Manga Ja Nai! (Not Manga!)

So I went to Japan and returned a manga apostate. But if I wasn't going to draw anime-style, then how should I draw?

My assistant at the time was making weekly pilgramages to the comic shop. After a while, I started going with him. I have been in plenty of comics shops over the years, but I virtually ignored everything expect the Japanese imports and their North American clones; and superheroes still didn't interest me much. Fortunately for me, Mike was into the alternatives, stuff I knew nothing about. I had a whole new world to discover.

I started collecting again. After getting burned by the sporadic releases of my favourite Japanese authors, I didn't want to get sucked in again. So I stuck mostly to graphic novels and trade paperbacks. And I was choosey. I wanted something different but I had become picky about what I would spend money on. I picked up stories by Matt Wagner, Jeff Smith, Mike Mignola, David Mack and more. I was looking at a wide variety of artists and borrowing freely from what I liked. Eventually, I think, (I hope) it all evolved into something that was greater than all the parts.

Next time: an overview of my favourite artists and why I like them.

Manga ga daisuki! (I love manga)

So, I fell in love with manga as a teen.

I mentioned that I had been an anime fan for a long time. A really long time. So long that I was a fan before I knew what Japanese animation was. Even before I knew what Japan was. And that was thanks to Gatchiman. Or as I knew it first, Battle of the Planets. I loved that show. I was in grade four when it arrived here and I was absolutely crushed when it got cancelled. Then I discovered Captain Harlock, in French. I stumbled upon it by accident on one the CBC's french channel. I couldn't understand any of it but I was convinced that it was somehow related to Battle of the Planets because the characters looked the same.

Then years later, when I was in high school, Robotech came on. I was hooked again. For Christmas that year, my parents gave me the book, The Art of Robotech. It was from there that I finally learned what I was. An anime fan. I discovered that all of my favourite cartoons from childhood were originally from Japan. Well, from there I was able start seeking it out, although where I was from, there was precious little to be found. The thing that really got me about all this anime was the look of it. I loved the designs. Especially the characters. I learned to draw from freezing videotaped episodes of Robotech and copying them. Which brings me back to where I was.

In the comic store looking at manga. I couldn't get my hands on enough of these wonderfully designed anime cartoons. But manga is like anime in print. The aesthetics are the same; the story values are the same. I was in love again. As I mentioned before, the first issues I bought were Appleseed and Nausicaa. At the time I liked Appleseed better. The drawings were less crude (Miyazaki fans, bare with me) and there was more action. But there was something about Nausicaa that I liked, too. I just couldn't define it at the time. That was the beginning of my comics collecting phase. I decided to collect there two titles and anything else that caught my eye until both of them were finished. I though they were five and seven issues, respectively and that I would be collecting for only a few months.

I was wrong. Both stories were published in volumes of five or so issues at a time, with months and sometimes years in between. So I would devour them when they came out and fill the times between collecting other manga titles. I continued to study them and learn from them. This went on for a few years. Then I went to Japan.

I first visited Japan while in college for a couple of weeks and enjoyed it so much I wanted to try living there. I had my chance after being in the animation industry for a couple of years. I worked for a man with connection in Tokyo who helped me get a job as an assistant animator. I was living my dream! Or was it a nightmare? I was there for six months and although I have very fond memories of Japan, few if any of them are of working there. It was an incredibly valuable experience, but it wasn't fun. And one of the side effects of that experience was that anime and manga now longer had the same magnetic hold on me. Simply put, now that I had been behind the scenes, the magic was gone. Now that I had made it myself, in Japan no less, anime (much like the Japanese language itself) was no longer exotic and mysterious. It was a job. And a dirty one at that.

After I returned from my adventure, I was the opposite of a fan boy. I was vehemently critical of the Japanese style. I would harp on about how all the characters look the same and how annoying speed lines are. All the things I used to defend with equal fervour­. It was made worse by working closely with others who also hated anime.

It took time for the bitterness and the disappointment to fade. But it did. And little by little I was able to recognize the value of manga and to see it for the first time in a truely objective light. So, yah, the characters do look a lot alike, but there's a lot more to comics than character design.

Next time: if not manga, then what?

A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge, Part 3

So Patrick was in a "super" mood -- eager to work on a story with superheroic or supernatural elements.

I can get behind a good superhero story, but I wasn't in the mood to write one.

(An idea that Patrick and I had talked about working on a couple of years previously had been a superhero story -- it got as far as being outlined, having the script for the first issue written and all the key characters designed. Then, between our schedules at the time, and someone else independently coming up with another version of the same idea, it fell by the wayside. I may talk more about this project another time, as I still have a great deal of affection for it.)

That left the supernatural.

As you've probably already inferred from some of our previous posts, though -- as well as the comic that we eventually cooked up -- we were both of a mind to create an action-adventurey kind of supernatural tale, rather than one that focused on, say, horror.

(Actually, I pitched Patrick a teenagers-getting-disembowelled story that I had on the shelf, in the form of a mostly-finished screenplay. It wouldn't have been difficult to turn into a comics script, but it wasn't Patrick's cup of tea.)

So we were looking at at least some of our protagonists being tough and competent.

But despite that, "Bunny Mayhem" was the first character to be imported into Cold Iron Badge.

Imported?

Yes. A lot our our characters existed in some capacity previously to Cold Iron Badge. Not precisely, of course... not in the final forms they appear in now. But Patrick and I -- entirely separately -- had character concepts or sometimes just names, from years of ideas that were waiting for the right venue.

Patrick had been looking for a story to use Christine McCall in for years. Ray Donovan was a character name I'd made up as a teenager meshed with a character concept that was much more recent. And Delric... well, Delric's origins are dorkily embarrassing.

But Bunny was the first. Bunny was one of mine, but I think Patrick suggested using her. And because she was the first, Bunny ended up defining a great deal of what came afterwards.

Because of her name, you see.

Because in the time between me coming up with the name "Bunny Mayhem", there was another supernatural action-adventure story that achieved some degree of success, featuring a title character with an ever-so-slightly similar name.

Bunny.

Buffy.

Bunny. Buffy.

Buffy. Bunny.

You see the problem?

I felt, very strongly, that I needed to deal with this similarity -- which really was a coincidence -- by crafting a story that would not otherwise invite comparison with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But was still a supernatural action-adventure story.

Well, this happened to dovetail with some other things I'd been thinking about. I tend to enjoy genre mashups, and I like procedurals a lot -- they provide story hooks that are immediately understandable to the reader and don't require a lot of complicated backstory to understand: The heroes are involved in the story because it's their job. This balances nicely with the need for fantastical stories to establish and explore a world that is clearly different from our own. So fantasy and procedural seemed like a good fit.

But what sort of procedural?

As I suggested in an earlier post ('Does Fantasy Have To Be Anti-Democratic?'), inspired by both the fiction and the criticism of Ursula K. LeGuin, I think a lot about ethics and fantasy. Much fantasy seems to be seriously at odds with contemporary ethics, and one ethical issue that bothers me a lot in many supernatural action-adventure stories is secrecy, a distrust of the public, and a lack of accountability.

The illustrious Vampire Slayer, for instance, operates in secrecy, aided by a few friends. An attempt by the U. S. military to get involved in battling the supernatural was a major plot point in one season, and interestingly, was treated as being at best horribly misguided, at worst an immoral conspiracy that became a tool of the forces of evil.

The irony of this wasn't lost on me, and neither was the opportunity to resolve my own ethical issues with some of the elements of my chosen genre while also clearly differentating my story from Joss Whedon's.

My heroes wouldn't be secretive vigilantes, but cops, protecting a public that was fully aware of both their existence and that of the supernatural menace...

Um, which was going to be what, exactly?

More on how we solved that problem next time.

Secrect Origins

Happy New Year! 'Tis the season to regroup, rethink and forge ahead. So, in honour of the coming new year I thought I'd take a look back at how I got into comics. It all started way back when I was a lad... Well actually it wasn't until I was in high school that I really became aware of comics. Oh, I knew the iconic characters like Batman and Superman and Spiderman but only through their spin-offs into TV and movies. I had a friend in high school who decided to start collecting comics. I flipped through a few of his books but wasn't really impressed. It was all superhero stuff and full of characters I'd never heard of with names like Dare Devil and Wolverine. I was more interested in playing AD&D and watching Robotech (I think I just dated myself there.) so that was as far as that went.

Stephen introduced me to the New Mutants some time after that. I remember thinking that Illyana Rasputin (Colosuss' little sister, for those who care) was kind cute and I was intrigued by a six armed samurai woman who's name escapes me now. (Spiral?) That was enough to get me to read the section of Dragon magazine dedicated to the Marvel role-playing game. So even though I didn't read any of the comics I was becoming fairly well versed on the backgrounds of some fairly obscure characters. Surprisingly, this all became useful a decade later when I was living Japan.

I was working as an animator in Tokyo and the friend of an acquainence who helped me get into the industry there asked me for help translating some storyboards for the Spiderman cartoon that was being animated there. It wasn't actually translating words that was the problem. The translator simply couldn't follow the story; it was too convoluted to make sense.
(This was the cartoon version that included half the Marvel universe and had Peter Parker sprout a set of ten-foot hairy spider legs out of his rib cage.) My job was to explain things like who the Kingpin is and why Kraven the Hunter want to kill Spiderman...

But I didn't really get interested in collecting or reading comics until after I finished high school and started seriously pursuing animation as a career. I met an new friend (this is getting confusing so I am going to start naming names. I may or may not change names to protect the innocent.) His name was Dave. Dave lived for comics. So I would accompany him to the comics shop and there I discovered... MANGA.

I was already an anime fan and manga had the same look and feel so, while Dave bought his superheroes,I would browse. A lot. But I was very particular about what I would buy. I recall liking the artwork in Akira when it came out but I didn't want to collect it because it didn't have any giant robots. (So my exposure to anime at that point was very limited.) There were, however, two comics that did catch my fancy: Nausicaa and Appleseed. So I decided to get my feet wet. I told myself I would collect anything that caught my eye until I had all of these two series and then I would quit. And thus began a long and intense love affair with Japanese comics.

Next time: why I fell for manga and how it all ended.

A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge, Part 2

So Patrick and I had agreed that we should work together on a comic without actually knowing what the project was going to be.

Now, I had a bunch of ideas that I thought were pretty solid. Some of them, I'd been waiting to use for years.

None of them was Cold Iron Badge.

They were good ideas. They would have made good comics. I suspect that some of them would have lent themselves better than Cold Iron Badge to monetizing and merchandising.

But they weren't ideas that worked for both of us. No matter how good they were, I couldn't be married to them. We found -- had to find, through a lot of discussion and a lot of give-and-take -- a story that we could both get excited about.

There are a few reasons for this; one is philosophical. I'm not a proponent of applying auteur theory to comics -- even though it's actually possible in comics to be an auteur (unlike, say, film).

But just because something is possible doesn't mean that it's always a good idea. Collaboration is an incredibly powerful creative tool, and a lot of my own best writing has been collaborative. Comics is a medium that lends itself to collaboration. Particularly in my case, since I can't draw, and I am pretty much utterly dependent on having a creative partner in the form of an artist if I want to make comics.

(And even in comics, there are few genuine auteurs. My friend Mark Oakley is one. But even Dave Sim had Gerhard.)

Another reason is practical. In any comics project, the artist is going to be spending a lot more time drawing it than the writer spent writing it, so if there's no money on the table, it damn well better be something they actually want to draw.

(I believe it was Warren Ellis who said that he begins every new collaboration asking the artist he's working with questions like, "What do you love to draw? What do you hate to draw? What have you always wanted to draw and never gotten the chance?" That thought was never far from my mind while Cold Iron Badge was coming together.)

And besides: Patrick is talented. He has good ideas. Why wouldn't I want him involved in creating the story?

This isn't unprecedented for me -- Xeno's Arrow was developed in very much the same way, with Greg Beettam and me discussing the kind of story we wanted to tell, building our characters and world outwards from the initial desire to collaborate. It wasn't the first idea we kicked around, either -- just the best. It beat out, by the way, an idea that we did give a lot of thought too, that even got to the scripting and plotting stage before we decided that we weren't really into it, and which -- conceived, keep in mind, in early 1993 -- was eerily similar in many ways to Harry Potter.

That's a whole 'nother story, but I will say that it's enough to make me wonder if Alan Moore is right about IdeaSpace.

So: Patrick and I were kicking ideas around, mostly by email. And the germ of what became Cold Iron Badge was contained in a phrase he wrote, about being in a "super" mood -- wanting to tell a story that was superheroic, or supernatural. I immediately gravitated to the latter.

More on how that evolved into Cold Iron Badge next time.

A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge, Part 1

I'm going to leave my impressions of the rest of the first edition of The Hobbit -- from Chapter Six on -- for another time, for a couple of reasons.

I haven't actually finished it yet, for one thing -- I've been reading other things, books that I can actually read while on public transit without fear of damaging an heirloom. A lot of science fiction (one of my other loves, and which I also write) by John Scalzi and Charles Stross, both terrific writers.

The other thing is that first edition of The Hobbit, after the radically-different Chapter Five, the variation between versions in the chapters that follow is pretty minor. Barely noticeable, and not the sort of thing that makes for very interesting analysis.

So, if I'm not going to bore you with that, what do I intend to bore you with?

Well, Patrick has been wowing everyone with his posts about process, so you've learned quite a bit about the whys and hows of his creative choices. But you haven't heard much about the writing side of that particular coin.

So: How was Cold Iron Badge conceived? How did that translate into the story you've been following and, I hope, enjoying the hell out of?

It emerged, first and foremost, from a desire to work together.

Patrick and I have been friends for a long time, and at various times in the past we had talked about doing a comic of some sort. Nothing that had gotten beyond an interesting conversation or two and some character designs.

About a year and a half ago, I was frustrated. My attempts at breaking into screenwriting had long since fallen by the wayside (the details are a long story for another time). I had also recently had reason to remind myself why I've always avoided writing short stories or a novel: I'm just not very good at prose. What I'm good at is scripting.

Especially in the wake of attending the 2007 Toronto Comics Art Festival, I missed comics. But it was clear to me that, in terms of creative outlets that were fun, didn't have many related expenses, gatekeepers or bars to entry, but still held out the possibility of being of high quality and maybe even profitable someday, webcomics were where the action was.

The problem was, I can't do a webcomic by myself. Because I can't draw. It pisses me off. It's the one talent I don't have that I really, really wish I did. But I can't draw for beans.

At that point, I didn't have many contacts in comics anymore. My "career" (and I use the self-deprecating quotes advisedly) was about as cold as my "career" in film. The artists I was still in touch with were all busy with their own lives and projects.

So, Patrick and I were talking, and I was bemoaning my situation. "The problem is," I whinged, "That I don't know any artists who want to work with me!"

"Ahem," he replied.

"Oh! I thought you were busy!" I said.

So, that was where it all began.

That left wide open the question of what we were actually going to work on. More on that next time.

Things I have learned

After laying out fifty-odd pages of story I think I am finally getting a handle on pacing the story. As I mentioned last time, I try to end a page on a scene cut or a dramatic moment. Sometimes that leaves me with a lot of business to cover in that page and sometimes it leaves not very much. When that happens I have to look at whether to stretch or condense the action. Do I squeeze it into one page or stretch it out over two, and if so how much goes on page one and how much goes on page two?

I don't think I can explain how I make these decisions right now. All I know is, it is getting easier to make them. But here are a few things I have learned in the process:

1) More panels on a page means more work for me. This may seem fairly obvious but it wasn't to me. For example, Christine's fight with the goblins at Puck I used a couple of sixteen panel pages. I asumed that more smaller drawing would be take the same amount of time as fewer larger ones because the pencil mileage is the same. I was wrong. Perhaps the drawing time is the same but I didn't account for how long it takes to work out the composition. (Significantly longer that it takes to do the drawing.) So extra panels ends up being a lot of extra time per page.

2) Size matters. The size of a panel does influence the seeming passage of time. In Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner states that a longer panel will seem to occupy more time than a shorter one. Even though I had read that, I thought that the number of panels is more important than the size. Now I have to conede that Eisner knew best. (I quess that is why he has an award named after him.)

3) Blow by blow action is really boring. In a movie it is great to see a fight in intricate detail. Fast cutting can make any number of shots feel as fast or slow as you want. But in a comic, too many drawings slows things down. Even though I know this, I still imagine that action as a movie, which I then have to distill down for the comic.

4) Planning is essential. Not just thumbnailing out pages and panels, but taking the time to really think about what the story needs. I tend to thumbnail out twenty or so pages at a time, then draw them, then thumbnail out another twenty, and so on. By the time I get to the twentieth page of any given set, I have been thinking about it for weeks more that the earlier pages, and they (not surprise here) turn out better. The pacing is better and the story works better. So, as in all things, measure twice, draw once.

Trekking Along the Paper Trail

Inking is still weighing heavily on me this week. I still love my brush pen. I am having lots of fun experimenting with it and if my only problem was the steadiness of my hand I would be fine, because that will improve with practice. The problem is the $%(*&%/?&!!ing paper.

As with everything else in this comic, I am experimenting freely to see what kind of results I can get and what will eventually become “my” style and that includes the paper I am drawing on. I did the first twenty four pages on three ply, 11x17 Blueline Pro Art Boards. I thought that since they are “pro” art boards they must be what the pros use. (Apparently a lot do but there are many who don’t. For an interesting read about some successful comics artists, I recommend the book Artists on Comic Art. It’s full of interviews and examples of work in progress and finished product. Very inspirational.) I didn’t like them for a couple of reasons. First is the texture. I was drawing all my roughs with a Colerase coloured pencil and I ended up carving trenches into the board as I drew. I have a heavy hand and the paper bears the brunt of it. Erasing was also a pain because I could never get all the colour off the page, which is why the early pages are so sketchy looking. I ended up using Photoshop to clean up the faces and the hairiest of the lines but it was so time consuming that I decided to chalk it up to experience and move on.

Another problem I had with the 11x17 boards was they were to slightly larger than my backpack. So anytime I took them with me (which is nearly always cause you never know when you will have a minute or two to draw in) they got bents, bruised and ended up looking pretty ratty. All the scuff and creases were easy to clean up once the pages scanned, though. (Photoshop saves the day again!) But why make more work for yourself, I thought.

When it was time to buy new stock I looked around and settled on a pad of vellum finish Bristol board. The vellum finish has more tooth to it which means I can save myself some elbow grease with the roughs. I was able to draw with a lighter hand now but on the few panels where I did go heavy, the erasure was really bad. (More Photoshop!) Another draw back was that the new pads didn’t come in the same sizes as the art boards. Since I would have to cut the pages anyway, I decided to go a little smaller and save them from some of the wear and tear in my backpack.

It was here that I discovered how convenient the Blueline pages were. They come pre-printed with margins and guides for splitting the page in halves and thirds, to make drawing the panels easier. With the generic Bristol board I had to do a lot of measuring and ruling before getting down to drawing. After a very short time this became very tedious.

I am now on my third type of drawing surface. I decided that the pre-printed margins were too good to give up and went back to the Blueline boards. This time I am using only 2 ply pages and I do find them to be a little less durable. I solved the backpack problem by carrying the whole pack of twenty four together in the plastic wrap they came in. The bulk of the stack makes they solid enough to survive. I also switched from the Colerase to an ordinary HB pencil. The real reason for the coloured pencil was just force of habit and after the first page, drawing with graphite feels normal. And the lack of tooth is as much of an issue.

My only real complaint now is that with these new boards, the ink from all my pens bleeds a little. For close ups its barely noticeable because the lines are thick. But I just finished a page with a lot of small panels and most of the panels are long shots. With the pencils, I am able to get very fine details in the drawings only have the bloody bleeding ink wipe them out.

So the search for the perfect drawing surface continues. I think I will try a larger vellum board for the crispness of the ink lines. I will have to device some way to reduce the measuring and ruling. Since many of the pages are a grid, I can make a template by cutting holes in one page and… yes. I think that will work. Now I just have finish off the boards have now and then I can move on.

The brush pen is mightier than the sword

I promised myself a little present once Cold Iron Badge was up and running. Something fun and somehow related to comics. It took about a month until I finally decided to get a new pen. A brush pen. And that has got me thinking a lot about inking lately.
I went back and forth quite a bit in deciding how I would ink CIB. I really like the smooth flowing lines of Jeff Smith. But I also really like the hatching and tonal work Masamune Shiro does in Appleseed. And REALLY like the inking by Haruhiku Mikimoto in Marionette Generation. But I, having never inked a comic before, don’t have a defined style. As a result, the inking is the thing that changes the most. On days when I am feeling meticulous (and have the time), the lines are more smooth. When I am feeling more pressed for time, the lines are more sketchy. As things progress, I expect “my style” to emerge.
So far I have been using various pens. I tried a bunch of brands and eventually settled on a very fine Sharpie, because I really wasn’t seeing a huge difference between them and because Sharpies are, well, cheap. Although on pages 30-32, I tried a disposable brush pen. I was really happy with the first few panels. The brush tip gives are nice organic line and it was easy to get a good variety of line weights… Until the tip started to wear out before the first page was finished. On the three pages I used a brush pen, I went through four pens and actually broke a sweat from concentrating on controlling the lines. Once the tip started to degrade, I couldn’t get really fine lines anymore. That was really frustrating. I spent so long on those pages that I went back to the Sharpie. And so I expected it would be for the rest of the story.
Then I found my new pen.
It’s a Pentel brush pen with an ink cartridge and an actual brush tip with bristles and I love it. I can get really good range of line weights and I can even us it to paint in big areas of black. I find especially useful for texturing hair. The only draw back to it is that it requires a really steady hand. I have had a few “what the hell was I thinking” moments, to be sure, but all-in-all, I like my brush pen.

Is this thing on?

Testing, testing. Is this thing on. It is. >cough, cough<. When was the last time anyone dusted around here…

Oh, hi! Patrick here. It’s my turn to welcome you to Cold Iron Blog, where Stephen and I will talk about stuff related to the comic, Cold Iron Badge. You’ve been hearing from Stephen about CIB for a while now so I thought I’d horn in on the limelight. So… where to begin? A logical place would be the beginning: Page one, panel one. Puck. What the hell was I thinking with that building. I had originally decided to keep the backgrounds minimal because I was more interested in drawing the characters. They were what was really interesting to me, since they drive the story. But since Puck is a major set piece for the story ( there are several scene set there), I wanted it to be more than a big concrete box. However, I am not an architect, not by a long shot, and I was having a really hard time coming up with a design for it. Then I walked past this great building. It had a distinctive shape, and was surrounded by a heritage area; it even had a cobblestone street running along one side. AND, it had a club in the basement. Perfect! I thought. It was only slightly out of my way coming home from work, so I walked around it a bunch of times, and took some reference photos. Now, I am a pathetic photographer so my reference photos were all but useless. Fortunately, I found what I needed on the good old internet, and started to draw. And draw… And draw. What the hell was I thinking? It took me about three days to wrap my head around the perspective. Anyway, I finally got my act together, took a deep breath and got started. Once I got rolling it ended up being what you see. I was so frustrated by the amount of time it took to get that on panel down that when the club appeared again on page four, I reduced the first drawing and traced it. Although, from the new angle we can see more of the environment and a have to admit that I goofed up on that. I mixed up the angle of the intersecting street and some of the buildings. A colleague of mine said no one would notice, and since it isn’t critical to the story it wasn’t a big deal. Maybe he was right, but I still get grumpy when I see those half assed Bgs. If Cold Iron Badge ever comes out in print, there’s a gonna be some fixin’ a happenin’, let me tell you. So the question is, can you name the interection where Puck is? If you can, then I guess the drawings are good enough.