Hello everyone. If you didn’t know I have started posting all updates about ADAMSVILLE on my main site for now. Please jump over to www.michaeleregina.com to read what’s been going on with this book and my other projects. Lots more to come soon.
Hey everyone! First off thanks for all of the great discussion about my last article about giving up webcomics. I hope everyone knows that what I was not saying is that webcomics are not something people should do, but the heart of it is to stay focused on making a great product and story. Let the way you share your story with the world be something you do later, when you are either done or quite far along in creating your book. For me it was finishing all of volume 1 of this series and now I will begin the process of sharing it. If a publisher does not pick it up, I will move to self publishing and hope the series gets picked up with book 2 and 3.
As most of you know my first goal is to find a traditional publishing home for my book. I have been actively pursuing that now for about a month and some of the results are still coming in. Some are disappointing, some are disappointing but really encouraging, some there’s a possibility things could happen still, the rest is just silence. It’s such a roller coaster of emotions. I wish I knew how to handle it better, but my emotions often get the better of me and a rejection can really sting. I always remind myself though that that means I care and if I care then I should keep going no matter what. No giving up!
Nonetheless I feel really confident in the book that I made. I know I gave it my best! Then I will have to give the next book my best as well! And we’ll keep going, getting better at the craft along the way.
So I have been spending some time trying to determine what I would spend the next year or so on working on while all of this sorts out (trying to get a book picked up takes MONTHS! Best to have something to keep yourself busy on). I wanted to pick up Adamsville and start up on book 2 but with so many variable out there it didn’t seem very wise yet to really throw myself into the production on it just yet. I had one script idea that was really starting to come together, when my oldest daughter rediscovered this little guy:
For those who don’t know, KEVIN AND THE LIGHT OF DESTINY is a webcomic I began maybe 2 or 3 years ago. I got about 45 pages in and decided it best to set it aside while I focused on some other things going on and decided to make ADAMSVILLE first. Well as I am waiting for direction on said book, KEVIN seemed like a great place to pick up. The ground work is laid in pretty well for the book and I am working on getting the rest of the script ironed out. The goal with it is to finish it by the end of the year. Which will roughly equal 80-100 pages of work left to do.
The original script for the book was very bloated, even though I enjoyed it very much when I reread it. I want, however to make this a more compact story and, so there is a lot of work to try and find the important elements of the book and bring them together without it feeling contrived or rushed. Wish me luck on this.
If you haven’t been introduced to Kevin, go check out the webcomic site and view the original webcomic pages. They’ll pretty much stay as they are, but I plan to re-ink them to get the look consistent.
Adamsville hasn’t been forgotten. I have a treatment for book 2 that I am very happy with, but again, just wanting some clarity on what will happen with the book before I decide to plunge my way in head first.
First off let me say, not everyone’s goals are the same. Some just want an avenue for self expression. Some are looking for a way to just get their work out there, or are looking for work. This post is for those who say that what they want to do is write and draw their own graphic novels, mostly.
I think you should quit webcomics. Just do it. Go on, go ahead and do it. You’ll be happier, healthier and possibly more productive.
Webcomics/novels do many things well for an artist. It gives them a means to share, and build a community around other artists. It helps you to develop good habits, like working within deadlines and, you know, actually working period towards a goal.
But I think you should consider quitting them because, let me tell you, after making one graphic novel completely offline and now starting another… it’s just plain better. So much better. People fight to have a buffer ready of like two months for their webcomic. Well sir and maddam, I have a year and half buffer of a two page a week webcomic, just waiting if I have to. Do you know how freeing that is? Very freeing. For a whole list of reasons. I will share a few right now.
1.) Changes Get Made All Of The Time-
When you make a webcomic, you are usually making it on a week to week, update to update schedule. Usually those updates and all are your first draft of the material. You can’t see the whole thing yet and there are things down the line that you may change and improve and simply put, its not your best story yet. When Hollywood makes a movie they don’t edit the movie and show us all bits and pieces without ever once conisdering the whole and how it all works together. Instead they sit down after it’s all done (and this could be your thumbnails or pencils for the whole book) and review the entire story: the pacing, the dialogue, the shots themselves. I found that after I was done with my book, I was changing stuff all of the time. I was adding new shots, new pages, new scenes. They weren’t just like, “add on” scenes that I could say were bonus content later. They were important pieces to my narrative that drastically changed the reading experience in the book. Making your book offline, allows you to make decisions about your book without the pressure and input from an entire internet of people. I do recommend sharing your book with people, but maybe only five to ten friends and colleagues for their input and let them function like editors.
2.) You Pay Forward The Business-
One of my favorite things about having done all of this work now, is that I finally get to share a completed story with everyone and can focus on that instead of making the story and sharing it too. Normally we are busy tweeting and posting and advertising our book to everyone, as well as trying to finish up our book. That’s too much! Consider the benefits of being able to with all confidence tell everyone, this book is done and it’s coming your way, now let me share it, kickstart it, publish it. Whatever! The freedom I am finding now is that I am planning and writing my next graphic novel without any hestiancy and can play in that book’s playground while the other book goes into the real world to become a man. This I think gives a huge amount of confidence to your readers, you, publishers, reviewers etc. They know you are good for it. So like now, I get to do all this fun stuff, like query agents, submit to publishers, consider Kickstarters and webcomics and share it… and all the comics work is done! Huzzah! It’s a beautiful thing.
3.) This Isn’t Goodbye To Webcomics-
I don’t think webcomics should go away as an option for graphic novelists. I just think they should be delayed, but I know how hard that is to do, I don’t think we’re making a daily syndicated comic strip. We’re composing a book and the whole thing is one thought. Without giving each and every part it’s attention and detail, we run the possibility of putting work out there before it’s ready to go. If you want to put the book out there before its 100% done, I would recommend breaking your story up into parts, finishing all of that part, and then start serializing it. I can tell you that my friend Josh Ulrich tried this approach before having his whole story figured out, released his first issue of his book, completed ALL of issue 2 before realizing it didn’t work and scrapped the whole thing. In the end he had to rebuild from the ground up. The point being, taking the time to get it done right before you go public with your work. Trust me, as someone on the other side of taking a year plus to make a book in private, it is much better, healthier and freeing to have it done and ready to go after the fact.
With that said, go make books!
Howdy everyone! Well book 1 is off to all parties and reviewers at the moment. So much out there could happen and while that is at once nervewracking it is also very very exciting. Only the anxiety is usually the prevailing emotion sadly. It’s easy to lose yourself in all the questions and the silence you experience while you wait is often defeaning. You start asking questions about what everyone is thinking of you, your work: Did you do well enough? Is it sub par art? It’s almost impossible to fight that fear down. In some ways that is good thing. It means you care, it means this matters , it means you took a chance on something and THAT means you’ll probably keep going no matter what if you don’t let discouragement keep you down.
But on the flipside, it could mean that the thing you hope for to happen will! It could mean things finally start to click. Either way, your life doesn’t end here and it won’t if you don’t let it. So keep going. Keep believing and KEEP WORKING! Also, the silence seems a lot quieter when you pick yourself up and keep going on to the next project.
Speaking of which, what am I working on right now?
A number of things. I am finishing up a book my oldest daughter and I have been working on. You can see the line art for the first story we finished right here: http://www.michaeleregina.com/blog/?p=994 I don’t know what we will do with it all when it’s done, but we will share it all online at least. I have some ideas on what we could do charity wise with it and that excites me. So stay tuned!
Beyond that I am doing a free video tutorial on how I paint in Photoshop. In it I will be explaining my process for making a portrait painting of the great Marvel villain/deity GALACTUS! I’ll be fielding questions and talking through lessons I’ve learned in the art world, so please if you are interested in painting digitally, watch the first video and leave your thoughts. I’m looking forward to sharing some time with you all. Here’s the first video:
On the comics front, its time to make book 2 of Adamsville.
You always hear how breaking a story is inspiration or hear excuses from others that they don’t write because they aren’t inspired… well sir, fix that thought. Making a story is labor. It may have started as inspiration but the doing is hard work. Frustrating back stepping, starts and stops all the way around and then finally you look and your story is there ready to be made.
This past week I finished my first pass at the whole book in a treatment form and that’s what I wanted to talk about.
Now when I write my stories, I start with just a blank word document and let myself have a free for all. I write down everything and anything I think I want to see in the book and just really allow myself to be free to mess up, be crazy and come to some bigger story ideas. This goes on for awhile. I’ve been addressing book 2 of this series since around July of last year. It’s gone through many stops and starts. But the first thing I recommend for you all is to define what you want the book to be. What I mean by that is very open but for me it was deciding I wanted Adamsville to absolutely be a trilogy of books. Before now it had been fairly open and it could have gone on for forever, but defining it was good so that I had something I could more definitively pitch the book.
Since I was able to define the book as a trilogy I knew where this book needed to end for it to be right on track for book 3. Once that was done I got to writing a one page breakdown of the book. This is a super consolidated version of the story that makes sure the plot has a beginning, middle and an end. In many ways this is the absolute hardest phase for me with writing. It’s where I have to actually have a story for the first time, not the trailer that is in my head. Lol. This goes on for months with me, since I don’t get a ton of time to spend in it.
Then finally once that is good and set, I begin a treatment of the book. A treatment in its simplest defintion is a scene by scene break down of the book. It tells what happens every beat of the way. It’s the skeleton of your story that you will put the flesh on to. Many times you’ll find that you will need to leave this phase and go back to your one pages summary to make sure that the plot is truly working. It took me about four or five drafts before I finally finished one that I thought was solid and ready to be tightened up before writing the book.
And what can I say of book 2 so far. It’s gonna be bonkers, lol. Big conceprt, a nigtmare to actually draw and hopefully the emotional and kinetic experience I see in my head. Very excited to finally see these moments in book form after so long them sitting in my head. Just remember when writing, serve your story. Listen to what it is telling you it needs and don’t fight it to hard. Your instincts are usually right.
So that’s where book 2 is. A treatment is done and now begins writing the script. So until next time! Have a great day! 
Hey everyone. Happy New Year and welcome back to work! Right? Am I right? Yes… Get to work.
Well, Adamsville book 1 is done and now the search for a publishing home for my series is beginning. This is a whole different part of things. It’s a side that requires a lot of patience, understanding, faith and nerve to take whatever comes. There are a lot of things you can consider when publishing your books. A lot of folks choose the self-publishing route, which may be what the future could hold for this book but at this time, I am going for a book publisher.
What does that look like and what should you expect and do in this pursuit as well? Let’s look at what the process most commonly calls for.
1.) Have an agent, or an existing relationship with an editor:
If you want to get in with a publisher in many cases you need an agent to get face time with an editor at any of the major publishing houses. Most major publishers like Scholastic’s Graphix line will not accept an unsolicited submission. This means it can not be something you send to them on your own basically. It must come to them either through an agent or by personal request.
The easiest and best means of getting past this is to have an agent. I say easiest in a very loose term. It’s not extremely easy to get one and with good reason. Agents generally act as a filter of sorts in the industry, helping make sure that an editor only looks at materials that would have a certain quality that could meet their standards. It saves the editor having to filter through tons of submissions that could be from anyone and whoever.
The other option would be to have a contact with an editor through either personal relationship or contact. This actually goes quite a long way. The majority of people I know who have landed book deals have been people who were working with an editor before they had an agent. It’s a lot like when you apply for a job… If you have a friend that already works there or you know the owner it scores extra points in getting hired. But again the product needs to be worth their time. It isn’t fair or proper to expect other people to show your work to all the people they know for your personal gain. Your friends are your friends… don’t make things messy or start going directly up to people asking them to show your work to their editor. It’s just not very cool. I have actually had someone ask me if since I know a number of graphic novelists it shouldn’t be hard for them to put it in the right hands. This is true, but I’m not going to ask anyone to do that. My position on this, is that it’s their prerogative to do that if they feel compelled to… Share your book with people because you want to, not to devalue your relationships for personal gain.
So how do you get an agent? Let’s look at that one:
2) Query An Agent
Querying an agent is the most common way of reaching out to an agent that you do not have a relationship with. Now just like editors, some agents do no accept unsolicited submissions as well. So make sure you read their guidelines and understand an agent’s policy on being approached.
There are a few resources that may really help you in finding an agent.
Agent Query.Com This is a FANTASTIC resource for hunting down agents by being able to sort through agent’s by their desired subject matter and links to all of their agencies.
Preditors and Editors – This is a great guide to agents and editors. Really it exists to help people filter through potential threats in the publishing world. With all things there are scams out there. Being advised of them is good.
Query Shark – Don’t know what a query is? Well this is the site for you. A great blog where the writer will take submitted queries and dissect them. A great learning tool for what is and what isn’t effective in getting someone to pay attention to your submission.
It is very important to make sure, again, that you read each and every agent’s guidelines for submitting to them for consideration. It could mean the difference between the trash can and getting read.
3.) Patience
Lastly, and most difficult of all, is just learning to be patient with this process. God knows I am still learning this. We finish our book, or pitch and we just so badly want people to be taking notice. Nevermind people’s lives and all. Be patient. This process of querying and getting word back from publishers is a lengthy one. My first time through it took one year, solid. It was grueling, at times elating and many times for lack of better word, heartbreaking. The best thing you can do during this time is pick up and get to work on the next project. I am intrenched in so many odds and ends projects around here with work on my script for book 2 and other illustrations, I don’t really have too much time to be anxious. I believe in my project and I believe that if it’s good enough, it will rise to the people it needs to. Stay active, keep working and remember to control what you can.
With all of that said, do prepare for the possible outcome that involves your book not finding a home in the bigger publishing world. In comics and the rest of the industry it’s becoming harder and harder to get your book through. The whole industry is in flux and so many things could be changing in the near future. So I offer this word of personal advice from someone who’s gone through this and is about to again, set expectations appropriately, believe highly and have your next plan in place. If ADAMSVILLE doesn’t find it’s home somewhere I already have my next steps in mind. It’s OK for you to as well. We live in an exciting age where no project is truly dead. The internet and self publishing have risen so much that anyone can find a way to share their idea with the world. It’s a great time to be working in storytelling and working to get BETTER with every project.
So keep working everyone!
On an ADAMSVILLE note. Tonight I finished my first pass at the treatment for book 2 of the series. With any luck I will be working on the script very soon! In my next post I will talk more about how I write a comic from start to finish. See you all then.
It’s that time of year again. Time to ponder, pontificate and expound on the year that has past and what the year ahead will offer. So in this post I will do a hodge podge of things, Adamsville and otherwise unrelated subject matters.
In Adamsville related subject matters, the obvious is the most important. In 2012, I finally finished this book. All in all it took roughly 16 months of work and the final product is something I am really thrilled with. I’ve written enough about the production of the book and all the goings on in between, but thank you all for your encouragement along the way.
Most of my goals and hopes for 2013 with the book are things that are somewhat out of my hand: book deals and the like. But the things I can control I am working on. I am still writing the synopsis and treatment for book 2. A big part of the pitch for this book is to bill it as a trilogy to publishers so a lot of details need to be ironed out and sorted to make sure the next two books work.
One of my major personal goals for the past year was that I would only devote myself to one project at a time. Thankfully I pretty much did that. And to my “astonishment” lol it’s a much more efficient means of getting things done. Especially when your day is split between so many competing priorities. I already have a list of projects that are my immediate priority in 2013, alongside of getting all of the writing done for Adamsville book 2.
So onward to Adamsville in 2013… Hopefully a lot of fun and exciting news will be around the corner in the very short term future.
As for the rest of the year in review… 2012 was a trying year in many other respects. I lost a family member and have had a number of things cause some road blocks in directions my family and I would like to go. Years are never what you would like them to ultimately be, but that is the thing of it. As a whole we will look back on this year with mostly fond memories and understand the difficult ones as what life so often is… challenging.
I did want to do a short list of my favorite things from this year. So here’s to it!
Favorite movies:
1.) Prometheus
2.) The Dark Knight Rises
3.) Life of Pi
4.) The Hobbit
5.) The Avengers
Favorite books I read:
1.) Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
2.) The Unsinkable Walker Bean by Aaron Renier
3.) Mal and Chad: Bellyflop by Stephen McCranie
4.) Amulet book 5: Prince of the Elves by Kazu Kibuishi
5.) Liberty Defined by Ron Paul
I look forward to the new year and all that it so far is showing to bring mine and my family’s way. And I can’t wait to hopefully show you all Adamsville in 2013. I leave you all now with the portrait I recently completed of my favorite caped crusader. Happy New Year everyone!
One of my favorite things is to read about the production experiences of making comics from other friends and colleagues in the comics game. Admittedly I am huge special features junky. I watch the making of features on the Lord of the Rings trilogy far more than I do the movies. It gives me that inside look at what people who create these stories do and how to approach them myself. For comics these special features usually come in the form of blogs and podcasts. Much of the time as well, comics creators don’t talk a lot about the work they are doing. There are a few notable exceptions, but my favorite is the old blog Kazu Kibuishi kept while making the first volume of Amulet. I think he did a great job of just really distilling the frustration, fun and exhaustion creating a graphic novel can be. I actually think it may have been the best mental preparation for making this book I have had.
I’m in the middle of doing my final edits on Adamsville Book 1 and quite frankly, I am ready to be past this book. Especially since book 2 is really starting to form in my mind and I am anxious to turn to writing it. But Kazu did a great post about revising and what happens in comics… He called it “THE SLOWEST TYPEWRITER“ I thought I would share a bit from it:
As a reader of graphic novels, it always bugs me that most long form comics read like they are the first draft of the material, when in fact they often are. And for good reason. As a creator of graphic novels, I am exhausted by my selfish reader tendencies by having to redraw page after page to smooth out the reading experience. I can see why, over the years, creators often compromised their stories under the pressures of deadlines and satiating the public’s thirst for the material. For the large amounts of time and energy a creator must spend to create the work, the reader only gets a small handful of information to chew on. Sometimes, working out the details are not an option.
This is the pickle that the readers and creators of comics seem to always find themselves in. Readers are very forgiving of the story elements in a comic book. This is unlike other media, like films or novels, where audiences often criticize stories with sharpened talons, and only the very best and most appealing works make their way through the gauntlet. Is it because comics readers understand how difficult the process is and are simply happy to have reading material? Or is it simply that we have low expectations of the medium, as opposed to extremely high ones for films and novels?
Illustration by Stephen McCranie
I remember reading this post years ago and it often comes up in my mind. See when I was making my webcomics, I really depised the immediate nature of it. It had it’s benefits, like immediate feedback and a means to share and grow an audience. But I always disliked that I felt I truly was giving my audience the first draft of my material. However niave it may be I have always seen and wanted to approach my books like a film or a novel. I’ve wanted to give people the most authentic and complete experience I could at the time in my creative life. So when I finished the first pass at Adamsville, and finally let some small section of the world read what I had made, getting the feedback that it needed work went to my heart. Not because I was hurt in my pride or anything, but because I knew I was at a moment when I could just pick my ball up and go home… Or I could do the professional thing and make a better book. No matter how much that meant revisiting material I was emotionally ready to move on from.
I may not be there yet, but I want to be a great graphic novelist. Like in my bones want it. And I don’t mean in the flocks of fans, people standing in line forever sort of way (though that’s not terrible either). I mean in the way that I repsect the craft and want give it the attention it deserves. I want it to be as profound an experience to people as movies and novels can be. Settling for shotty, misfired execution of my story is simply not gonna cut it.
It may make the process take much longer than I would like, but I hope the love comes through when people read it, close it and think… “man that was good stuff. When does the next one come out?!?”
I am wrapping my edits all up this week and I think I can honestly say I’ve made the best book I could right now. I hope that others will enjoy it. I do often get a pit in my stomach wondering about it. It’s going to be a fun new year as it finally leaves my small office space and enters the bigger world to see where it goes.
Then the typewriter will start all over again….
Here’s a page I shared on my Twitter account if you haven’t seen it. I showed it off already in black and white form, but here it is in color.
At some point you have to ask yourself a question. The question is what am I trying to accomplish? When you set out to finish your project, did you just want to make something and put it out there? Meaning, the completion was more important than the execution of it all? Or are you trying to craft some sort of masterpiece? Somewhere in the middle? I’m trying to make a great story that is worth your time. I just don’t it to be done and be out there. If you spend a year plus on a project and then when you think it’s done, realize that things aren’t set, but still work… do you just let it lie? I couldn’t.
Truth be told the version of the book I completed a couple of months ago, was pretty solid I think. As a whole it was there and accessible, but it was flat on the point of some of the character development. So I added two scenes in the book and a new page, but the real fun was editing the final product.
I had these two new scenes I thought were perfect and answered all of the my problems. When I put them in to the story they just felt really weird. Like the book lost all of its tone and early creepy vibe it had carried and really was the book I was trying to make.
I went through about 5 versions of the opening, and bombarded my friends and wife with updates just about every day. It just wasn’t working. But then finally, I had a nice conversation with my wife and then Stephen McCranie when it finally happened. My wife called out just how much everything was not working and felt jumbled. She didn’t like the new version much, though she did like the new scenes and she recommended moving things around once more. Stephen and I rolled around the ideas and the picture became clear.
Stephen has a process of scene writing that I thought was helpful. When you think of a scene the biggest question is what is it saying and why. So when I applied that, it became apparent that I wanted the opening scenes to tell us: who Chloe is and what she cares about, what happened that changed everything and the consequences of the thing that happened. In three scenes the story is laid out and done.
I used to be a film editor and I trained myself how to take the materials I was given and assemble it into something comphrehensible that has some sort of sense to it. It is a fun act of discovery when you move a piece of dialogue into a different place and things shift in tone and suddenly it all works. I finally got to that point. And all the wrestling was worth it. This book is really, really working in my opinion and others who have read it who had their concerns initially.
Don’t rush past something when you know it isn’t working. Trust your story instincts and work it and move it until it goes in the direction you hoped it would. It’s worth it.
I wanted to share the inked pages of what the book’s beginning will be now. I will be adding colors over the next couple weeks. All trying to get the story right. The point of this new scene is to introduce Chloe to us and set up some of the relationships. Hope up like them.
Hey Everyone!
Sorry I haven’t updated lately. Things have been very busy. Some with the comic. Some with life. Mostly with life. But I think I have come back into a clear patch in things and I am moving towards getting things done here.
On Adamsville’s front I have been slowly but surely making my way through these new pages. 16 new pages is quite a bit and it’s also involving doing some redrawing of a few panels here and there of completed stuff. I haven’t been getting through them as quickly as I would like, but I will get into that shortly. The pages are looking good though and I am excited to see what the story looks like with them in place. And so far Kev Brett has been lending some help my way with flatting and he is awesomes.
I have been thinking a lot though. Honestly the last month has been a big rollercoaster of emotions. And it is very silly for the most part… But we have to work through what’s going on inside of our heads and hearts. I have struggled a lot with letting go of the version of the book I saw in my head to embrace the book this now becoming. Originaly I saw the story as one big “whodunit” from book to book and then those things inter connecting into one big story. I am now having to embrace this story as more of one big continous adventure book rather than a whodunit X-files style book.
I am starting to emrbace it though and honestly I am just getting more and more excited about the way the final two books will play out (originally it could just go on and on and on). It’s making it easier too to propose this series later, since I can tell them exactly what each book is and is about.
What I don’t think I was quite prepared for was just how physically exhausted I have been lately. When I decided to do this book last year I decided I wanted to pursue it with all my energy and try and finish it as soon as possible. That lead to long nights and days for a long period of time. And it finally caught up to me. Like I feel as if my body is just shutting me down right now and I am having to fight back into production mode, when I was hoping to be recouping, so that I can finish these new pages. I took a number of days off and went to bed much earlier for a few weeks. It’s easy to fall into a pattern of rest, especially when are going full speed all day and doing this in the whee hours of the evening.
What that then afforded me was the opportunity to think… Which isn’t a great thing for me, lol. For the last year or so there was no time to do anything but put the nose to the grindstone and keep going. Now that this is almost over… You start in with the what if’s. What if the book doesn’t find a publisher? What if it doesn’t make any money? What if no one likes it? Those concerns have been almost crippling lately. It has lead me to really think about what all of those scenarios might mean for me and I came out on the other end… pretty happy actually. Things are looking good no matter what! Even if it doesn’t sell, I will still have finished it. Even if I have to focus more energy on other art forms by necessity, like painting and concept art, well that doesn’t mean I can’t just make the comic anyways.
We are (artists that is), as a whole, a very insecure group of people… And we make it much worse with our wringing of our hands and concerns. I am reminded of Christ’s words from the Sermon on the Mount: Matthew 6:34 – “Therefore don’t be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” No story is ever as absolute as we like to think. Life isn’t boxed in like we suspect. And life and happiness and our futures shouldn’t be caught up so much in things that are out of our control.
I don’t know what will happen with this book. I believe in it, but I am super anxious it may go nowhere. I don’t want to be crushed if that’s the case because it was worth making this book no matter what. And I want to make the next two. So I need to pick myself, nose to the grind stone, make the best book I could make and let the world do with it, what it will.
What I have done is spend some time sketching and painting. When this book is officially ready to leave my door, I will be spending a lot of time getting better at my craft. Honestly I have been SO ready to just explore and make new paintings and illustrations or comics stories. Like it’s just pouring out of me. So I have been painting some to just pet the muse. Here are the things I have done. I hope to show more Adamsville stuff soon. Right now I suspect I won’t get to pitch the book around until January, but it will be a much better and more complete feeling book. Happy Holidays everyone.
I took some time this weekend to finish up a promo image if you will for Adamsville. More of a suspenseful teaser shot than anything. Hard to say when this book will be available to everyone to read. I am very excited to share it more.
Things are not quite over yet. I got my first set of reviews back from some friends I have shown the book to and the reponse has, overall, been very strong. The action and suspense are ringing true and the mysteries of the town are keeping people excited. Which is all that I was hoping. It seems that the area needs some fleshing out are the characters. Mainly our female lead, Chloe. There was some opportunity there to draw us into her conflict more and fleshout why we should care about what’s happening to her. So I got to writing.
At first it was hard to think about or really desire to do, but I took a look at the book with some good friends and we tried thinking through what could be done to make this book better. I ended up writing 16 new pages, which made up two new scenes and 1 additional filler page later to bring it all home.
I started inking those pages now and they’re coming together pretty well. The first scene I am adding is pretty difficult to draw because it’s a full stadium shot as we watch the end of a basketball game. It’s like they say though, what doesn’t kill you… Here’s an inked page from that sequence.
I expect I’ll be quite busy with these pages for the next month or so. When they’re done this book will tonally feel quite different, but in the end more character focused. So fingers crossed, that will make it a better book.
Hope everyone is doing well and I’ll share a bit more of these scenes as I go.