THE SIMPSONS NEWS

First week back on a new episode this week.  Next week will be my last week and then I have a three week hiatus.  The episode I’m on has a very lite rewrite. It’s a very special show for the Fox producers and they are very happy with it.

I’ve been assigned Act 1, Act 3 and the Couch Gag.  I’m halfway done with all of those assignments and it’s only Thursday of the first week.  Like I said, VERY lite rewrite.

VIDEOS

The following video is a really good talk about how an artist can protect themselves from being taken advantage off.  Especially if their client decides to NOT pay them for the work they do.

As can be seen from the title, the talk uses very rude language. Still, the content of the talk is such that I thought it really needed to be shared:

ART

I’m taking a small break from my “Illustrated Film” to finish up my BLACK TERROR KID comic. My film is taking so long I really felt like doing something I could finish. If there’s something I know how to do, is finish a gag comic.  I’ve been making them since I was in fourth or fifth grade.

It’s coming along nicely.  I thought I’d share a bit of my process this week, and next week I’ll start posting the finished pages. I plan to return working on my film sometime next week too.

Alright, so how did I go about making this comic?  Well, I came up with this one by looking at a list of Black Terror Kid gag ideas I have.  I looked around for something I could do that would be short.  Some of the ideas are fleshed out while other are not.  I would read the idea and play a scenario in my head until it ended with a punch line.   I had a few ideas but they would have been too long.

Finally I came upon this idea:

BTK tries to make The Claw cookies. Punch line?

This lead me to think about, what if BTK would try to SELL The Claw cookies.  I played the scenario in my head and it was short. I liked the punch line so I started writing the dialogue. I worked and reworked the dialogue until I was satisfied.  I let that sit for a few days and rewrote a bit.  Then let it sit and came up with an idea for the last page that made me laugh out loud to myself.  I went back and rewrote what I had again.

When I was done with the rewriting, I finally decided to start thumbnailing the comic. I did this on sticky yellow notes at work, during my lunch break, with a ball point pen. This is what they looked like:

Once I was done with the thumbnails, I assigned each thumbnail a number and began trying to work out what the pages would look like. I did this on my sketchbook and it looked like this:

Once this was worked out, I made photocopies of some page guides I had made for myself and started drawing  roughs of the pages with the panels broken down as I had planned. Below is page 1:

You can see the “ghost” of  where I changed BTK’s head and turned it more toward camera.  I realized that, for the gag to work better, he needed to say something in the panel. I then added a word balloon and wrote in the dialogue.

The title was the last thing on the page I came up with.  I had, in fact, forgotten I should put one in.  It was a pain in the neck coming up a pun that worked with the theme of the strip, but I did it.  After page one was done, I started work on the last four pages. I’ll show the roughs  of those after I’ve posted the finished pages.  Meanwhile, enjoy the sneak peek of page one. For the next five weeks, I’ll be posting up a finished page and it’s rough.

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