The Work Journal of Artist John Amor

24 Hour Comic Day

9 am: Not enough sleep last night.  Tried to do a little work on current projects, ended up with a head full of layouts to work out.  Good to have Alex begin the challenge with me though. No idea why she’s still awake after her night shift, but it’s also nice to see Jad chime in.  Started the day right.

10 am: One page down.  Jad uploaded page 1 to the site for me and came up with the title.  She’s happily asleep now.  I’m trying to plan one page ahead mentally so I build momentum.  Alex is eating chips and watching Youtube vids.  I can hear him eating over Skype and it’s making me hungry.

11 am: Page two took a little longer than it needed to.  Making page 3 a splash so I can catch up a bit.  Also, space ships are fun.  Alex has been inspired by videos he’s just seen and has begun.  Andrew Drilon is a machine.

12 nn: Page 4 is my hero shot.  Trying to keep my layouts as varied as possible to keep the delivery interesting.  My brother Roby had an anchovy pizza delivered for me.  Probably shouldn’t try to draw while I’m eating, but I’m fucking starving.

1 pm: Took too long on previous page, but detail there was necessary.  Using a bit of a cheat on page 5, combo with some basic Photoshop effects… am hoping it comes across clearly in the read.  Okay, enough pizza.

2 – 3 pm: Page 6.  Kinda screwed myself with that big exposition shot, but it had to be done.  Listening to Around Comics to keep focused.  Alex is on a break.

4 – 6 pm: Kat gets on Skype to talk me through pages 7 and 8.  And it’s just as well, coz I can’t figure out how to refill the copic markers she lent me.  Jad helps me figure out the forthcoming ‘mind assault’ scene via text message.

7 pm: Talking comics with EJ as I figure out page 9.  Taking a bit of a shortcut again, but I make sure Johnny Danganan knows about it first via YM.  He’s staying awake and online just like the rest of us.  Copy-paste zoom-in might sound like a cheat, but it ‘s the effect it has on the suspense that I’m after.  If what I have planned works, the next page will be a surprise.

8 pm: Recorded an episode or Tres Komikeros with EJ and the recently resurrected Alex.  Page 9 is in bed, and I take a breather to put some tiger balm around my wrist and on my neck.  Oy.

9 pm: The simplicity of page 10 is therapeutic, but I hope the ‘switch’ isn’t too jarring.  I probably could have delivered the transition a little better.  Also, drawing clouds with copic markers is hard.  Kat and Jad talk anime over Skype while Alex links us to 4chan crap.  Don’t they understand how serious this whole thing is?

10-12 mn: I employ a bit of a cheat again for page 11.  I spot the ‘flesh’ parts of the characters in cast black, just like Risso does.  I just recently started reading 100 Bullets.  Sue me.  I hope it works out okay.

1 – 2am: Neck and back hurts now.  My internet bugs out all of a sudden and I am unable to upload pages.  I lie down to talk to my girl over the phone and have a snack.  I entertain the idea of just going to bed now but Jad reminds me of how much effort I’ve already put in and eggs me on.

3 am: Back at the desk to draw page 12.  Still no internet.  I have Jad on speakerphone and a flock of angry ducks.

4 am: Page 13. I am drawing a raw duck embryo.  I don’t know whether to be mad or thankful that I don’t have access to Google images.

5 am: I’m gonna try to end this thing here, at page 14.  I’m chopping out a lot of stuff that I would have wanted to do… but I don’t think I’ll be able to do the ideas justice at this point.  So there it is, a dirty little bow.

— sleep —

7 – 8am: Still no internet, and three more pages to upload.  Internet cafes in my area are all closed, on account of it being a Sunday.  I find out Alex is awake, so I head over to his apartment to commandeer his laptop and upload my story’s conclusion..

9 am: Breakfast with Alex at McDonald’s.  We feel like we just got out of jail.  If jail was… y’know… fun.  And with prizes.

— pass out —

Umbilicus

The funny thing about being a comic artist for a living is that even though enjoying the medium is definitely escapism… the act of actually making the comics is very often not.  In fact, it’s the furthest thing from it.

You may be drawing images of fantasy, and the creative potential in that is near limitless, but I find it difficult to allow myself to get lost in that frame of mind when things are rough in the real world.  Of course, I may just be one of these overly dramatic types who can’t separate their lives from their livelihood, but consider this — how safe would you feel jumping into the deep blue depths if you weren’t sure you’d have a boat to swim back up to?

There is no spacewalk to fix the Hubble if the shuttle is not in place.

Play Pinball

A friend who teaches animation and character design at a local university blackmailed me into serving as a panelist as his students presented their equivalent of a thesis last week.  Granted  a law school dropout with a dubious degree in political science may not be the ideal judge for someone’s creative work, I like to assume I have more right than most people (…in the area).  Well my teacher friend does, at  least.  Quinton Hoover plagiarism and complimentary donuts aside, it’s definitely weird being called “sir.”  Where did this respect come from, you weirdos?

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There’s been a bit of a lull in the art posting here on the journal.  I’ve been pretty swamped with the pitches I’m handling and making sure PLUCK comes out on time.  I should be able to post some really neat stuff momentarily though.  More than anything, it’s just a matter of permission.  Soon though.

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I got caught up on Hickman/Eaglesham’s Fantastic Four this week, and recent reviews on the podcast have made me see more and more the Pinball Nature of mainstream comics.  I mean think about it — If you start reading a book at its five hundred and seventieth installment, there’s no logical reason why you should understand what the fuck is going on.  But I did.

What does that mean?

Two things.

First off, every time a new writer gets onto a book, it’s a soft reset.  Hickman may be following up on some of Millar’s Nu-World stuff, but really, everything else can be latched onto quite easily by any new comic reader or fanboy who has just come back to the medium after an extended absence.  The FF is still a family of explorers.  Ben’s still ugly, Johnny’s still a dick.

Second (and this is really just an expansion of the first point), nothing really changes in mainstream comics.  You can take away Wolverine’s adamantium; You can turn Superman into an electric gimp; You can kill the goddamn Batman.  But it all goes back to normal eventually.  Give it a coupla months, give it a decade (hey Bendis), but things will reset.  Now raising these two points may sound suspiciously jaded or cynical, but there’s something about this cyclical nature that’s comforting.

And this is why comics are like a pinball machine.  It’s not a question of how many pinballs you have left, or of how long you kept one ball live.  No.  What matters is where that pinball went.  What did it hit?  Where did you think you were gonna lose it?  And most importantly, How did you save it?

The answer to that last bit, of course, is that it saved itself; but you were along for a great ride.

Avatarded

Warren Sanchez is a 3-D animator.  A damn good one at that.  Warren Sanchez and I used to work together at an advertising/animation studio.  He knows I like to read a lot of comics and watch a lot of effects-heavy films.

Warren Sanchez knows I like to curse a lot.

Warren Sanchez has never heard me curse out of sheer awe of a movie’s visuals.

And then we saw Avatar.

2009 in Film is a closed book as far as I’m concerned.  Thanks, Jim.  After the Star Wars prequels, Transformers, and G.I. fucking Joe… I badly needed that.

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On the other side of the bowl of awesome sauce, I was at first worried about a project Jad and I were working on that was superficially similar.  HARBINGER WAR is a sci-fi tale pivoting on the premise of cavemen battling an extra-terrestrial threat.  The parallels are all there, but then I thankfully unclenched when I realized Lucas had beat Cameron to the punch with Phantom Menace, and Burroughs spanked them both with the Barsoom books decades before.

So yes, I’m good.  This, as they say, is fuel for a hopeful and mighty fire.  A movie hasn’t thrilled me like that in a long time, and if nothing else… it felt amazing being a wide-eyed kid again.

I Know a Place…

This is the thing with me.  And it’s rung true (present perfect tense… what.) for as long as I’ve cared to notice — I do my best work at night.  Set my workstation up in a brightly lit room and I will get nothing done.  I don’t know how you weirdos do it.  I’m like a raccoon, I’m very easily attracted to and distracted by shiny things… so a well-lit area just leeches off my productivity.

I come alive in total darkness.  Oh yes.  Like Batman, minus a butler bringing me vichyssoise.  (What kind of idiot brings you cold soup when you’re working in a dank cave in the middle of the night anyway?) And as if I were in a cave, I like my work area to be illuminated by a singular light source, so that I am surrounded by darkness and thus almost shrouded in a cloak of indistractibility.

I don’t know if it’s an emo thing, or an eyestrain thing, or an ADD thing, or a headspace thing, or a body clock thing, or even a mixture of all of those eccentricities… but it is what it is.

And as I get ready for bed around half past four in the morning, I wait until that sliver of time between when the street lamps die and when the sun starts to rear its ugly head.  And for just long enough, I find myself in complete darkness… and it stops being a moment and starts being a place.  And it is a place no one can infect.  Because it is nowhere.  And here I revel in the lost silence of dreaming.

Just Say No

Scripts.  I have to admit to at least one thing I hadn’t prepared for when building my doomed comics career over the past year and a half or so, and that is the amount of script reading I’d actually have to do.  I mean… that’s precisely why a handful of us drawhappy types become artists in the first place, yeah? So we don’t need to read? Hehah! Welcome to the half-movie, half-book medium… care for a brain smothering with miles of text? No. Ellis was once asked at a con about how Darrick came up with the idea for Spider’s glasses, after which Warren explained that most artists can actually only express themselves in pictures and grunts.  “…guhh… colors… STAR WARS!”  Hilarious business, that.  Sad part is I know exactly what he meant.

But yeah, I’ve had to read.  And I don’t just mean reading so I can put it on paper… I mean reading to find out if I even want to put it on paper.  Know what I mean?  I get a healthy stack of scripts to choose from every couple of months, and I get my next project from this pile.

But I need to be smart about it… because if I’m not, I’m gonna be stuck with something I don’t love for what will seem like too fucking long.  Whore yourself out just a bit too much and you risk committing to something you’re not sure your creative attention span can handle.

It's a diagram.

Son, when choosing a gig — big or small — you gotta be excited about it, because if you aren’t it will show in the pages, and that will make the book an ugly part of your portfolio… assuming you even manage to finish it.

It’s the irony of ironies, really — having worked so hard to get to a place where you don’t need to kill yourself pimping anymore, just to learn how to turn things down.

-

Bowing out of a project is easily one of my least favorite things about working freelance, because not a lot of writers take it very gracefully.  Too many assume that the reason why a project is declined owes a lot to the story’s quality… even when you make it clear that you just don’t feel you’re right for it.  Comes with the territory, I guess… an insensitive writer probably isn’t really much of one, I’m inclined to imagine.  But what do I know?

All the same, it all boils down to decision making and having the balls to stick to it.  Gladly grown a pair, hoping it lasts through harsh winters.

One Year Later

Okay great.  So I’ve been busy making sure a handful of projects got squared away and finished, complete with complimentary ribbons and back rubs.  August and September was a time of reckoning of sorts, as it forced me to learn the pitfalls and perils of not paying attention to deadlines.  I guess above everything else, though the indie scene has allowed me a broad playground to run around naked in, the fact that there are no deadlines has pretty much spoiled me.  That dawg just won’t hunt, know what I’m sayin’?  I’m just lucky I have enough work lined up to still be okay for the next coupla months.  Gotta pick up the pace though.  And no more whining.  I’m lucky enough as it is I get noticed in such a fickle medium.  No more whining.

So it’s been a little over a year since I started drawing comics full-time.  I suppose it’s only fitting I mature somewhat at this junction, yeah?  Do I miss commuting to and rocking a Joe job?  Hellz no!  There’s nowhere and no way I’d rather be than waking up at noon and sleeping close to dawn, hunched over my desk, drawing all the time.  Nothing else could fulfill me more.  But that being said, as fun as it sounds… it’s work.  You screw up, there are consequences.  You slack off, food and lights don’t happen.  And it’s all on you.

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Fun Fact (because you can’t ever know too much about me and the universe does in fact revolve around my keyboard):  I celebrated my birthday on 9 – 9 – 9.  It’ll be a while before we roll back around to those digits again.  Tell your mommies.

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I recently turned twenty-six, and Jad flew over to spend a few days with me.  It’s funny how a whole year ago I would be going on about how cool getting to draw killer robots and alien monsters was… but now the work has a sense of meaning aside from the obvious story that simply has to be told.  Know what I mean?  I don’t mean to get all mushy and shit… but it simply feels like I’m now also allowed a story of my own.  A good one at that.

So this second year is going to be about getting serious — sequential-wise, speed-wise, relationship-wise, even motherfuckin’ blog content-wise (maybe).  So I hope you bastards stick around to watch the pastrami fly.

I don’t know what that means.

Howzit.

Don’t Call it a Collab

As I’m working on a handful of projects I’ve started a little something-something with my lady Jad Montenegro.  We’ll be taking turns talking about our progress:

So John came to me with a proposal to do a comic together, aside from the  sheer audacity of a previously conceptualized “relationship strip” *John slaps hand to forehead*, he wanted to do another project entirely, one that wasn’t borne of a need to shamelessly indulge our egos, and when I heard his idea to wrap the storyline around one simple, beautiful concept, there was nothing I could do but to agree.

I mean, come on:

Cavemen versus Aliens.

.

Tell me how any self-respecting sci-fi lover could resist taking that and not going to TOWN with it, you know?

Drawing inspiration from the likes of sci-fi romance and tall-tale spinning Arthur C. Clarke to the classic iconoclasm (iconoclasstic?) of Isaac Asimov, to Frank Herbert’s Duneverse sagas and Bradbury’s moody, chronicling cynicism (to name just a few of the authors I grew up reading), I guess I’m pretty set for helping create this rippin’ yarn of a graphic novel. If anything, I’ve certainly got the enthusiasm covered.

I’ve never done this before, but that’s where John comes in: he’s good at showing me the ropes.

Huh.

I zoned out for a bit.

Anyway, that’s what me and the boy have got in the kitchen, and hopefully we’ll have something in the coming weeks for you folks to sink your teeth into.

— Jad

Outside the Box

Heard Millar talk about his method for story structure on a podcast the other day, praising Seinfeld for apparently informing his approach to putting together a comic book. Yeah, no, I don’t see it either. But yes, because I am not beneath comparing myself to one of the biggest names in comics today, I lean back against my douche throne and ask myself… Outside of comics, what prominent works could have put creases in my brain deep enough to directly influence my own work (and I use the term work very loosely)? Too many people fall into the trap of learning to make comics just by collecting shiny things from the comics they’ve already read, and that’s okay if you don’t plan on bringing anything new to the table, but I always figure that the biggest hindrance to being able to think outside the box is when you yourself become the box, Daniel-san. Thanks, Mr. Miyagi.

Everything I know about facial expression, I learned from watching Chuck Jones cartoons as a kid — Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, The motherfucking Grinch, I’ll yell it loud and proud, sir.

For gesture and body language, I drew from the TV sitcom Friends — nothing beats the visual comedy of contrasting personalities, especially in the first few seasons… when everyone was overacting, I thought (sorry, Perry).

I learned pacing from Spielberg movies — when I saw Sam Neil shakily take his shades off and stand up in the theme park jeep, I think I might’ve clenched in anticipation so hard I later crapped a diamond.

Fairly easy to name the cinematic influences, but it takes me a while to figure out what single biggest thing feeds into my shot design and camera placement, aside from the occasional Wally Wood flowchart or Frazetta piece. I laugh when I realize that it’s probably my gaming. Now Alex “Awesome” Cipriano (he made me do it) will cackle like an oversexed harpy and slap me with a dead horse’s cock and say that I’m not even a real gamer, and he’d be right — give me a Playstation controller and I’ll throw it back at you thinking it’s a batarang. Thing is, as I was getting serious about my comic art years ago, I saturated myself with a shitload of first-person shooters every time I needed to unwind, and the immersive experience cut such a deep groove into my mindpeach that it got to a point where I’d run around de_dust maps in my fucking sleep. I can still describe building ruins in COD’s Carentan map, and I sometimes still replay insane Quake III rocket launcher frags when I drink my coffee.

A little sad, I know… but I draw comics, what’d you expect? Existentialist discourse?

All things considered though, it’s true up to a point when people say you can actually learn to make comics just from reading them, but a big part of me likes to believe that it’s the outside influences that add the real flavor to the stew that eventually eventually becomes your style. It’s a little tragic though that because I’ve simply been too busy lately, I’ve had to uninstall what little games I did play just to avoid temptation.

Counter-Strike…

Call of Duty…

Sexy Beach 3…

…what.

That HD Modern Warfare trailer looked hella sweet too.

Fuck.

What’s Wrong with Comics?

My buddy Sully and I have had many discussions revolving around qualms and drawbacks with the comic medium, and he just recently found a chunk of time to dump it all onto a work journal mega-entry of sorts.  Being a fledgling writer more than just an avid collector, he has a bigger stake in caring about the sequential art form than most, so it makes for a pretty comprehensive read.

Check out the entries, you might even learn a thing or two:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Our own discussions often devolve from How can we fix things to How can we fix what we use to fix things… and then to boobies.  There’s also the occasional and unavoidable comparison between comics and manga… also he’s a gamer… so be warned… he tends to wander.

Dyslexic penguins go, “ploo ploo ploo…”