I've been really busy on my project, so much in fact I've neglected to update my lj! I do have some news I'd like to share, just so you all know where I'm at. I've been reading Alex Robinson's Box Office Poison recently, I'm in the last 1/4 of the 600 page monster and am really drawn in by the stellar dialogue between the characters. While on the surface it looks like a comic that has nothing in common with what I'm working on, I was struck by an epiphany while in the shower tonight on my way to bed...which is why I'm still up typing this!

BOP is almost entirely dialogue, exposition, and characters interacting with one another...the current 10-page "character history" piece I've been working on at Dave MacCaulay's suggestion is exactly that. I've been having a very VERY hard time deciding what to put in my balloons, what exactly I want the two featured characters to say. I find I have too many words and not enough bubbles to put them in! *click-click!* Naturally the light bulb turned on in my brain (finally)...duh: slow down, do more pages! The trouble I got into at the end of last semester was trying to say way too much in way too small a space.

Now that I've actively recognized this problem in my current work, the solution to me is to take this current 10-page bit, and expand it over the length of an entire "chapter" for my story. While the details of most of what I want to do is still evolving (growing out of this 10 pager, as I'm sure Dave knew it would) I feel like if I establish this pattern of giving myself the room to say what I want to/need to say now, it will make my life immensely easier in the long run when the action in my "adventure" comic actually happens!

Upcoming will be some more character design stuff, some re-drawn pages from previous posts and story chunks! COMIIIIIICS!

-RD

SPX was friggin’ GREAT! I met a lot of my favorite cartoonists, had a super fun time with my fellow CCSers, and even got to see the community walk away with 2 Ignatz awards! Congrats to Colleen Frakes and Cat Garza! However as all things must, SPX is over and it’s back to the daily grind! Jason Lutes has us hard at work, warming us up for the looming thesis projects with some starter homework, and in class assignments. Here’s an example of one of those assignments.



Ignoring the BLARING failure of spell-check on my part, this is the cover page we did in-class for a brief 4-page dream comic assignment we’re currently working on. I’ll have page 1 up tomorrow, and hopefully the next 3 in succession after that (1 is inked, the other 3 penciled.) The assignment is due Monday.

-RD

 I'm at SPX in Bathesda, MD this weekend! No updates till' Monday-Tuesday! Look for me at the CCS Table from open-1pm Saturday and from 5-close Sunday! COMICS!

I'm LATE! I know I said I'd be doing this on Saturday, but I was sick the last 3 days and working so, for the sake of my health, I slept a lot last night (this morning?) I don't have any real finished content to share with you all this week as it's very very early yet and I'm still sloshing through tons of ideas.

The ideas are actually a lot of the reason I'm doing these thesis updates. I really need and would appreciate feedback as I go forward. This is also hopefully going to be a good resource for my very busy thesis adviser to quickly come and see what I'm working on.

I'll post some initial stuff now for you to look at and have more update automatically as the week progresses, so keep coming back!

-RD


Let's start with some characters. Any good adventure is centered around one or maybe two very compelling, unique, easily recognizable characters. My adventure is going to be about a boy and a girl, to put it simple. Let's start with the girl...ladies first, after all.



Here's a quick head design for my female lead, I tend to draw my women's faces the same a lot of the time...so I'm going to use this young lady as my "typical" face...and force myself to draw every other female character differently. I want to teach myself to distinguish races, ethnicity heritages etc better. As you can probably, there's a significant amount of anime influence in how I draw...as I want her to be pale and somewhat Asian looking, I think this works okay here.



From a distant land, and found being chased by something...dark...I have in my head that she will be quiet and mysterious, but a woman of action, who draws attention to herself by way of above-average archery skills and playing rough with the big boys.

I'm eventually going to sit down and research some "period piece" clothing styles to come up with a set style to exist over the entirety of my cartoon world. Heavily influenced by adventure comics with distinctive clothing styles like Dave Sim's Cerebus, the Pini's Elfquest and adventure video games like The Legend of Zelda, I hope to be able to create a consistent style of dress that can be manipulated based on the world I create as real clothing does from place to place in our own world. Like those influences above, a psudo-medieval time period is what I'll be going for.

And last for this update:



Later in the story, I hope to separate the two main characters for a time and in that time our heroine and her secrets go underground and surviving as an assassin operating within the city walls. This is a quick idea for how an outfit might look for her. Since she's so light-skinned, I want all but her firing arm to be covered so that those she targets will see nothing but a pale flash in the dark before swift death.

That's it for today, but there will be updates for every day this week with other material I've sketched around with, and more descriptions of the actual story, along with some other un-related doodles from the past week. Please leave some thoughts and see you all next week!

Looks like not having hot water at our apt. for the last week has resulted in me getting a head cold. While the furnace is now fixed and I was able to take a hot shower for the first time in days last night, it's not stopping my throat from being sore and my nose from dripping. I have a BIG update planned for Saturday, and to start I'll be doing content updates hopefully once a week. Slowly as I create more work, I'll be able to update more often during the week. Cheers.

-RD

Hey everyone! Here's an update for you all (room echoes...!)

While my insurance was delightfully less than expected, the cost of having 4 rotors replaced made up the difference, coming in at a stunning $228.31. Also, VT Inspection was $40. All is said and done with the car now, at least for the next 6 months, and as long as I can afford to put gas in it, I have my wheels again. Now I'm dangerously toe-ing the red line on my bank account as I wait for my last paycheck to clear in my savings account, all while waiting for my rent check to also clear in my checking account, which does not have enough to cover it at the moment. I'm hoping the first one goes through so I can put the money I need into my checking. Last thing I need is a bounced check.

I put in a request for more hours at work, and also successfully negotiated some time off at the end of the month so I can drive to Bathesda, MD for the Small Press Expo with my classmates. It will be my first major comics and publishing convention, and it's a good one to start with I hear! When I come back, if things work out, I'll have an extra day or two at the kitchen that will give me a much needed boost economically.

School is underway, and I'm slowly turning the cartooning gears in my brain again, trying to get this thesis project underway. We have a few lead-in assignments to get the ink flowing in our veins again, I'm hoping they'll be the spark I need. Communication with my adviser has been minimal at this point, but he's a busy guy. I'm sure there will be time for some real one-on-one critique and analysis.


-RD

I got hacked, despite the upgrade, though the way my host made it sound, it may have happened in a way completely different to what was causing most other WordPress blogs to fail. Either way, now I'm upgraded with new password protection and plenty of other security upgrades. Once again thanks to Cat Garza for sticking it to those bad hackers and getting me back on track.

Now, the real reason I'm posting is to give you an idea of what's coming in the months ahead.

Thesis. Lots of it too. The Keyword is Adventure for me this year and I hope to keep you all entertained with lots of updates to not only the site, but the content as I'll be getting into the habit of updating much much more regularly. I hope to have a very large collection of my process and work from the year here at my site for all of you to see as well as a way to keep a record of everything I'm doing. I hope to build a somewhat regular audience to my website and also get lots of feedback on my work to keep me moving in the right direction! It's going to be an eventful year...oh yes indeed.

-RD

p.s - shameless plugs ftw.

I've been doing a TON of comics reading in the last month or so, trying to catch up on decades of comics I've never heard of before coming to CCS. I've been focused on 3 main series so far: Cerebus by Dave Sim (which I absolutely love and frequently lol while reading,) Elfquest by the Pini's (I'm reading the color floppy collections which are beautiful,) and, to mix things up, Strangers in Paradise by Terry Moore (which is such a great romp!) His rendering is unbelievable, great attention to detail in the super expressive faces!

I've nosed through a few single-serve graphic novels like Hicksville as well. I've also got a copy of Story by Roberet McKee which I'm looking foreword to getting into once the semester starts and I begin to focus on how to tell my OWN stories. I've heard a lot of very good advice come from this book via others. Thanks to David Yoder for lending me it, and Thanks to Jon-Mikel Gates for giving me such ambitious summer reading list suggestions!

In other news, after a year as a part of the South Main Street Gang (WRJ Represent yos!) I'm moving at the end of next week. Not far however, as I'll be taking recent CCS Alumni Jeremiah Piersol's vacant room at the Hartford House in Hartford Village, just down the road. I'll be adding +1 to roomate but also +? to space as his room is much MUCH bigger than my current cubicle. Rent will also run me near $200 cheaper than my current place. I'm super excited to settle into my studio space in the Telegraph building as well and get started on the year.

I don't yet know who my advisor is going to be, but I'll be sure to let everyone know when I do!

Onward to adventure!

-RD

Today was rather uneventful, but once the sun went down, things got crazy!

The weather has been hot and humid the last few days, something it hasn't been all this year, and usually, heat and humidity in the North East during summer = pop up thunderstorms. We have not had ANY this year, and I made note of this while talking to Steve Bissette at a pre-movie night meetup and the local watering hole, CJ's at Than Wheeler's.

After a few rounds and some rousing conversation, we all headed over to the old Telegraph building media room to settle in for some cartoons, then Midori...a surreal, over-the-top horror anime full of strangeness.

Halfway through a Felix the Cat short circa the late 1930's the power suddenly goes out, save the backup lights. The world outside had turned into the Apocalypse as a severe thunderstorm had swept into town, the first of the season, proceeding to pelt us with straight-line winds, crazy lightning and more rain in 15 minutes than we'd gotten the week before (and that's SAYING something the way this summer has been!) I was the only one to investigate, and got to witness the fury of the storm at it's peak, the wind driving the door back against me as I peeked out the main entrance.

Minutes later the power returned, and we got halfway through the first ever Pink Panther animated short only for it to cut out again. After much waiting, and the power refusing to come back on, we settled into the Gates Briggs classroom building a block over to finish the shorts, and start the feature. On the way past Than's, one of the bar men comes up the stairs and let's us know they're closed early due to flooding.

After the wild, disturbing trip that was Midori, I headed back to the porch house with some classmates to get our Mario Kart Wii on. I thruoughly embarrased myself, and decided to rectify the situation by coming home and washing dishes to some Queen.

Now here I sit, settled into another Yankees win (70-43 on the year...the best record in the majors) and about to crack open the next book of Cerebus. Tomorrow appears to be another quiet day, before hitting up $.25 Wing night at Thans, then board game night with Jason Lutes. Swell!

-RD