Hello
Its a horrible day outside so I thought I'd take the time to post some more work. For the past couple of months I've been working on a comic, based on a film I made with 2 friends back in 2005. The film was a 7 minute prequel to an animated series funded by The Digital City at Teesside University called "The Adventures of Leo Fox". The series was to follow the exploits of a young boy on a magical council estate. Orphaned as a babe, Leo was brought up by his Nan until one night she falls into a mysterious illness. The film follows Leo on his mad dash through the twisted estate in search of the only one who can save his Nan, his long lost Grandad.
The film can be seen
here.
Anyway, time went by and the 3 of us went off to do different things. Ben went off to study
film, Pat has been freelance writing and creating
audio short stories , and I've been learning how to
animate properly (as many of you may know!), but in the background we've always wanted to do something with Leo Fox, his tale is not yet told!
Since we now live all over the place, making a film again isn't really an option, so what we have decided to do is try and make a comic. Its slow going at the moment, but we have finally got a first adventure mapped out and are working on issue one.
When you go into making a comic I don't think you realise just how many decisions you need to address. Style, characters, working method, and what to show have been some of the many challenges. For myself as the penciller, it has been a challenge to create the work in a format which is doable with limited space and equipment. The process I came up with was to sketch out the panels roughly and scan and photoshop them into some kind of order. I then printed these out and using a dark pencil and layout paper, traced the roughs out as clean lines. These were then rescanned and photo texture added in photoshop, before being sent on to Pat, who is taking care of lettering, as well as the writing.
Being that this is the first time we've ever made a comic, its been a real learning process and more work than I thought it would be (drawing carefully takes time!) but I am getting better and better at it. One of the main things that has taken time has been to create the array of characters which are needed when you start to break down even the simplest of stories, and also working out just how much you can say in one issue, which is roughly 18 pages. We are aiming for the first story arc to take place over 3 issues, but since this is just a hobby at the minute we're not setting hard and fast timeframes for completion. We're just seeing where it takes us.
Anyway I've rambled on long enough. I'm sure I'll be adding more on this project as time goes by, but for now, here are the first ten pages of issue one without lettering. I know they won't make much sense as a story without the words, but I'd be happy to hear your critiscisms in terms of style, pace and readability. And until next time...
Adios!
