Another day of surviving on a mere three hours sleep after awaking at 3:00am for no good reason. Orders dropped off at post office though, and a quick visit to the lab for bloodwork checked off (I'm rather particular about my health and try to get tested fairly regularly). These are now the very last remaining copies of THE SOLAR GRID #1 in existence:
Cover for the print edition of #9 underway today.
Early on in my work on THE SOLAR GRID, I used to pencil pretty tight, with the inking process constituting little more than tracing. Now, I pencil very loosely.
And then work in much of the drawing directly in ink:
Also, this panel right here:
I definitely wouldn't have had the confidence to put that in there early on. I've always loved Godard's rear-view driving sequence in BREATHLESS though. How I'd love to several pages of that sort of thing in comix.
And that is the last TSG script in the bag. The chapter is coming out at 48 pages, quite a lot, but certain scenes need to breathe and as much as I'd like to be done with the thing sooner rather than later—something a smaller page-count would certainly help achieve—I just can't find it in my heart to condense it much further. It's mad and beautiful and gloriously demented and I cannot wait to draw it all.
Winds so strong I woke up to find the back door of the house blown wide open. Subzero temperatures expected next week, the annual freak weather incident apparently. Will have to bring all my plants inside, some quite large, and live like a crazy plant daddy for a while.
Scripting/thumbing what may be the most difficult 10 pages of comix I've ever had to conceive of, the last 10 in the very last chapter in THE SOLAR GRID.
I recall upon releasing the very first chapter way back when, and it was considered strange and eccentric. I think this last one will make the first one seem hella conventional (and maybe even boring?) by comparison. Shit gets weird, not because I want it to necessarily, it just kinda happened this way. Will try to wrap these up today, eager to get back to penciling pages.
A few years ago, I was so attracted to the idea of developing comix the same way one might've gone about making a French New Wave film; conceiving of the story as you're working on the actual pages. In essence, thinking of the making of the comix page itself as part and parcel of the writing process. Comix as writing, there's something quite sexy about that. But now I wonder if it might be better to actually write the whole thing out first. Not outline, but properly write the whole thing.
Not so sure about scripting it out though, that might be too boring and time-consuming of an endeavor. Perhaps write it all down in prose like one might go about any prose story. I'm sure there's an argument to be made that if it's a good prose story, it must be good in comix (with necessary adaptive measures employed). Although the opposite isn't necessarily true; can't imagine MAUS or SCOTT PILGRIM or anything by Chris Ware working strictly in prose. And that's a good thing, doing with comix what only comix can do. Which probably means that by going prose first, you're likely to come up with something that may not tap into the full potential of the comix medium.
But it would be the safer thing to do, having your entire story fully locked in before drawing anything.
17 pages into script & thumbs for the very last installment of THE SOLAR GRID. Listening to the characters and letting them take control rather than force anything that really shouldn't happen.
Endings are the most sensitive part of any story, especially ones that've been 8+ years in the making.
