Transplant - to make a short story long

Transplant is posted at webcomicsnation so go read it here.

This page was meant to be the page before my story, in Amanda's proposed but never published Apologue book, you can find more links to her art, thoughts on the book and ways to contact her at her deviant art page here. About a year ago, aaprox. sept. 2007, She held a fan art competition I asked if i could do a fan comic, came up with this and then she asked me to make this page to explain it, just read it. Below is a paper I wrote for Bob's class explaining some of my thoughts further, but with the prospect of its publication looking gloomier every month I have decided to publish what I had previously and curiously kept under wraps.




Fan Comics: creating comics inspired by other comics.
By Zach Bassett
Knowing that my story would encompass multiple locations meant that I would need to detail backgrounds and base my story in a more solid reality and physical world that Mythchan’s surrealistic watercolor dreamscape. However I also knew I was going to need to fit seven to ten panels to a page in order to tell my story, in the five page limit set by the competition. Though I did change my style a bit to fit with that of her manga inspired characters, I had to follow, be inspired by and essentially transplant Sleepsong in tone, subject matter, and theme more than I would be able to visually.

At the time I was approached about the fan art contest I was reading A Foregone Tomorrow and The Counterfifth Detective from Virtigo’s 100 Bullets series, featuring art by Eduardo Risso. As I skimmed through it visually, I noticed the amazing number of panels he was fitting on the page and knew he would be a perfect artist to look at for my own similarly panel heavy story.

A few days earlier a friend had seen my pencils for Transplant and told me it reminded him of an artist named Stuart Immonen. So I went to his website and found one of his blogs particularly pertinent. After briefly discussing how comics rely on deadline he hit went to the figures, saying that the average comic page has anywhere from four to seven panels, and the average superhero comic book has something like 90 different drawings in a 22 page story. In 100 bullets there was an average of nine panels per page, and you wouldn’t even need all your fingers to count the number of pages containing six panels or less. Needless to say Risso did quit a bit more than 90 panels a book. Risso’s style is not necessarily simplified per say, but does rely heavily on lighting to and separate foreground and background.

I probably should have taken note of his figure shading though, I left my characters shadowless in almost every panel and relied more on line weight to separate them from their backgrounds. Speaking of backgrounds, the stylized noir-like backgrounds and lighting of Risso’s 100 bullets and Tim Sale’s Batman: The Long Halloween gave me great ideas for simplified environments.

All in all, Transplant, while heavily influenced by Mythchan’s Sleepsong, Transplant turned out to be quite a different animal than I thought it would be. But thanks to some inspiration from Tim Sale and Eisner Award winning artist Eduardo Risso I was able to make Transplant into an easily readable story, despite it’s dense number of panels. For a more intricate look into the inspiration for Transplant as well as Mythchan’s original story, Sleepsong, checkout her self published Applogue.


I did the story, pencils and inks over a weekend on top of other homework, these were my thumbnails, pencils, inks and rough dialog, i scanned them before trashing them.





inks

progress - almost done

these are my in progress inks for my 4 pgs, all brushpen so far. it gets sort of confusing in the jacket on the last page so i will fix it.
here's links 6-7, 8-9 to the finals.

this is a printout of my tight roughs that i tightened and mixed with the hand from teh skecth below it, the earlier can be found on my earlier post.

these are some sketches i did to help with the hand on teh covers i did on my deviantart page for maelstrom.


some awesome phantom pages i colored from nick derington on splashpageart.com.

heres a color of an awesome bryan hitch dps.

Inspirtaion - What I want to and have been reading

Man I've been reading some good stuff, if only I had the money to buy it. Here's what is currently inspiring me.

Graphic novles:

DC - Superman: Doomsday – ok so obviously the new omnibus, awesome but expensive. After seeing the new WB animated movie I was intrigued much more by the special features detailing the creation of the comic book arc and have wanted to read them ever since. There are alot of classic anatomy things I can learn from Jurgens and Brendings too, their good most of the time.

MARVEL - Astonishing X-men: Unstoppable - grew to love the art and always loved Joss' writing. I’ve only read the 1st graphic, I need to read the middle 2 before this one but my girlfriend has read them and loved them. Just knowing that there is an end is nice, so often in comics things are left so randomly ambiguous and open-ended.

DC - Simon Dark vol. 1 - Awesome art and very cool jigsaw/slipknot looking character.

MARVEL - Moon Knight - Vol 1. the bottom – (I did want to get the original “essential moon knight’s” since I always did like him, and guiltily Dark Hawk, but Sinkevitch did some really cool stuff when he was kind of in his Neal Adams) broken, pill popping and alcoholic moon knight broods over his bloody encounter where he cut the face off one of his enemies killing him (or so he thought) right after he was tossed down from the rooftop of an alley breaking his legs and bones w/ every fire escape he hit. Amazing art by Finch and even better writing and commentary on what a super-hero is, how far he can go etc.

MARVEL - Spider-man - One more day - heard the plot synopsis from a friend, amazing artwork. Peter dodges a bullet that kills Aunt May and makes a pact to trade his love with Marry Jane for her life back, leaving him only one more day before he forgets her entirely. The idea being if they are soul mates they will meet again, kind of like Goto's comic.

DC - IDENTITY CRISIS - Awesome art, awesome story - One of the few thing's I’ve been interested in from Dc in a while. Plus it has a artist/writer interview in the end - all for 15 bucks.

Image - Wildstar – still trying to see if this is collected in a graphic yet or not, I read an article on it in an old “comics magazine” and was excited.

MARVEL - Essential Fantastic 4 Vol 7. - I heard and have been waiting for this one, issue 141: reed is forced to shoot his own son (turning him into a vegetable and "shutting down his brain") as his powers threaten to grow out of control and destroy the whole world, despite his decision the team breaks up, sue considers divorce. In the next few issues, on his own the thing gets into trouble w/ no one to help him and Reed goes out to dinner with Medusas (I always loved the Inhumans) only to find Doctor Doom (like Darth Vader on cloud city in Empire Strikes Back), then jealously fights Namor for Sue.
Medusa: You can't blame yourself like this, you did what you had to do.
Is that good enough, will that bring my son back, will it make my wife love me again?
-It's so dark and so good. He becomes so conflicted it's amazing, though the art isn't top notch in the issues following.

Both X-men and Fantastic 4 have come out in their entirety on cd for about $40 which is what I should probably buy, FF even comes with the entire silver surfer collection now. But if I got the X-men one I'd get to see Neal Adam's do X-men, old JRJR in what I consider his prime.

I wish I could cheaply get the Daredevil book Frank Millar wrote with JRJR's art, it now comes in an omnibus with Frank's work and Sinkevitch's Electra book. Awesome, but oh so expensive.

Series:

Comico comics - The Elementals - I bought issues 1-30 off of ebay but promised myself I wouldn't start reading them until I got done writing Terra Novus. I found a few issues in the quarter bins in NY and I had dying for some more ever since. It's superheroes from an indie standpoint, no rules - sex, gore, violence - does it cross the line?

Epic comic's - Powerline Saga - Al Williamson, who also worked on Elementals - amazing realistic art, more realistic superheroes.

Marvel – Ghost Rider: Spirits of Vengeance – it was dark and drawn by the Kubert kids in their prime so you know it’s good.

Marvel - Morbius the living vampire – had all but the 1st issue and I’ve been holding off on reading it till then. Eventually the artist changed but the 1st 10 issues or so I’ve loved since I was a boy.

Vertigo – Scarab – Have all but one issue so I have the same problem as Morbius. Amazing art, psychedelic, Gaiman-esk writing – awesome.

In other news:

Legion of Superheroes Tv show – so it’s not a comic and it’s cancelled now but I watched the 1st 4 episodes w/ my little brother and they were actually really good. I don’t like the art as much but I can stand it for the stories and the change in season 2 and the finale for season 1 look to set up some pretty interesting dynamics. I’m looking forward to watching some more.

I should be able to start writing the 1st issue of me and James’ 10 issue mini-series tomorrow, we’ve worked out the plot roughly and the 1st issue rather tightly. I get new ideas daily and if I have the time and we stick to it we could have a very cool story here, longer, serialized and very fun to work on, highlighting both of our styles.

easter eggs, art and everything else -finally

heres a wallpaper i did for my bubbie, she's so beautiful.
heres the roughs for 24 pages of y the last man, done on 1 and a half 8 1/2 x 11's

and heres the tight roughs - done 2 to a 8 1/2x11.



heres my "tight" roughs, lol - for the just in time script which i peciled in one night and did tights and blew them up the day before.

heres the 10 mins sketches we had to do to come up with an original astronaut, mine won when the class voted ,and then a spaceship to match, mine lost - big time even though i liked the ship more than the astronaut. they were for goto for an inclass storyboard assignment.


and here is the original sketches for noah, the 1st is more of a Charlton Heston thing going on - he's fun, not necessarily animatable but fun. then goto said to push him farther and i did, loved it, blew it up on the artograph and inked it.
figured now that im posting some stuff id add a few easter eggs as well for those of you interested enough to visit this page. so heres how i originally drew and inked the parts of the drawing. because i was in colorado i didn't have the size paper nor did i know the dimensions of the art or if he was going to want me to change anything so i did it in pieces.
next i assembled the pieces in photoshop using the multiply layer option.

and then made blocks of color under the ink layer so i could color each effect seperatly and on their own layer without messing with or effecting the rest of the art. this was an alternate idea i had for coloring based more off some old marvel silver surfer stuff that i was inspired by for the line art as well. you can find the final image with title and everything by followingthe link in the previous post or checking my deviant art http://xaqbazit.deviantart.com/

this is my drawing of kate that i tried for my lost animated characters, and the 1st sketch of ben that actually looked like him. i also dicovered men were much easier to characterize and make extreme and exagerated, women just got ugly really quick - however i felt this version of kate was too close to generic female and wasnt as close or iconic of a look as the others i did, which i will post on deviant and link soon.

i also posted a few more videos on my youtube account, have to get back to ga to split up drown and scan storyboards for it. http://youtube.com/user/xaqbazit

editor's day

mike o'sullivan from devil's due reviewed my portfolio, i showed him my pages from the 2000 ad script and the justin time projects from larrison. i had the pages on the right and then scans with word balloons on the left. it went really well, he said i had "phenomenal energy" and that they just needed to be tightened up, which i could agree with since i did each of the projects in a night. but he really like the composition of the 1st just in time page and said i also need to work on anatomy a bit, some more life drawing. especially my hands, which kind of hurt because i was in hudson's hands class but they have gotten kinda wonky. anyways gave my second appt to james, with someone from alternative comics. im sick now and had to cover for someone at work the same night of editor's day, after i asked for it off. sliced my arm at work and am just so out of it today - fever etc. not to much hw so ill probably rest. when i get the stuff up on deviantart ill post a link.