Platformalist

Hi! My name’s Andrew Reist. I make games, write books and short stories, play music and draw comics, and put that stuff on the internet.

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January Project Kickoff

· Platformalist

Let’s kick this thing off!

The project I’ve chosen for my January project is pretty straightforward. It’s an unfinished comic from back in my band days - one that I wrote about fictionalized versions of myself and my bandmates. Here are the steps I’ve taken care of so far:

  1. Read the comic
  2. Assessed what was finished and what’s unfinished.
  3. Determined if I also want to put together the Spanky / Boogly comic that I mentioned in the last post.

So what’s missing?

So yeah. I’ve read the comic. It’s surprisingly much shorter than I thought it was, only about 23 pages. I’m fine with the length, though I gave up on the project before I reached the story’s ending, so I’ll need to write and illustrate a few more pages to put a cap on everything. So if we want a multiple of 4 (for folded comic pages where 1 sheet = 4 finished pages when folded), let’s say that we want 7 printed sheets, so 28 finished pages. So that’s 5 more pages to draw.

Then, we’ll need a cover. That’s 1 sheet (4 more pages to draw, with the front cover needing to be coloured and a lot more detailed than the inside sheets).

Additionally, we’ll need to flesh out one empty section that I left on a single page, which I’d initially intended to be a ‘fake advertisement’ section where I’d advertise one of my friend’s bands’ cds/tape releases. Since it’s been about 12 years since I last worked on this, I no longer have anything that I’d like to pop in that section. So I’ll need to illustrate something for the empty half page.

So … that’s 9.5 pages that need to be created, 4 in colour, 5.5 in B&W.

Achievable.

Do I want to do the Spanky/Boogly comic?

Oh man, when I started writing this post I was going to write No. That was the plan. Cause when I assessed what had been created for that project, there were only a couple written pages. Maybe like … 4. But now I’m thinking, maybe it’s just enough ‘nothing’ to appear as little offshoot pages or a section of the Chairface comic. You know? Like how in Archie Comic digests there’ll be a single page comic from a different comic. Yeah, you know what? I might do that!

Yeah, Spanky and Boogly’s short little 4-page saga will live on! Let’s add that in there as a short aside!

What are the next steps?

I’ve taken a few next steps already. I decided that instead of inking the work digitally, I’m just gonna do it the way that I used to do everything, and ink directly on the pencils. There are benefits to doing it digitally but I’m not concerned about doing this right as much as I’m concerned about doing it at all. So we’re avoiding any sort of complexity here. Ink, scan, process, print.

I’ve ordered up some inking materials:

  • Copic Multiliner Inking Pens for drawing lines and stuff
  • Tombow Fudenosuke brush pens for stuff with more variable width
  • Some white paint pens for inevitable fixes
  • A ton of erasers. Cause the current penciling is pretty dense in some spots

All that fun stuff will arrive on Wednesday, so I’ve got a few days to come up with what I’d like to appear on the missing panels. No clue at the moment but it’s only 9.5 pages and the Spanky/Boogly stuff (which is intentionally supposed to be super simply drawn) so knock on wood I think we should be on track for finishing this in January. Let’s do this!