Continuing what I had started back in October, I’m going to lift the curtain on the thumbnail-to-inked-page process on PLUCK, my weekly webcomic for Zuda.  The whole season is going to be some 60 pages long, so if nothing else I’ll have a collection of fun little posts to look back on and be ashamed of learn from.Picking right up after page eight’s quaint little cliffhanger, our POV switches over to Pluck’s on page nine (above), and we see the king for the first time.  I originally wanted to show some sort of banquet right behind the king’s throne, but as I thought about it later on it made less and less sense for the king to let his subjects see he was all human like that.With Pluck getting a little too cocky on page ten, I wanted the king to put him in his place and to have a somewhat sinister air to him, hence the heavy shadow obscuring him in panel 3.  I changed character sizes in panel 4 and 5 mainly to make room for word balloons, but the layouts from the original thumbs are pretty intact.Panel 3, I felt, needed to be punched up a bit to give a bit more immediacy to the king’s words, so I scrapped the original shot and zoomed in on the king doing his best Uncle Sam.  I then made the amulet panel out to be the only predominantly black one in the page, to give it a bit more weight.  To mirror it in panel 7, I made Pluck’s frock blacker than usual, letting the amulet stand out a bit more in the overall layout of page eleven.

Once I started page nine, it had already been agreed that Gabe’s brother Matt would be coming onboard to provide lush colors for the comic.  So there’s a steady and very slow transition of me doing less and less blacks so that the line art can let a bit more color in.  Gabe is pretty hands on with the layout process and usually does his own set of layouts that I later build on, but we’ve gotten to a point in our creative relationship that we can pretty much riff on each other’s ideas very freely.  We’ll probably be moving in together soon as well.

Be good.  Go here.  Read PLUCK.

It took me a coupla tries before I got to a version I was actually happy with.  Managed to solve the asymmetry of the first version and ended up with this.  After magically avoiding an alternate version that came dangerously close to looking like “Prick,” I think I’ve come to a final draft.

I like to fiddle with ambigrams and word art sometimes, so I figured I’d do a test logo for PLUCK, the series I draw for Zuda Comics.  Obviously I’ve taken a few liberties in this case, as the closed belly of the “u” prohibits any effective 180-degree flippage, but I find it neat anyway.

Read the webcomic here.

I’m writing this for me.

Drawing at three in the morning, it gets to a funny point where I just put the headset on even when I don’t plan on listening to anything — the extra weight and pressure on my head is comforting.  Helps me focus.  Like a soft vice.  Or a tactile laser.

By the bed is a stack of trades I haven’t burned through yet.  Giffen-Maguire Justice League is about done, but catching up on GL will have to wait… and that Frank Frazetta Testament book looks fatter every time I ignore it.  Reading Comics? Serious Business.

Alex made me read Grant Morrison’s New X-men five years ago, and that’s what brought me back into comics.  This is all his fault.

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Two days ago, had a sitdown with Politician XOXO’s people about putting together campaign strip.  On the fence about the whole thing, and still feel a little dirty.  Fairly certain candidate isn’t all that bad (as far as candidates go), but that substrata of professional cartooning just registers as… soupy.  And not in a good way.  Comics should be fun.

Dad bought me my first trade when I was eleven.  Finished The Dark Phoenix Saga in one afternoon.

I can’t stop watching videos of mice getting eaten by piranhas and snapping turtles on Youtube.

Roby let me read his Teen Titans comics when I was too young to care about the words, and George Perez Starfire had a weird habit of making me feel funny in the middle.  Stupid alien.

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PLUCK went live on Zuda twelve hours ago.  I am irrevocably valid.  It’s funny working with a weekly deadline.  You’re forced to parse your style down to its essential components and bare necessities.  You draw three lines where two years ago you would have put six, and an alternating crosshatch.  You develop go-tos — fixed solutions for compositional problems.  A mental laundry list of Wally Wood shots.  Grids.  You read Blacksad and anything Quitely to keep from becoming repetitive and boring.  You devour Stuart Immonen.  Because you still have those four other pitches you’re working on, and you sure as hell don’t want those falling flat.  It’s a constant and hectic chase of self-criticism and improvement.  This is the lab, and the scientist is the rat.

Glad I’m seeing my girl this weekend.