Blaze Bear

Here are some quick storyboard concepts I did this summer with West Park Media for a Yorkshire fire department ad. Blaze Bear is the English fire safety mascot, much like Smokey Bear, and I thoroughly enjoy the idea of him bursting into private situations to "save the day" by soaking things. I'll put up the link to the video once production is finished and whether or not they put it online.

"March of Death!" 4/4 Finale

Well, 14 strips later and here we are... a full year's worth of little comic strips. I utilized last week's "March of Death" banner because I thought it worked really well, and embellished the title card to reflect the pulp adventure serials I was loosely trying to emulate. Everything is wrapped up in this one, and I think it's a great way to end of the series, since I myself will be graduating in a month. I brought in the array of heroes from one of my very first mock ups of the team I did for Tony back in 2008 -- ending as we began, in a way.

Next steps will include publishing the collected strips (either doing it semi-professionally, or just printing them off myself and stapling them, zine style) along with some sketches and additional material. It'd also be great to have students next year take up the mantle of The Marauders to keep them going for future generations of McMaster students to explore further. But, even if it ends here, it was incredibly rewarding for me to work on my first published comic this year. The perfect diversion from school work (too often, at times), I think it will ironically represent more about my future as a body of portfolio work than my history degree, demonstrating my ability to (somewhat hastily) get things in on a weekly basis. At least that's more than I could say about research papers.

I hope anybody who actually read it enjoyed it, I know I did. Now it's on to other projects! I've got a few ideas in the works, so stay tuned...

"March of Death!" 3/4 Special Edition

Full page o' glory! The newspaper printed a special music edition magazine in the paper last week which absorbed most of the content. As a result, we got a space three times as big as we usually do for the Marauders strip. It came at the perfect time in the story as well, right when the action is the most... action-packed. This was so much fun to do, and also so much work. I had to seriously rush a few of the panels as a result of basically doing three weeks worth of drawing in one week, and it was challenging to figure out the new layout. I think the serious hand crampage payed off though... it's certainly a nice highlight piece to the whole series, and a great opportunity to work on a larger scale.

I loved the way Divinus' teleportation scene worked out, as well as the final panel. They are some of my favorites from the whole series. I also enjoyed how reflective this was as a metaphor for my coinciding school life. March truly is a time of death, and I felt just like our heroes, unable to keep up with the horde of assignments pressing in on me from all sides. Will I get them all done? We'll just have to wait and see if our heroes survive...

"March of Death!" 2/4

We finally get to figure out what's going on in this issue, with some hinted back-story. Which is great. Not to mention the important fact that I got to draw zombies. A zombie, I suppose (though he does break the "no talking" rule of zombies... though I suppose the fact that he's possessed accounts for that) . The Cap is also back from his hiatus -- off catching up with homework after his encounter with MechEng way back when -- along with Dr.Pine and Sulla. This strip only has 4 panels as well, alot less than the usual 6 or 7. It gives it more space for detail, giving me the chance to really lay on the ink. I think it turned out nicely. Like last week's re-use of Togo Salmon, the keen eye will detect that I used Captain Marauder's pose here for my poster design as well.

Fun Fact: Dr. Togo Salmon made his living researching the Italian Samnite people. Perhaps he read the wrong ancient scroll at some point... with dire consequences! But hey, I just draw this stuff.

"March of Death!" 1/4

Each has brought us closer to the reveal of the main villain: Zombie Togo Salmon! This week he's finally here. I stuck with pretty straightforward panel design. I do like some of the images (Divinus' cape is a favorite, based on Batman style cool), but overall I think the strip is kind of mediocre compared to others so far. I recycled the zombie image from one of the very first promotional ads in the paper at the start of the year, I just made it bigger and added more detail. Cheating? On the contrary. I think it's fun to add in specific images that have been used elsewhere. That's the point of an ad isn't it? To show what you're going to see. Anyway, something strange I didn't intend is Lady Maroon (on her cellphone, as usual) ended up looking like Megan Fox. Which is fine.

"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).