VI). Click the image for a larger version.

While drawing Frog last week, it got me thinking of his archetype in many video role-playing games––especially Japanese role-playing games; the tragic, down-trodden hero of honor who, despite having their world crash around them, never sacrifices their poise or principles.

Cyan Garamonde by Final Fantasy series artist, Yoshitaka Amano.

This naturally got me thinking of my favorite video game character from my youth, Cyan Garamonde, a knight of the Doma kingdom. He’s a very proud and noble knight, dedicated to his king and kingdom above all else. However, everything changes when the water supply to Doma castle is poisoned during a siege and everyone except Cyan––including the king as well as Cyan’s wife and son––lay dead by the morning.

Left without a purpose, he becomes a character with some interesting and powerful character development through the rest of the game and it really made an impact on a 14 year old Dan Bethel.

So, with my nostalgia fully engaged, I added Cyan next to Frog and it seems like a natural pairing.

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