THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Second week of my hiatus, three weeks to go. I must say, it’s going pretty fast.  There’s a small chance that work will turn up from the studio but it’s not very high.

I went to the studio Tuesday night because we have figure drawing every Tuesday there.  I hadn’t gone in years.  I was talking to a friend at work about going.  I wasn’t able to last week because I was taking care of Dante who was sick but now that he’s better I went.  I’m glad I did.  It was fun even though I was really rusty.  I felt that I was really getting something out of it.  Even though it was painful to be so bad at it.  I’m hoping that the more I go the better I’ll get and the more I’ll learn.

BOARDGAMES

I haven’t written about a board game in a while.  Mostly because, as much as I like them, I get to play them as much as I usually do, which is to say, just about never.  That said, I have recently gotten a hold of a really cool game that kinda hits on a lot of things I like in a board game.  Uncle Chestnut’s Table Gype:

Paul Nowak, of Eternal Revolutions created a board game inspired by G.K. Chesterton.

It’s a little bit like Chinese Checkers and a little bit like chess without quite feeling like either one and the pieces are DICE.   I read the rules but I still haven’t played it. The point of the game is to take your pieces and move them into the home row across from you.  Pieces are not captured but you can jump over them.  When a piece is jumped over, it must be re-rolled, resulting in a different face appearing on the die.  Since each face moves a different way, this causes the game to constantly change. It’s definitely one of  those rules that are so obvious and yet new.  Familiar and yet original.  It’s seems like a very cool, very family friendly game.  Just enough thinking without it hurting your head. I played a few solo rounds and I was like, “Woah this is cool.”

As soon as I get to play a few games, I’m definitely going to go deeper into writing my thoughts on it.  I just wanted to make you aware of it for now. Check it out. Uncle Chestnut’s Table Gype.

Table Gype’s Board game geek page

BUY UNCLE CHESTNUT’S TABLE GYPE.

ART

This comic idea started twelve years ago when I felt the itch to make my own comic.  I didn’t really know what I wanted to do so I just started drawing.  I drew a girl a boy and a little dog.  I stared at them a while and started coming up with their relationship to each other.  Little by little things began to change a bit, but I still didn’t know what the story was.  I then just decided, to start writing dialogue.  I wrote for a while but it didn’t go anywhere, so I started over and over and over.  Eventually something started to form.  Then I  went back and started writing along the lines that started forming.  I had hit something and it started to work for me.  I went back to the beginning and plugged in what was working and the comic was born. It was titled: The Seven Impossible Tasks.

I meant this comic to be drawn simply.  In my big head style.  That way I would be able to get it done.  I drew the pages rough so that later I would be able to put a sheet of paper over the roughs and start drawing things better.  I just wanted to get the pages laid out first.  Thing is, as I drew the roughs, I was also experimenting with the look of the characters. Since the pages where roughs, I didn’t feel the need for the characters to look consistent through out.  I was trying to find the style I was going to use in the end.

After I finished the first 22 pages of story, I passed out copies of my roughs to friends and family to get their opinions about whether they thought it was a fun compelling read.  Most of the feedback was positive.  The only thing people said was that it needed an establishing shot at the beginning.  Then, one day, I showed the pages to Richie Chavez (art Director of Dreamwork’s Prince of Egypt movie) . He took one look at the pages and without reading them told me the panel layout was boring.  He thought they needed to be more dynamic. That I need to use the comic medium to it’s best advantage.  This made me rethink all my pages.  He was right. My mistake was to try to fix what I had already done. On hindsight I should have just finished the pages as they were and laid out out the next part of the story in a much better way.

The thing is, by the time Richie had given me his critique, I had already started established the character designs, the background designs and I had started finishing up the pages.  Not only that, but around that time, I had started reading some books on writing.  This had made me rethink some of the structure, or lack there of, of my story.  I started having second thoughts as to how I ought to present the story.  I rewrote the first to pages and compressed them into one. I rewrote the ending to be more compelling and I just generally thought about the comic’s story a lot.  Little by little, the comic started to become a burden and it began to lose it’s fun.

There came a point, after reading a lot of books on story and story structure, that I contemplated rewriting it all from scratch.  Part of the reason for this was that I didn’t really have a solid, locked down idea for the direction the story was going to go.  I had the jist of  where it was going to go, what the arch of the character’s would be but that was all.  It also didn’t help that I was planning to write a long “epic” story. In the end, after a year (or maybe even two) of working on it, I just got burned out.

Looking back on it after all this time, I find that it wasn’t horrible.  It could have been better, yes, but it’s readable. Some dialogue is a bit redundant but I think, if I had stuck to it, I might have been able to get better at writing and I might have been able to do something with this.

So here, for the first time ever, I present to you my failed attempt at my first comic.  None of it has any finished art (except for two of the “deleted scenes”), all of it is rough and the character’s designs change from page to page. Oh, and the character Paul, is suppose to have a Spanish accent so the way things are spelled in his word balloons are weird. Just thought I’d give you a heads up.

Here are the first 6 pages of 21. Let me know hat you think. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE:

To be continued next week…

FOR PART 2:  CLICK HERE

Below are the “deleted scenes”.  I’ve posted up the original first page, along with the cleaned up dialogue.

The page below is the final art version of the page above:

The page below is the original page 2 that I cut completely after drawing the new page one.  I thought this page was bit redundant and it didn’t really move the story along.

The page below is a partially finished version of the page above:

As you can see in the page above, I still hadn’t made up my mind as to the proportions of the characters that I wanted to have.

Looking back, I’m pretty sure I’ve improved enough now to be able to do an overall better job if I was to try it again.

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