Allude with Interrogator

Am I making fun of Mike?

No, of course not! (If I was making fun of him, I'd have saved this image at a much larger size.)

No, I just had a few doodling minutes on my hands, and a silly idea floated into my head. Not worth doing any visual research for—and I'm sure this guy doesn't look like a real Inquisitor—or doing anything like a decent sketch. And I'm definitely not teasing my good friend Mike.



Nope. Definitely not making fun of my buddy. And now, presumably, back to our Elfworld story.

Thumbnails for p. 2 (obstructed story)

For page 2, I'm left with two of Charles's constraints: "They have their exits and their entrances," wherein "the sequence must involve dialogue and interaction among multiple characters, with at least one character making an entrance during the sequence and at least one character making an exit," and the "Corrigan," in which "the faces of all the characters except the protagonist are obscured from view."

I'm afraid my extremely rough thumbnails obscure almost everything from view, but I'll put them up here anyway in hopes that they can at least generate some feedback. You'll note that my thumbnails tend to be extremely rough indeed; my usual method is to make even sketchier thumbnails, just placing balloons and figures and saving the real puzzles of composition for when I'm penciling panels on Bristol board. That won't work so well for this particular method of collaboration, though, so these pictures are (yes) clearer than usual. There's no room for legible text, though, so please refer to the script below (keyed to the numbers of the panels in the thumbnail):

1) Stepan: "I—My master said you could draw a map for him."
Arntham: "A map of what?"

2) Stepan: "Of—of I don't know what. He didn't say, exactly."
Arntham (off): "Then how exactly can I help you?"

3) Stepan: "My master said you'd know, yourself."
Arntham: "And just who is your master?"

4) Stepan: "Magister Ipthorin, of—"
Arntham: "—of Wynholme. I knew him well, once..." (new balloon) "Come, boy; to my lodgings..."

5) Stepan, framed in the doorway of a shabby, crowded room, looks over to Arntham at a writing lectern. In the dark background, some pointy ears are just visible—someone's hiding behind a trunk.
Stepan, thought caption (misdrawn as the topmost balloon): "It's so dark here, but I guess that's no hardship to a blind man. But hold on..."
Stepan, word balloon (on bottom): "How do you see the marks you make, Arntham?"
Arntham: "I don't see them, boy. I feel them..."

6) Arntham: "Look here. I grave them on parchment with a blade."
Stepan: "I can barely see the grooves..."

7) Pointy-eared assailant (brandishing dagger, viewed from behind): "You've seen enough! A blade for your grave, Arntham!"
Arntham (pushing Stepan): "Out of the way, boy!"

8) Stepan falls, hits his head on some furniture: WHACK!
Arntham (off): "Aagh!"

9) Stepan crouches over Arntham's body while looking toward the silhouette of a pointy-eared cur in the doorway. Stepan, thought caption: "Still groggy from my swoon...Arntham looks dead...and what's that in the doorway?"

I'm considering a different approach to panel 6. Instead of crouching behind the assailant and looking over to Arntham & Stepan at the writing desk, the viewer could look down from above on the whole room, thus:
The dark blob in the lower left corner is the assailant, moving out from behind his trunk. I'd want to reframe this somewhat so that Arntham and Stepan aren't stuck at the extreme top with the word balloons at the focal point of the panel; I think I can arrange for their figures to be more centrally located.

Anyway, that's what I've got so far. Help me out, folks!

Page 1, Inked

Well, I got the first page of our constrained fantasy story done within the one-week deadline. I think the story's off to an interesting start, and I hope that I've suggested an interesting world with all of these passersby in the Bazaar.

I'll try to color this image before long, but the coloring can lag behind schedule a little bit, as long as we get the inks done on time. (Only the black-and-white pages will be submitted to Elfworld.)

Here are my results. You can click to enlarge the image. I've deliberately saved it at postcard size (at least for my monitor), so all of you can't-fit-that-on-a-postcard naysayers can judge whether the four-tier plan worked out. (The postcards will be printed at better resolution than a laptop monitor, though, so they should be more legible.)

I'm pretty happy with the way I responded to two of the constraints. Stepan, our protagonist, definitely spends most of this page as an "audience" to the little scenes around him, and the seven ages of man are represented in seven equal-sized panels that hew pretty closely to the types mentioned in Jacques's famous speech: the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldlier, the justice, the pantaloon, and the shriveled old man. I like the way that Charles's constraints suggested a macguffin for this story: I sent Stepan looking for a very old man, because the old man was at the end of Jacques's speech.

I'm not as happy with the way I responded to the "Reverse Corrigan" constraint, to tell you the truth. It wasn't until I had inked about half of the page that I realized that Charles wanted every character's facial expression visible (except for the protagonist's). I think there are five or six people in the backgrounds and margins whose faces can't be seen—or maybe even more than that. If you like, you can think of them as props or set-dressing, instead of characters, but that's sort of a lame excuse. Sorry, Charles—I messed up (but only a little).

I now pass the baton to Mike, who has to continue the story and satisfy the remaining two constraints. Good luck, buddy!

Pencils (p. 1) update

So, okay -- my pencils don't look a whole lot different, so far, from my thumbnails. The script has changed very slightly, and I've filled in some of the crowds a little more.

For Mike, this will be old news, but I pencil sort of loosely to start with. Lots of vague shapes, balloons for heads, a few scratchy lines for posture. And I build up from there, almost like I was making a sculpture on a chickenwire armature. It's a slow process. I use a pretty light pencil for this, because I have to erase so frequently. These pencils are not all the way to being inkable -- and in fact I will probably work on them some more tomorrow.

But I figured since Saturday is the day when Mike has a holliday, and since we're both pretty busy this week, I'd better post these in-process pencils and let him offer suggestions.

Click to embiggen, for legibilitude:

There's a babe in arms (being held by an elf) in the second panel. Sorry for the weird "scan" -- my scanner doesn't pick up pencil very well, so I had to use a digital photo. I think I did manage to get the seven ages of man pretty well suggested.

Interlude with Alligator

I don't mean to interrupt the Elfworld proceedings for long, but I had a distracted couple of minutes with some colored pens earlier today and paid a surprise visit to an old friend.

It might be more accurate to say that the friend paid me a visit, because I didn't expect to draw this alligator at all. I was reaching for a purple pen when my hand came up with a green one instead, and my mind was too tired to look for another. (And probably too tired to have figured out a suitable drawing in purple, anyway!)


My last real decision before starting to draw was to resolve to sketch an alligator, and at that point muscle memory took over. I've drawn this 'gator in some form or another for (mirabile dictu) twenty-five years, though I really can't remember when I last drew him. Yes, he's highly derivative of Albert Alligator, but not as much as he used to be.

You may note the ghostly images of Hebrew letters bleeding through the other side of the paper he's drawn on. They're just calligraphic studies, and have nothing to do with the alligator. And even less with quasi-kabbalistic reptile worship (ahem).

Thumbnails for p. 1 (obstructed story)

Okay, these are rough, but they're enough to get a start, and enough for some kibitzing to begin, too.

I chose to use the constraints "All the World's a Stage," "The Seven Ages of Man," and "A Reverse Corrigan." Mike will have to deal with the other two. I handled the onlookers and the Corrigan restriction by combining them: our main character, Stepan the Apprentice, is people-watching for the first eight panels of the page, and we see him (facing away from us) in just a few of the panels.

Click, please, to see the larger image, as well as my notes on the script.


The seven ages are handled with a series of passersby in the Bazaar of Drena, which is where Stepan is supposed to meet the person who will sell him the map that his master has sent him off for. (My idea is that the master, a wizard of some sort, is off fighting some major evil, rescuing a town, or whatever, with his whole adventuring party, but he knows that they'll need a map of something -- I don't know what yet, and Stepan probably doesn't know either -- when they're done with their current mission, and time is of the essence in finding this map.)

At the end of the page, Stepan is face to face with a very old man who is supposed to be the person he's looking for. I'm sure it's bothering our young hero that the old man's calling him "Boy" -- Stepan's older than that -- but compared to this wizened old codger, probably anyone in the first five Ages of Man counts as a boy.

Page 1 doesn't advance the story much, but I hope it provides a little characterization (of both Stepan and, indirectly, of Magister Ipthorin), and a decent sense of a setting, even if it's a setting that we abandon on page 2.

With this many figures in the page (thanks, Charles!), it's going to take me a while to do the pencilling, and I'm probably going to want to do some studies before I settle on a face for shriveled old Arntham. I'll plan to get the pencils done by Friday, though, so I'll have time for the inking.

Let the kibitzing begin!

Charles Hatfield's Constraints to Us (p. 1 and 2)

This morning, we got constraints from our comics-scholar colleague and friend Charles Hatfield. (He's the author of Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, for sure one of the best critical books about graphic novels.)

Here are his obstructions to us, the ones that will shape the first two weeks of our new project:

1. All the world’s a stage: The sequence in these two pages must include onlookers to the main action – that is, an audience, whether seen or implied – so as to involve, if only implicitly, the idea of spectatorship. (The audience may be us, addressed directly, or it may be secondary characters within the diegesis, but, either way, we should become aware of audience.)

2. They have their exits and their entrances: The sequence must involve dialogue and interaction among multiple characters, with at least one character making an entrance during the sequence and at least one character making an exit.

3. The ages of man: Characters of several distinctly different ages, spanning from early childhood to old age, must be present in the sequence.

4. A Corrigan: One page of the sequence (which, again, is to feature dialogue and interaction among multiple characters) should be composed so that the faces of all the characters except the protagonist are obscured from view. That is, the images should be drawn/designed in such a way as to hide from sight the expressions of every character except that character you designate as the “main” character.

5. A Reverse Corrigan: In the opposite page of the sequence, the face of the protagonist, and only that of the protagonist, must be obscured from view. That is, the images should be composed so as to hide the “main” character’s expressions from sight, while revealing every other character’s expression.


I have to revise one thing slightly about Charles's first three obstructions: it's our intention that in each set of two pages (one drawn by each of us), the first page will "claim" three of the five obstructions, and the second will tackle the two that the first page didn't handle. So: we'll have onlookers, entrances, exits, and the seven ages of man in this two-page sequence, but it's possible that each of those things will appear in only one of the two pages.

I'm going first, and I've already had some ideas about how to satisfy the constraints. Believe it or not, I've already changed my mind at least once about which three I'll use. I have a week to finish this page, so I'm going to try to bang out some thumbnails (and post them) as soon as possible. You'll hear more from me soon.