Tonight’s installment… “Momma always said it is better to have character than to be one.”

The Characters
You have a vision but no pen. Your artist has a pen and no vision. Now it is time to start changing that. Before you draw a panel you need to spend some time figuring out how they will look. This level of detail is important because it provides even more “character” to your character. Sometimes it is the minutest details that people find interesting. Is Fox football pre-game commentator Michael Strahan more or less interesting with the gap between his teeth? It sets him apart and is something that people remember about him. That whole remembering thing is very important. Will they have a specific body language? Are their clothes unique? Are their weapons realistic or futuristic? But it is more than just remembering the image; it is also about their movement. Carol Burnett tugged at her ear, Jack Benny placed his hand on his face, Michael Jackson grabbed his crotch, all things that immediately identified the celebrity. Some of you may have to Google the first two folks. Anyway, all that type of stuff needs to be thought out in the character design phase.

There is also a converse to all of this; what if they are just ordinary guy’s? How do you make someone ordinary appear extraordinary? For superheroes, this is the transformation from Clark Kent to Superman. In our case, we are doing a person that has powers but he is set in our realistic world. No spandex. No telephone booth changes. No secret identity, just a guy like you and me.

Except he is a super genius and an electrical engineer working in a secret laboratory set inside an electrical dam, other than that, just like you and me.

For him, I wanted a normal guy. Not too big and muscular but not an out of shape slob either. The “regular guy” needed a nerdy scientist feel. We went with jeans for the casual look but then a black ribbed turtleneck and jacket for the nerdy, smart guy appearance. We needed him to blend in.

Tim Lai did a great job with my rather spartan detail. He presented a bunch of options and we kinda picked what we liked best from the images. Here are the four that we chose from.

The second character was the reporter. For the majority of the first arc, the reporter plays the role of the viewer. Hopefully, you will find that he is asking the questions you would ask. After all he is a reporter. However, we also give hints that he may not be what he appears. He needed to look like a relatively poor, rumpled reporter. I used to work as a reporter so I had a good feel for what I was looking for. I wanted him to have a more rugged feel, so for the look I really was looking for a photographer more so than a reporter. We decided on a vest with a lot of pockets, jeans, t-shirt and sneakers. He is an older African American. By age we say mid to late fifties but for reasons explained later in the story, a man who looks much younger than that. However, his hair was to be speckled white to make sure we do not get too much age confusion.

Here was the first draft…

At the end of the day this is what we decided on...

I won’t comment on the thing with Ryan Spencer’s eyes. You will just have to read the story to understand. We also made a conscious decision to remove the eye scars when he was wearing his glasses.

Oh, the glasses. I guess that is really important. For the beginning I wanted generic glasses. In time we may upgrade that a little but for now generic big black sunglasses.

You will also notice that there is a third character. However, miscommunication between Tim and I saw a male character created. Since she does not arrive until the third story we decided to shelve that sketch for now. Once we get green lit we will go back and fully render her character sketch.

In preparing the packets, there is an awful lot of bobbing and weaving. Nothing seems linear. We would get ideas on the logo but not really be able to come to a decision so we would put it on the back burner and concentrate on something else. When you start up something there are so many other things to do. I wanted to just write scripts each night, instead I was buying domain names, negotiating with a webmaster, doing an exhaustively comprehensive character timeline, approving character sketches. Most of these things I never considered when this started. Now they were vital, especially the timeline.

Now we had characters, now we need a whole bunch of things I really never knew we needed.

Next Time… A lot of other things I never knew how to do

Labels: christopher, Comic Book Publishing, hill, john, lai, primordium, tim, watson

Posted on Friday, February 13, 2009 at 9:41 PM -  0 Comments

Tonight’s installment… “Details, Details, Details”

The Process
We had our creative team on board and now it was time to get things moving. I am somewhat of a type A personality. I like activity and some form of chaos, probably why my wife and I have three kids under the age of five. Chaos rules at our house. However, I also like it at work. For this project activity was going to be constant because our team was committing to the project. Everyone had their roles. Tim would do the interior “current day” sequentials and color all pages. John would lend his name and do the “flashback” pencils. I was in charge of everything else.

First, I fine tuned the story. Before I wanted the guys to work on it I had to make sure the script was tight. I also wanted to make sure a friend of mine got a chance to review it and give me his thoughts. Dan Murphy and I have been friends for years. He is a writer for Pro Wrestling Illustrated (who just broke the story of Yokazuna’s victory over Hulk Hogan) as well as several books on the Western New York area. He worked with me on many of the BallparkBrawl wrestling events we had at the stadium and I respected his writing and work ethic. He looked the piece over and critiqued it for me.

Always good to have others review your work. Now, you have to take their commentary in some ways with a grain of salt. If they are friends of yours, chances are they will like the piece. Even if it about little aliens and their formulation of the New World Order. They are your fiends and they want to help…so they will almost always be overly positive. To get through that and get some real substance from the commentary I like to ask for help with a somewhat benign topic like grammar. People have an acceptance of friends correcting their grammar. They may not love it but they accept the need to speak with the proper grammatical prose. Once they start to make changes with a few comas and accents a transformation usually takes place. Now, all of a sudden, your friend who would never criticize your creative outlet in a million years now feels comfortable enough to disagree with your characters motivation on page four! Now you are getting some where. Now you get input that will help to improve the piece. Of course, friends sometimes get carried away but that is a separate conversation.

Once Dan fixed the commas and questioned the extensive exposition on page 2, I had a pretty tight script that moved along nicely and had a decent mix of back-story with current day action. I also spent a lot of time rewriting the artist descriptions. As a writer, you have a vision of the page. How you communicate that vision will determine how satisfied you are with each page. As I mentioned before, I write in full script which means I am listing panels and descriptions. However, I want the artist to exert their creativity. They are in charge of imagery so I wanted to make sure that their voice was heard. What I have discovered is that if you want something done in a timely fashion you have two options; tell them exactly what to draw or give them a very broad outline and let them go nuts. Those two options help to create a third and final option.

Over time you develop an understanding of strength and weaknesses within yourself and your skillsets and your artist. After doing the initial work with Tim and John I have a much better feel for what they excel at and what they do not. I think they also have an improved understanding of what I am looking for. We got to that point by using both options. Some items were tightly scripted while others, especially the logo and some of the character sketches were left to the artist’s musings.

So they have the story and now we need to see what they will look like.

Next Time…The Characters

Labels: christopher, Comic Book Publishing, hill, john, lai, primordium, tim, watson

Posted on Saturday, February 7, 2009 at 2:09 AM -  0 Comments