"Invasion of The Malice Circus" 6/6

This might be my favorite strip yet. Closing off the end of this arc, the action is the best so far and I got to spend alot of time fiddling around with sketches over reading week in Florida, giving me the chance to do some more detail and think about layout some more (although I've recently been told it might make it look too busy). I had the most fun with Kinessaurus, who is becoming somewhat of a favorite, and really nail down his appearance. He's taken an interesting evolution since his first appearance, just subtly evolving more distinctly bad-aced features. The original panels are each much bigger, so it's a bit of a shame I had to shrink them down... but I knew that when I was drawing them. As a result of the scale, the lines are much thinner than usual as well, which I think ends up working quite well in terms of the ink intensity I've been trying to balance.

I originally intended to have Lady Marron as the 3rd panel, but I'll let you use your imagination to project where Kinessaurus' slathering tongue would be curling around due to the overlap... Suffice to say I decided to keep it a family comic and swap her with Maroon Mind.

Early Updates

As promised, here are the revisions to the first 4 strips I've done since I started using the comic lettering instead of hand writing them. I've also gone back and adjusted the layout to look more like my more recent ones, applying what I've learned. And some additional greyscale shading is thrown in here and there to freshen it up. Eventually I'm going to change the Marauders logo to the updated version you see on "MechEng Online!" pt.1. Compare these to the older versions to try and spot the differences... nothing major, just enough to make them look more natural.

I go back and tweak just about every strip after I see it printed, so some day I'll throw up all of the final drafts for those as well (most likely at the end of the semester once the series is complete).

"Invasion of the Malice Circus!" 5/6

More La Spectra! This was the strip which ran just before reading week, which was a few weeks ago now... I'm a bit behind with posting, seeing as I've already finished this week's as well. I'm trying to get my bearings in terms of darkness in this strip, since it takes place with the lights off. Instead of making everything look really dim, I just went with a high contrast approach. I think it works alright. Divinus is my favorite hero so it was fun drawing him in action, but we're pretty limited in terms of how much we're able to explain characters' powers... so while Divinus has a host of cool spiritual abilities, I pretty much just stick with your generic hand blasts to keep it simple.

Fun Fact: Togo Salmon was a professor and History Chair at McMaster for over 40 years. One of "The Four Horsemen Halls" (Togo Salmon Hall) was thusly named after him.

Blankets

Over Christmas I bought this fantastic book. I devoured it in two days and read my favorite portions over again. When the student paper was coming out with a special Break-Up Issue for Valentine's Day, Blankets immediately sprung to my mind. This is the "heartbreak" angle I used for my review:

If you have ever lost something precious, you’ll know the heartache that comes along with it. But, as Pulitzer Prize-winner Jules Feiffer has said, “that which goes awry in life, goes well as art.” Craig Thompson’s illustrated memoir Blankets illuminates that sentiment, with 582 black-and-white pages dripping with moody emotion. The inky art of Blankets is rich with quilt-like motifs which he cleverly overlays with his dialogue and narration to generate poignant metaphors.

Spanning 9 thematic chapters, the central story recalls the isolation of Thompson’s religious childhood and youth through the lens of his time spent under blankets, be it sharing a bed with his younger brother or innocently spending the night with his first-love. Subtly woven throughout the plot are Thompson’s musings on how adolescent romantic relationship serves as an analogy for his spiritual relationship with God… or is it the other way around? Through these reminiscences, the “nakedness” that comes with intimacy is exposed, along with the loneliness that comes in its absence, with nothing to cover your shame but blankets.


While the tenderness with which the story is told might seem soppy, Thompson’s self-pitying is told with such honesty that it could wring out sympathy from even the most cynical reader. In fact, what makes Blankets so impressive is not just Thompson’s mastery of the medium, but also in his ability to tell such a lengthy, hyper-personal story while still keeping it universal. The story reveals how a passion can burn so hot that it devours itself. Which is not to say that the passion was not a genuine one, only that it shifts, wanes, vanishes. Love, like this life, is an intrinsic source of meaning and joy, but it doesn’t have to last forever. And not only is that okay, it’s what makes it beautiful. It's in ways like this that the story makes constant allusions to Ecclesiastes, my favorite biblical book (most of the epilogue is just Thompson's own illustrations and contemplations on it, and how it aided him along his spiritual sojourn). Instead of despairing over the meaninglessness of a love lost, Craig feels blessed that he was able to experience it in the first place.

In the end, Craig finds the relief and personal reprieve that comes from letting go. Purging himself of sin, of obsession, he is free to rest in the comfort that someone else has shared in his experience. Blankets’ epilogue ends with Craig trudging through a winter forest, his footsteps filling in with fresh snowfall as he moves forward: “How satisfying it is to leave a mark… no matter how temporary.” Boy, and all that in a silly comic?

Promotional Posters

My writer, Tony, came up with the idea of drawing a bit of campus attention to our weekly strip as it's understandably quite easy to miss a 4x10" space in the middle section of a whole paper. What better way to do that than by plastering our material all over the walls of McMaster herself?

Tony originally imagined the first one featuring Captain Marauder on his own, but I thought it'd be nice to showcase the whole team (as they appear in these strips -- there are still 2 other members that don't). What's more, students get to see them depicted alongside their very own (stylized) campus landmarks. But perhaps best of all, at least for me, is to see our heroes in glorious colour. I have very minimal experience with colouring in Photoshop, and having taken a good chunk of time making the colouring just so, I realize there's no way I would have enough time to colour each strip to my liking. So I certainly appreciate the black and white format of the weeklies... but my, how cathartic it is to finally take the time to give these characters the full-colour treatment they've been yearning for. I wanted to go for an epic, almost 1920s-style vibe. Did I pull it off? Well it is epic -- the swooping perspective, towering buildings and larger-than-life figures ensure that. I also quite like the slogan at the bottom, recycled from our very first teaser advertisement in the paper. I suppose that's a fitting way to start off the next round of ads...

The second poster was fun to do; drawing big baddies is always a joy. And who doesn't love to vilify Engineers? I was toying with the idea of having him bursting forth from the first poster. While that would have been rather cheeky, it ended up just looking busy and confusing. I found putting faded past strips as the poster background would give people an idea of what the strips themselves look like, and also represent the excitement of characters tearing out of the page and confronting the reader... I dunno, kind of a lively and appropriate symbol there. He who has ears, let him hear. I struggled making MechEng look as clean and distinguishable as the heroes. I guess it's due in part to my choice of posture (with an ambiguous silhouette), but in the end I think that works for the character. He's gritty and mechanical and bulky. Lest they be confused, I drew subtle attention to the machine itself as it appears in the comic in the upper left, just so the viewer has another point of reference for what he looks like. And there you have it folks... a display for one and all of both heroism and dynamics. He who has eyes, let him see.

"Invasion of The Malice Circus!" 4/6 ("Masks Off" #2)

Ooooh, the mystery continues. In "Masks Off" tradition, there's more dialogue in this strip, with a focus on the Professor (the team's sage mentor) and it's really only valuable (or comprehensible) to those who have followed along the story to this point, bringing together aspects from the “MechEng” arch and the present “Invasion” storyline. It's important in advancing the plot, and I think it's equally important to reward the reader for their attention.

When there's no action going on I find it difficult to design a logically flowing layout, and this strip took me some time to figure out how to deal with the script. I stuck to comic reading convention, and tried a couple of tricks to help indicate where the eye ought to go. Even if some folk do find which panel to go to next slightly ambiguous, it's no surprise -- the dialogue is mostly one-sided and thus more is left up to the reader, and also the reader isn't meant to understand exactly what the characters are talking about in the first place. It all makes sense in the grand scheme of things, but for now we don't really know what's going on. Sulla (the senior member of the team) has one leg up on us, with the ability to -- woops. Shouldn't say yet. That must be irritating. Anyway, even if for some reason the intrigue doesn't tickle your fancy as much as POW-action, hopefully the art still does.

Fun Fact: Mills Library is ALWAYS busy and noisy.