Dylan Williams Benefit Auction

Floating World is doing some good work to raise money for Dylan Williams' battle with cancer. I've got the above painting up for auction as a part of the benefit here. An 11x17 print will also be available through Floating World. You can check out other auction items here. And of course you should buy comics from Sparkplug. I recommend Lemon Styles by David King and Neverland by Dave Kiersh.

Newswire

Two things:

1. I'll be at the San Francisco Zine Fest this weekend! It was a lot of fun last year, so I'm really looking forward to the 2011 edition. Plus its all caps FREE.

September 3 & 4, 2011

11am - 6pm

San Francisco County Fair Building

1199 9th Ave and Lincoln Way

in Golden Gate Park

2. Expansion has undergone some edits, and its become too big for one issue. Seriously, we can't staple that many pages together. A 28 page Part Three will debut at APE on October 1 & 2, and then PART FOUR will come in November!

Process

I always like seeing other people's process creating comics, so I thought I'd share how Matt Sheean and I put an Expansion page together.

First, I write a "script", although it's almost an outline. It has dialogue and everything, but it's not very detailed. This way the story is more of a collaboration between myself and Matt. From there Matt creates thumbnails for the whole book. Here is his thumbnail for page 9 of Expansion Part 3:

After the thumbnails are finished we make revisions. The sequence that page 9 is a part of got shuffled around, so the layout changed. Matt starts working on the pencils, usually giving them to me in batches of 2-4 pages at a time as he finishes them. The pencils for page 9:

Matt keeps the pencils loose so that the finished image is also more collaborative. I get the page back and use the following tools:

Recently I've been using a Japanese brush pen that I don't know the name of. (This is a little different for me, I usually use the watercolor brush next to it) I use a 08 Micron for the panel borders, and the Staedtler for lettering. Page 9 doesn't have lettering... so we won't get into that. My inks, unedited:

Expansion has a flat grey tone for most of the book. After I finish inking the main page, I tape another piece of paper to it and use a light board to create the shapes that will be grey:

I scan the two parts in and tidy them up. I put the grey tone (which at this point is still solid black) on its own layer, set it to "Multiply", and then change the opacity to a grey tone. For page 9 it's a little darker because it takes place at night.

That's that! Here's the final page:

Roke in Color

Why did I color this? I don't know.

Expansion Three in October

Here's a page (minus the dialogue) from Expansion Part Three, which Matt Sheean and I are working on. It'll be done in time for APE, the first weekend of October! I'll be posting more images as work progresses.

Neptune

11" x 14" Gouache on paper.

Comic-Con!

I'll have a new zine at Comic-Con this weekend. Full color! Very limited print run! It's two stories, one on each side, each with their own cover:

and


The new Top Five/Sweet Dreams comic will be at the Revival House and Koyama Press Table, Q-12 in the small press area.

I'll also be doing some signing at the Fantagraphics booth (#1718) for Mome 22. I'll have the new comic and some prints there as well. I'm signing from 4-5pm on Friday and 6-7pm on Saturday.

Inside The Pod

Top Five Color

Ranta-Una

Another character design!

Ralik

I'm working on a new project that I'm really excited about. This is a design for one of the characters in the comic.

Some Projects

I've been working on a couple of short comics for various anthologies. This is a page from one of those comics, where I'm trying to push myself stylistically. I can't tell if I pushed too hard, but it's fun to work outside my comfort zone a little.

Of course, Matt and I are also working on Expansion #3, (the final installment) which will be 57 pages! More than twice the length of #2.

Top Five

I'll be reading a new comic, called Top Five, at The Silverlake Jubilee this Saturday at 9pm. At some point I should have a zine of this as well...

Comics Reading

Silverlake Jubilee is about a week away, and I'm participating in a comics reading on Saturday the 21st with some great cartoonists: Robert Goodin, Keenan Marshall Keller, Levon Jihanian, Jed McGowan, Tom Neely, and Jen Wang.

I'll be reading a couple of comics that haven't yet been printed, and I might even have a new zine available.

Mome 22

Here is the first page from one of two short comics I'll have in Mome 22, published by Fantagraphics. I can't believe I slipped into this last issue! It's kind of bittersweet...