This must be a good week for project milestones. I finally finished this Cosmic Theatre story. Here's the first sixteen pages. As it ended up, I did not write a sequel to "Raymond and the Giant Robot Attack". Longtime members of TAG will spot this as a massive re-do of a tiny story I did about eight years ago. Just as "Raymond" was my version of a Giant Robot story, so this is my version of the "Monomyth" or "The Hero's Journey" tale.
21 comments:
Words fail.
This is so great. So super, super great. A pleasure to read, a pleasure to look at, just a total off-the-charts pleasure all 'round. I am blown away.
Great framing device of the story-in-a-story. I love Dr. Kozmic. Funny for him to have a granddaughter, and love the exchange about wanting an awful story with a sad ending--and his agreement it's time she hear something of real life. Even in these first 16 pages a sense of possible (if not imminenet) tragedy gives an extra charge to all the exchanges.
Great design work with the characters and costumes--love the death sculpture on the title page. And the colors are amazing, and really reinforce the far-away, fable aspect.
And I love the compositions you've come up with for your pages--really looks like an illustrated book more than a comic. The great page where Joe sets out to learn about the cold wind--the silhouette-ish eagle/snake, snake/frog, mouse/cat are so great (the frog in the snake's mouth instead of a mouse--refraining from doing the circle-of-life illustration--intriguing).
The story reads so easily, and communicates such richness.
It;s interesting to compare the dialogue here with "Raymond...," where I had the sneaking suspicion that maybe 7-10% of the dialogue could've been trimmed without losing anything. Here it's more like 2%. I'm talking about such a fine margin, it's really just a subjective reaxn. But that's the merest of quibbles.
There are only two minor things I saw that I might say are worth looking at again: the gap between "So Joe went to look for answers...." on page 11 and the follow-up, "...And wound up at the Airy Mountain" on page 13 was too large a distance for me to bridge, and the resulting confusion took me out of the flow. "So Joe went to look for answers...." seems like it could be a stand alone, and the Airy mtn quote could be the same ("At last he came to the Airy Mtn." or something). In the same vein, I was then thrown by the word balloon below, ("Oh really? Then let's hear your...etc"). I got confused again. It took a back-n-forth over the pages to figure out it's the middle of a conversation with two new characters. Maybe ellipses inside the word balloon would help?
Just my two cents--and both of these were very minor ripples in an otherwise glass-smooth sail thru yr story.
LOVE IT. AMAZING. LET'S SEE IT PUBLISHED LARGE-FORMAT!!!
...and: 56 pages!! Wow!! Can't wait!!
Love the diagram of the robots on the whiteboard. And the 1950s looking high tech snow maker machine (very Kirby) being run by Dr Kozmic. Especially the helix light bulb. That would make a good animated gif.
I also like the character being silent and both side of the conversation coming from the "extras."
And I like super genius Hamilton Beardsley sitting on the floor to listen to the story.
The art is great. It would have gone straight into Heavy Metal at the height of that Mags early run.
Looking forward to more.
Thanks guys. Ellis I'd love to learn how to do simple animations and apply them to my drawings as you suggest. I've pictured learning to do something like that for a website version of the stories.
Marty, I think your suggestions about the dialogue boxes are good so I made changes just now to address them. See what you think.
Interesting edit. It proves the wisdom you can never hit your reader over the head too hard to make something clear.
I'll do some blog entry showing how I do animated gifs.
Or would you prefer a youtube. Blog entry would be clearer. I'll do a blog entry.
No hurry Ellis. I'm thinking down the line sometime when I'm actually publicizing the work I'm doing and trying to attract people to my web site.
Hey, have you seen Kurt Vonnegut's "Eight Rules for Writing Fiction"? I especially like
1." Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted."
and
8."Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages."
http://www.troubling.info/vonnegut.html
William Blake meets Maurice Sendak meets Jerry Ordway meets Yellow Submarine meets Terry Gilliam. I'll be chewing on this for days!
Is this colored pencil or some Photoshop way of looking like colored pencil?
Ben, you list so many of my artistic heroes. Thank you. One of my friends told me that my work was disturbing like one of those "Nancy" stories (of Nancy and Sluggo) with Oona Goosepimple in it, if you are familiar with the character. I laughed and said, "Thanks! Just what I was aiming for."
http://pappysgoldenage.blogspot.com/2008/03/number-269-oona-goosepimple-and-yo-yo.html
The work is done with blue Col-Erase pencil on Bristol paper, then it's scanned in and manipulated in Photoshop Elements. The color in the lines is due to playing with the hue, saturation, and lightness directly, or the result of overlaying of various flat colors using the "multiply" function. The result does look like colored pencil; I never really thought about that.
It's all about that "multiply" function!!
I don't know if I can add anything to what has already been said here. I've always found your work phenomenal and I can wait for the rest of the world to have a chance to take it in as we get to. Can you outline your plan for how you get this to an audience? You mentioned a website...
I currently have a secret website where I have put up all my comic book work. I acquired it through Squarespace and it's very basic. I used one of their standard "portfolio" templates. If and when I want people who are outside our little TAG blog here to see my work, I refer them to that site.
For now I'm concentrating on maturing my concept, on developing the Cosmic Theatre universe. Eventually I will try to start networking with more and more creative people in the field. Not just friends, but established professionals that I think will be interested in what I'm doing. Also, if I decide to approach a major publisher I will be able to refer them to my site so they can see my work. Hopefully, out of all this will come the idea on how to proceed from there.
That's all I got for now.
Amazing Tom! Just AMAZING.
Thanks Jim. More to come next week!
Tom wrote: "...Not just friends, but established professionals..."
As if there's any overlap.
Blair loves the stuff, too! And she can't wait to see it published!
...and I like the changes!
Best case scenario Marty: by the time I get around trying to publish, you, Rick and Ellis will be making big bucks doing comics, and I can just ride your coattails.
Hope no one objects to me bumping and manipulating the timeline on Tom's big post. I dated them for a couple of days ahead. When he posts his final work tomorrow, it will clump the work in an easy to see way.
Tom, post one of the raw pages without the digital manipulation. Would love to see a side by side comparison
Good idea. I want to see a raw page too.
I love this Tom! It takes me back to being a 6 year old kid with my stack of comic books in the back of the family VW bus as we drove around the southwest. Every time we stopped for gas, I picked up whatever comic books were available in the gas station comic spinner and they mostly ended up being Charlton and other non-DC / Marvel material. Very inspiring!
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