Spacetrawler

It’s January 1st, and after much development, Spacetrawler is ready for you, garnished with chocolate and a whole lotta’ whipped cream.

For the release, there are three pages (one is double-length), so make sure to start from the beginning.

Now sit back, put on your space helmet, strap yourself down, and read on…

A quick post, to let you rev your engines. Spacetrawler will be released on January 1st (with a several-page intro). It is a full-page comic (the strips will be the size of the samples above), and will run twice-per-week, Monday and Wednesday. I am so frikkin’ psyched.

Happy Holidays. :)

bleeauurgghhhh!

Things continue to come along. More serious editing. Beth (a nurse) went through the entire set of scripts with me to work out each character’s psychology. Mike Russell gave me a very thorough line-editing, which was awesome, and to which I learned just how backwards my sentences often are.

I’m loving it, and am so excited to soon be starting the actual drawing. But the humor is in the scripts, and so I keep cutting out everything that’s not funny enough and re-doing it. Edit edit edit. Must be funnier, more interesting, exciting.

Yesterday I did another major edit, working on it 15 hours straight, finishing up this morning with another 3 hours. I think I made some great break-throughs.

Keep watching, the first week of January is the solid date now. Be prepared.

In the meantime, go trick-or-treating and get ill on candy. You deserve it.

Well, for the background of Spacetrawler, I plan to do much of the reference layout  on the computer, and then then do loads of trace-work. My Lilliputian light table, knee high to a grasshopper, I knew would eventually cause my emotional breakdown.

Foreseeing this unavoidable mental deterioration, I kept an eye out for a light table on Craigslist. Luck would have it, one appeared, gorgeous (and cheap!). I wrote, he wrote back (Ray Braun, local designer), and within three hours, Beth and I had picked it up, I had disassembled it and reassembled it (to fit up the spiral staircase to my apt), and it STILL WORKED despite me having wielded tools against it.

I am very very happy.

Will I have all that much to show before the strip begins (current guestimate, the first week in January)? Well… likely not. Visually I want it to be a lovely surprise. That said, I will show you here some sketches I did for some interiors (at bottom of this post). Currently I am working with Bob Goff to build the interior for the main spaceship of the comic in 3-D models, so i can do constant quick references for each panel. So, these interiors I’m showing here will bear similarities to what will come, but are far from what you’ll see.

As well as giving you this teaser, over the next couple months I will likely blog here, both jabbering about progress, and perhaps an occasional book review (I’ve been inhaling sci-fi, and loving it). Here’s where I stand and what there is to look forward to.

After receiving edits back from the scripts I had done (from Dylan, Dan, Mike, and Bob, linked to on the right side of this page), I edited them very thoroughly again. Several characters need slight face-lifts, and one needs to be a bit more entirely re-thought. As well, there is a general lack of cohesiveness to the story after the main characters board the ship, and so I am writing an unifying storyline to put in, likely not more than a few strips.

I would like to note here, that my sweetie, Beth, has been a support on all fronts. She’s given me feedback on the writing and art, as well as been tolerant of the long hours I’ve been putting in to get this all done on top of my normal workload, as well as bringing me the occasional chocolates, fueling me with kisses, and reminding me to go for walks. Invaluable.

I have to also finish fleshing out the exact look of the characters, and create character sheets of them from various angles, to keep them consistent. Then I need to start drawing the dang thing.

But it’s been an interesting project. More like writing a novel than the usual daily comic routine I’ve been doing for 15 years. Because I am writing this in chunks, probably about a half year at a time (but will be more determined by when storylines begin and end). And so there is a lot more craft and looking at the big picture. And I’m loving it.

the bridge, computer room, and lounge respectively