Halloween Fun Comics!

Happy Halloween!

I was reminded this morning by Bully's super-fun post about Ben Grimm's reading habits that a nice little holiday post might help to scare away all the witches and werewolves.*

Here, then, with a little bit of October color and a little larger than you'd see it in our Satisfactory Comics #7, is "The Graveyard of Forking Paths," one of our branching-comic homages to Jason Shiga, master of the mathematical comic. (Seriously, Shiga is one of the real genuises of the new generation of cartoonists; I heartily recommend his Meanwhile..., Hello World, and Knock Knock, as well as Fleep and Bookhunter, if you can get your hands on them. You can get some of his books at Global Hobo.)

You can, of course, click to enlarge this thumbnail; I hope you will. To read the comic, start in the upper left corner as usual, and follow any orange arrow you'd care to follow. (It's basically a sort of maze.)


Isn't that spooky? Why, even the "happy" ending is a little macabre!

Here's hoping you get plenty of candy in your plastic pumpkin tonight, and that the litlte rubber band on the back of your mask doesn't come unstapled while you're blocks away from home.

EXTRA BONUS: Here's a great costume idea:



RARR!

*(More Halloweeny fun from the blogroll: Chris Sims has posted about a NSFW--and in fact NSFYCS**--story about witches, and Blockade Boy has shown us a bit of a Batman-vs.-werewolf fight.)

(** Not Safe For Your Continued Sanity, that is. Seriously, you may not wish to follow that link.)

Page 8, inked

Hey, this time I used my image-correcting brightness controls in "post-production" to make the spot blacks look really black for a change! (My inks were looking a little feeble compared with Isaac's.) Yay, technology! Improvements at the push of a button!

Alas, other improvements were more laborious. Tier three, panel 1 is mostly redesigned away from the pencils I first posted, and I had to bust out some Pro White to add the magical "reins" in tier two, panel 2, where I had stupidly omitted them at first.

But never mind all that! A page is a page, and this one follows close on the heels of Isaac's page 7. We're closing in on the end. Will we make it? Only time—and Matt Madden, our next constrainer—will tell!

Page 8 pencils (obstructed story)

My hope is to get this page inked ASAP, so if you have any suggestions or corrections please post a comment at once. (One goof is still visible in this scan: I had put a sword in the right hand of "the Egg," when pages 6 & 7 show him to be a lefty.) Anyway, the pencils:I will be adding more visible debris from the fight in the inking stage, but this should give readers a chance to vet where it's going.

Page 7, Inked

I had a cloudy bunch of pencils for page seven before I left town for SPX, and I'm only now, a couple of weeks later, done with the inks. But I've had a very busy couple of weeks.

The good news is that we've just got three pages to go. (The bad news, of course, is that we have to wrap up the story somehow in those three pages and still satisfy our final set of constraints.)

Here's the way page seven seems to have turned out. Please click on the picture to enlarge it to legible size.

That kick to the jaw, by the way, is totally dedicated to Chris Sims of the Invincible Super-Blog.

You may also wish to compare the thumbnail of p. 7 with this slightly distorted version of Marcel Duchamp's most famous painting, Nude Descending a Staircase.


This version of Nude Descending is wider than the original, so that I could put it under my page and lightbox the layout of the painting directly. In fact, I was still doing that when I had inked every one of the figures on the page, to get little areas of light and dark to "match up," not that it matters. Not very much of the original comes through, in the end, but I hope that some of the kinetic, multiplanar chaos carries over. When I color this image, I'll try to stick to a yellowy earthtone palette, which should help make the swipe more noticeable. (That will probably also make the captions easier to find in amid all those lines.)

I have to say, it was fun to draw the figures a little larger this time.

Thumbnails for p. 8 (obstructed story)

Remember that the following takes place after page 7 (don't let the immediately preceding post of page 6 fool you!):This time I actually drew at postcard size, so the images are mighty sketchy. Hence, some explanations followed by a full script.

The second tier fulfills the constraint wherein three panels must maintain a continuous image (Tom Motley described this, cinematically, as a "pan sequence"). The background may be too sketchy to make this effect plain, but the idea is that the shadow man is staggering to the right, becoming ever less shadowy, while we see all the continuous space he covers. And yes, the birdlike junkman and Kalbi do bridge panels, to reinforce the sense of movement and the passage of time as they watch the shadow man stumble.

The last panel, where Stepan and the shadow man fade into the shadow world, fulfills the constraint that one panel must lack panel borders.

Here's the text for the above panels:

Tier 1, Panel 1:
Caption: All at once, the shadowfolk all disappear with Arntham…

Tier 1, Panel 2:
Caption: All but one.
Stepan: Stay where you are!
Shadowman: Aaaa [no word balloon, just letters]


Tier 2, Panel 1:
Shadowman: Please… [wispy word balloon]

Tier 2, Panel 2:
Shadowman: …don’t trap me here… [overlapping word balloon edges]

Tier 2, Panel 3:
Shadowman: …I’m losing what I am! [normal word balloon]
Toadish Junkman: What’s happening to him?


Tier 3, Panel 1:
Stepan: I saw something similar with Arntham’s attacker. The longer I looked at him, the clearer he became…
Shadowman: Yes…

Tier 3, Panel 2:
Shadowman: This place…it hems us in…fixes us, in form, in time, in space…

Tier 3, Panel 3:
Shadowman: And Arntham’s map would do the same!
Stepan: And that’s why you tried to kill him? So he couldn’t bind your home in place?


Tier 4, Panel 1:
Kalbi: And now they’ve got him over there! They’ll kill him for good!
Stepan: Maybe not. Shadow man…

Tier 4, Panel 2:
Stepan: You’re still bound to my will. But I will release you—if you take me to your home.

Tier 4, Panel 3:
No text as Stepan and the shadowman, in the same pose as in the previous panel, become shadow figures against a blank background in a space with no borders.

***
You know the drill, gang. Comments welcome!

Page 6, Inked

Well, after a short hiatus and a trip to SPX, I'm back in business (so to speak) and putting some ink on the page. In fact, there's kind of a lot of ink on this page. And yet, I don't think it's quite dark enough. When I look at the fields of black in my scan, there are little flecks of white all over the place. I need a new device for spotting blacks. Anyone have any recommendations? I'm trying not to use a Sharpie because they discolor over time.

Anyway, here's what happens on page 6.


I think that both of the requirements I got out of Ben Towle's constraints for these pages fit in pretty organically. It was fun to set up that end-of-the-page "reveal," in particular.

While I was inking this page, I started thinking of the junkmen as "The Chicken" and "The Egg." I wonder which one of them is named Mutt?

Anyway, let me know what you think; I'll probably ink p. 7 early next week, so please be sure to take a look at it and offer me any comments or suggestions you might have.

Page 7, lettered

My pencils for page 7 are necesarily kind of a mess, because I'm working pretty closely from a source that I'm lightboxing, and because I'm trying to keep them pretty loose until I figure out all of the elements of the composition. (I'm still positioning a lot of debris, and the toadlike junkman's pose isn't settled yet.)

But I thought I'd post things as they are right now, because I'm planning to spend my time inking p. 6 tonight, and these digital photos of the pencilled pages seem to turn out better if I do them by daylight instead of lamplight.

Anyway, here's what I've got on p. 7. You can see that it's lettered, and (if you click to enlarge the image) you'll also see that I've revised my tentative script a little bit, mostly for the sake of naturalness. I've also spotted in a few of the darkest black areas on the page, but there will be a lot more ink in a lot of places before I'm done.



Looking at the image itself, you should be able to see Kalbi and the birdlike junkman in the top "row," fighting with barely delineated shadows, then Stepan and the toadlike junkman and finally Arntham in the lower "row." Plus lots and lots of extra lines, most of which will get cleaned up a lot in the inking process. But first I need to finish p. 6.

Let me know if you think this reads all right, or if any pencilling changes ought to be made before I set about to ink.