Sunday, October 7, 2007

Page 5, inked

Well, it's been three full weeks since Isaac posted the last finished page, but here at long last is page 5, more or less finished (you may click the image to enlarge it):

A couple of corrections are in order (stray or wobbly lines here and there, and I still need to suggest the "ring for service" label on the countertop sign in the first two panels). And having just seen a prime version of "the Bagge" by Peter Bagge himself, in the latest issue of Apocalypse Nerd, I am well aware that my distorted version of John the constable in panel 2 is woefully pedestrian. Sorry, Ben! Still, this version should suffice until the final clean-up before publication.

And really, we are planning to finish this, and not too far off our notional schedule, either. Isaac and I have both had a couple of very busy weeks, and this comics-making activity of ours is strictly extracurricular. But Isaac wisely factored in an extra week in our schedule when we started back in August, and now that the fall Jewish holidays are over I have a lot more working hours per week again—so I should be able to get things back on track once I see what's happening with page 7. (Wishful thinking? Wish me luck!)

But before we get there, Isaac's got to finish page 6—so I'll jump back to his just-posted pencils of that page to see if I can offer any useful comment. ("You come, too!" as Frost might have said, were he a blogging cartoonist...)

4 comments:

Isaac said...

Looks mighty fine, Mike. I'll print it out so I can have it handy when I ink p. 6.

Or would you rather me get some pencils roughed in on p. 7 first? That way, you could start working on p. 8.

Hm.

I'd better post Tom's constraints, before I start working on the next page...

Isaac said...

Oh, hey: don't forget to add scales (or whatever they are) to John the Constable's collar in panel one. It's looking kind of bare...

Ben Towle said...

Wow... Looking great. And I love the between panels shadow folk. -B.

Mike said...

Hey, thanks, Ben! I consider the giver of the constraints for a given pair of pages to be our first audience for those pages, so I'm glad it's meeting with your approval. And I'm glad, too, that Isaac pressed me to do something with the more challenging "Segar" constraint, because it has ended up shaping our sense of the world a lot more than we first expected it to. (And when I say he pressed "me," I mean that we both thought a lot and discussed it plenty before this page got settled--which accounts in part for the delay in posting it...)

And to Isaac: I actually fixed those missing scales on John's uniform the night before you made your comment, once I realized my error. And while I was at it, I went ahead and added "ring for service" where appropriate...