Down, But Not Out

I’ll start with a couple of personal shout outs.  Hope you all had a good memorial day and paid your respect to the deceased.  I decided not to do any work, in their honor of course.  Congratulations to my sister, who graduated from college last Friday!  I’m glad you’re enjoying London.  My son turned one on the 17th, and I’d like to thank everyone who turned out for the party and made it such a success.  I’d say he has enough toys now!

Let me address Something Awful’s horrendous review of Black Snow on their Awful Link of the day on the 20th.  Kids and easily offended folk should skip to the next paragraph to avoid my colorful language.  FUCK YOU Andrew “Garbage Day” Miller!!!  I’ve never heard of you or your misspelled website before, but I can see it takes no talent.  I can imagine the creation of this site: “Hey, lets make a website where we unsolicitedly bash other people’s hard work while doing nothing of importance ourselves!”  Yeah, that’s real cool.  No effort was put into this shit review, and I’m pretty sure the guy didn’t even take the time to read beyond Issue 1.  I know our work isn’t perfect, but I think we’re always improving and don’t deserve such harsh comments about our “shittiness.”  I was pretty upset when I read this guy’s unwarranted attack on Alex and myself, but I’ve taken some solace in the fact that we got a lot of traffic to our site from this link.  No such thing as bad publicity they say.  Still, it’s fairly disheartening and added to my resistance to continue drawing lately.

That’s the type of thing you leave yourself open to when you share your work with the public, I suppose.  Couple that review in with a rejection letter the same day from Top Shelf Comics and I think you’ll understand why I’ve been a bit down.  I did in fact resume drawing Issue 6 last night and I’m very happy with my work.  Page 12 may be up by nightfall.  I think my drawing is at a good place now, and I’m coming up with some interesting ideas for the future. 

I recently finished reading The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies and really enjoyed learning about the history one of my favorite rides.  Oh, and the movie sucked thanks to the obnoxious Eddie Murphy and a mediocre family friendly plot.  It contained a lot of beautiful concept art revolving around the creation of characters and locations, which I found pretty inspirational.  It reminded me of my original love for drawing as a child, which was heavily focused on haunted houses and monsters.  Hopefully I be able to work this into the comic more, as I’ve done in the past with things like the carpet zombie, Kannibal Karl’s voodoo, the fight in the Gothic church and the graveyard.

One result of that Something Awful review was that it brought to the forefront a problem Alex and I have been trying to figure out how to solve: namely, Issue 1 isn’t very good.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s terrible and has it’s good moments, but it’s obviously leaps and bounds behind the rest.  It was our first effort and we didn’t know what we were doing.  Like most beginnings, ours is pretty rough, which isn’t a good thing when you are trying to attached a new audience.

We’ve talked about the unattractive idea of redoing it, but Alex looks at it as established canon that the rest is built on, and really I suppose he’s right.  Then the idea hit us, lets make an Issue 0!  So Issue 7 may have to wait awhile while we work on 0.  I’m actually very excited about this.  Issue 6 was originally slated to be the origin story, then it was going to be the current story mixed with flash backs, but none of this seemed to work and hurt the overall story arch flow.  Issue 0 is the perfect chance to tell the story of the beginning.  It makes so much sense!  It will serve to answer some questions for our existing audience while simultaneously working as a great introduction to newbies. 

I can honestly not wait to start on this.  I wouldn’t mind pausing work on 6 to do so, but I don’t think that will happen.  I’ll let you in on a secret.  Another reason for my multiple weeks of not drawing was that this next scene is about the cops, and I’ve never liked working on those scenes.  They aren’t filler by any means, but they just been the formation, building towards something greater.  Well, the scene I’ve just started is indeed what they’ve been building towards, and now that I’ve taken a little time to figure out how to approach it I’m pretty excited.  If you’ve felt that the cop scenes were boring or didn’t make much sense I think you will be happy with the pay off coming your way.  Don’t even bother to ask me when you’ll get your Van Buren pay off.  You’ll have to wait and see on that one.

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