Chandra, Page 21: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

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Yeah okay, I know, it's a Heinlein book.  But come on, Commander Davis is a fan, so what do you expect?  The Commander here is one of my very favorite characters.  I feel that I was able to convey a lot about his personality in just the two pages that we've seen him so far.  Probably much more than say Danya, Rocky or Tom. 

You out there with the sharp eyes will note that the weights are 135 kilograms apiece, which is 297 pounds.  BUT, on the moon that would only be 49.3 pounds each.  Of course, there's still the mass to deal with...hmmmm.  Little details and considerations, all things that need to be taken into account when making graphic novels.

Seriously, if you haven't read 'The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress' by Robert Heinlein, pick it up now!  It's about a civil war between Earth and a Lunar colony, what else do you need to know?

Chandra, Page 20: I Know The Base Like The Back Of My Own Hand

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Whoa, lotsa dialogue!  And here he is, our fearless leader of Chandra, Commander Henry Davis, training away to keep himself fit, and fight the withering effects of the moon's light gravity.  These first twenty pages were finished exactly one year ago today, crazy huh?  It's strange looking back because I feel I've learned SO MUCH about making graphic novels since first drawing these.  Despite the big blocks of text, I think this page is successful enough in most ways.
Let's break it down after the break.

Chandra, Page 19: Oh. That Looks Deep.

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Good morning ladies and gentlemen!  A sunny day here, in contrast to mushy post-Irene last week, and with it, page 19.  Jason and Dr. Bannister begin their investigation of the good doctor's quarters.

What works? The first and second panels are fantastic.  I think they really breathe and though I broke the 180 degree of action rule (great discussion here on Mark Kennedy's really awesome blog) by placing the camera on opposite sides from one panel to the next, it still totally works.  There's also a really great swooping effect of the composition of panel two.  They eye skitters from the vent and Jason's work, to the picture, over his back to the toolkit, and on to the doctor's words and posture.

We'll break it down further after the break.

Chandra, Page 18: I Would Not Recommend It

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Wow!  Page 18 already, Chandra's officially an adult.  This is one of the first pages I think actually works pretty well.  It has a decent, cinematic feel to it that reflected what I was going for in my head, though the final panel ended up looking a little tacked on.  But, I think the dialogue was a bit fun on this page at least.

Here is actually a pretty important point: That of final product matching initial idea.  How does one make sure that they can follow through in creating the wonderful, amazing vision that is hovering in their mind?  Some would argue that skill is the great deciding factor here.  That those creators with more facility will always be able to chase their visions down and wrangle them more effectively into the real world.  Skill must be honed by hours bent over the drawing table, or standing at the easel or whatever.  But most importantly skill must be open to change and adaptation.  How many of you out there have worked through a composition only to stumble into something better than you first imagined?  Happy accidents huh?

Continued after the break.

Chandra, Page 17: Looking For Me Stud?

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Welcome back Loonies!  Let's just get this out of the way: The first panel has all the stiffness of a high school production of 'Waiting For Godot.'  Furthermore, Dr. McBee looks terrible in the second panel and Jason's face is a bit scrunchy in the third panel.  BUT, the fourth panel, I can't find much fault there, I like it (Though Dr. Bannister is slightly walleyed).  I'm also partial to the final frame.  There was a lot of space to play with there and I was able to put some big rips in to remind everyone that Chandra Base is falling apart.  The problem remains though, I never took the time to get enough detail into the pages.

This brings me to the issue of QUALITY CONTROL.  Sometimes, for me at least, when I've started a project I feel there's some kind of drive to finish it at a breakneck pace, as if it were a race.  I speed through the project blindly, hoping on hope that the final package will be good enough so that everyone will ignore any inadequacies.  This is obviously wrong.  If there's one major lesson I've learned over the last year it's this: Take your time with all that you do.  Don't let it out the door until it's trimmed, polished and sewn up tight.  There's this quote, I don't know, maybe I'm misquoting it but I can't find the thing on the internet.  It's from The Fountainhead By Ayn Rand, the protagonist, Roark says to another character: "My failures go into the trash, whereas yours end up on the wall."  I could be way off base here with the wording or attribution, someone correct me if I am.  Anyway, I always liked this quote because it summed up a beautiful work ethic, to never settle for second rate work from your own hands.

Of course that doesn't apply to Chandra.  In some kind of masochistic way I want this in the public eye so that I'm accountable to showing you something better.  And I can get feedback on what didn't work here when I was making this graphic novel.  Sure, I'm plenty critical on myself, but I want to hear from others as well.  So, chime in!

Yeah, The Fountainhead is divisive, but come on, it's a cultural and philosophical touchstone, read it if you haven't!

Chandra, Page 16: Kiss Ol' Miss Earth

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So, we've got a hurricane blowing down our necks in the Philly area.  I'm headed west for a few days, but here's Chandra, page 16 to kick off your weekend.  Hopefully it'll be dryer than mine.

It seems here that our dear Dr. Bannister is heading home.  I had a good time drawing both of these characters, each of them have a fun look to play around with, from Dr. McBee's dumpy habitus to Dr. Bannister's aesthetic of rumpled academic.  There's still a real measure of stiffness in the characters in this clinic scene.  I find tinges of things that I like, but overall the people feel like their floating in time, stuck into positions that don't feel altogether natural.  The doubling up of the first and second panel also irks me for some reason.  It's hard to get an immediate feel for the different angles of view that suit a particular scene but I am a firm believer that there is always a better, and perhaps even a best, way to do something.

I am happy with how that anatomical chart turned out though.  I'm also fond of the angle over Dr. Bannister's shoulder in the fourth panel.

See everyone Sunday, provided my house is still here and not carried away by the flood!

Chandra Page 15: Spikoot!

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Well, here we meet members seven and eight of our Chandra crew.  Two doctors, including the aforementioned, mysterious Dr. Bannister that Jason was looking for.  I wanted Dr. McBee to smoke and really be a crusty old bird but I chose to make her chew tobacco instead.  Considering the air filters there on the base it seemed a logical change.

Also, for those of you that may have caught it yesterday and this morning, ignore my foray into Wordpress.  I'm sticking her on Blogger for the time being.

Chandra Page 14: Have You Heard The Good News?

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Good morning friends.  Let's break it down.  By now you're getting a bit of a sense of the characters of Pat and Danya, though they're a bit flat.  I'm still pleased with the lighting and especially the point of view in the third panel.  The fish in the second panel was one of the only times that I ventured into trying to get a slightly painterly texture going.

What doesn't work?  Danya's face in the fourth panel is a complete failure.  To be completely honest, I never felt like I got a handle on drawing him.  Another problem with this page is the overall wordiness of the word bubbles.  Let's talk about bubbles for a minute.  As you may have read in my last post, I brought up thumbnails and the importance of spotting the locations for your bubbles early on.  Now, when making the graphic novel Chandra, I did this badly.  Basically I wrote the script, then converted it to thumbnails with no consideration of where the written dialogue would fit in.  A rookie mistake.  What happened when it came time to work the bubbles in was that I realized I'd not left enough room when drawing the thing in the first place, consequently I had to edit a lot of the dialogue so that it would fit in the proscribed areas.  Now I've learned.  Let me make these mistakes so you don't have to.

Chandra Page 13: Dominion Over All The Fish In The Sea

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Compositionally it works well enough no?  Chandra is made up of three pods, and the agricultural one is called Hasta, thus the 'H' before the floor numbers as they descend the stairs.  One thing I feel I did NOT get across well enough in Chandra is a real sense of the space inside the base.  I think there could stand to be a lot more focus on seeing the environment that our little crew inhabits.  In fact, one of the main focuses I had when writing the script was trying to fully show the feeling of isolation they're experiencing and I really think I might have failed on that point.  Though, the lighting was really fun to work on on this page.

Chandra Page 12: This Level Has The Chicks

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Ah!  Yellow!  A warm page!  So, here are two more of our little crew, Patrick and Danya.  Here is an instructive moment: this page has a few problems.  See all those little cabbages?  I hated drawing them, couldn't wait to be done with it.  I scribbled them out and I'm sorry to say that they look like I did just that.  The details...the details are what make the piece.  Look at a page drawn by that French master, Moebius/Jean Giraud...exquisite!  Go to his site (if you can read French).  Each line drawn is just as important as the last and that's truly one of the biggest lessons I learned when making this graphic novel.

Yeah, that's not a typo up there in the first panel.  That's my attempt at a Russian accent for Danya.  It's difficult to get inflection and cadence of speech into a silent medium but I've seen it done well before, notably the character of Kremlin in Vaughn and Harris's great comic series Ex Machina.

Something that did NOT work out for me at all when making this graphic novel was working solely in pencil.  By that, I mean that my plan from the start was to draw everything in pencil and then scan it into the computer where I could boost the contrast of the lines to darken them and make them look like ink.  An unforeseen consequence of this is that I tended to bare down really hard with the pencil to make sure I was making a dark enough line.  This not only resulted in massive hand cramps but also made the line work very stilted and stiff.  So, the takeaway was that I learned that it's just easier to use a pen to get a dark line (go figure).  Now I'm gratefully addicted to crowquills and bottles of ink.
 
One thing I am very pleased with on this page though was how the little hexagonal sun lamps turned out at the top.

Chandra Page 11: I'll See You Guys Later

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Though it's not particularly apparent on this page, it should be understood by now that Tom is a jerk with some kind of chip on his shoulder, and Rocky is that rare combination of a free-spirit, yet duty-oriented dude.  One of the real challenges I've found when making a graphic novel is giving characters a unique voice (not saying that I'm particularly successful here).  Sometimes I read comics where everyone sounds exactly the same, there's no texture, thoughts or opinions peculiar to individuals.  It's a really subtle thing and I think that writers like Brian K. Vaughn do a really good job with this.  Though, his reliance on making everyone a trivia hound about everything can get a bit distracting.

It's funny looking back at these pages and realizing just what a big job this thing (Chandra) was and how unprepared I was for it.  Not only do have to be able to competently draw and write to make a graphic novel, you have to be an art director, an architect, an interior designer, a topographer, a scientist, a linguist...the list goes on.  Of course you can fake a lot of these.  If you're skilled enough in the art department you can make anything convincing with just a few strokes of the ol' pen.

Chandra, Page 10: What Do You Need The Shrink For?

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Ok, so I busted out with the first ten pages here.  At this point I'll be updating Chandra every TUESDAY and FRIDAY.  If the update schedule ever changes it will say so in the right sidebar.  

So, Dr. Bannister is at large?  Where could he be?  I'm trying my hardest here to create a good rapport between Jason and Marcella.  It doesn't entirely work yet.  The thing about Chandra is this: I'm still waffling on the opening of the book.  I have two directions I could go.  This one that you're reading, which is the slow build.  Or I can take a few pages from later in the book, around page 40, and put them at the start and go with the modern "start with a bang and then work through flashback to get us up to speed."  Is that what people prefer these days? 

Chandra, Page 9: Sunspots Too

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Yeah, it is a terrible joke.  I think Jason is coming across as a bit of a creep in this scene.  I swear he's a nice guy.  One thing I found difficult about this project was how to go about injecting the life stories that I wrote for each character into what the reader sees about them.  It's successful on different levels depending on the character.  Some ended up coming across very flat, while others ended up feeling a bit richer.  I'll leave it up to you guys to let me know what's working and what's not.

You know how when you watch a movie or read a book and you go "Oh stupid, why did they do that?"  Well, here's your chance to help with the direction of THIS project.  Crowd-sourced editing, that's what I want here.  Your payment is the satisfaction that you've made a difference.  That's worth more than gold.

Chandra, Page 8: The Company Man

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I tried my hardest to establish the tenor of the characters as early as possible, you know, give everyone a distinct voice.  It's something I've learned a lot about since I first wrote the script for this over a year ago.  I actually ended up tweaking the dialogue a bit when it came time to populate the panels with bubbles.  The problem is, when the drawing is done, it's done and there's only so far you can go off script before what you're writing doesn't make sense with the image.

In my next venture, my approach is going to be more of a single mind.  The strength of a creator-owned property is that you have COMPLETE control over every aspect of the pipeline.  This also means that everything rests on your shoulders though.  With Chandra I took the approach of tackling each job (writing, drawing, coloring, lettering) as if each were an independent piece of the puzzle.  With further experimentation after I finished Chandra I've learned that a better way to go about things is to conceive of the totality of the project from the beginning and interweave the different aspects of it as much as possible.  In this way it's easier not to get caught up with the shifting gears of this kind of production.  I guess this is all obvious but imagine this: you're walking through a forest and you turn a corner, suddenly there is a mountain in front of you, not miles away, but inches in front of your feet.  At this point it would not at all be easy to know the best way to climb such a peak, you'd just have to start up it.  But.  At the top of that mountain you can see the descent AND more importantly, the next peak.

Chandra, Page 7: I have the touch

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That's it, now you've been introduced to four of the nine person crew on Chandra.  That guy there in the bottom left is sort of our focus in the story.  I think that's what I was trying to subconsciously point to with the prominence in the foreground.  He's a bit generic looking at the moment, but it's important to me that he have red hair.  There aren't enough red-haired heroes out there.

You may have noticed this pervading texture all over the page.  That was a last minute addition and I'm pretty pleased with the look.  It ties everything together in a way that wasn't there before.  It's simply a picture of concrete run through a few filters in Photochop and applied in a transparent overlay.  I found that before the texture everything had too much of a flat feeling to it.

Now that I think about it, this book has a really weird look to it.  It wasn't something planned, it just kind of naturally grew out of the process I was using when working on it.  I made a lot of random decisions based on necessity in the moment.  Mid-way through, when I began to color things I started pushing it in a sort-of cartoon direction, thinking that the panels were beginning to look like stills from some unproduced sci-fi animation.

Chandra, Page 6: Pisser.

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Now we're getting somewhere.  Welcome to the interior of the Chandra base.  Tom there is meant to be British, but I'm not exactly sure how well he's written and how much of that comes across.  I know that less is more when trying to write accents.  Two Britishisms in a row out of his mouth might be a bit much.

As you can see, the interior of Chandra is decrepit but, I feel I didn't quite get the level of degradation that I want, simply because there's not enough detail worked into the surroundings.  If there's one thing I'm happy with about this panel, and pretty much all the scenes that take place inside the communication room, it's the lighting.  I do feel that I nailed the look that I was going for in that respect at least.  The glow is a pretty effective tool I found. 

Chandra, Page 5: Stand By For Transmission

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And here we are, continuing with the three bar format, on our zoom into Shackleton Crater in the southern hemisphere of the moon.  It's funny, I feel like writing these things is like making a director's commentary.

Another area of struggle has been the correct font and bubble shape.  There are just SO MANY options/directions one can go with this.  It's like background music in a film, if it's good, you don't notice it.  If it's bad, it's the first thing to stab you in the eye (or ear, as it were).

Here you can see I was playing around with a bubble colored a slight yellow to indicate another voice.  Not sure how that reads though.

For Chandra I ended up going with the Digital Strip font at Blambot.com, a really excellent resource for hopeful creatives.

So...who's talking here?  You'll find out on the next page.

Chandra, Page 4: To The Moon!

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At this point it was about a year ago that I drew this thing.  I remember really struggling with how much detail to put into the moon's surface and I ended up splitting the difference with some textures.  I now know: the more detail the better!  You have to understand, for some reason I really really really hurried through this project.  I don't know what it was, I think I wanted to feel like I had something, anything under my belt.  Unfortunately for Chanda, she was the sacrificial lamb.

At the time that I drew this my thoughts were that I should just get through it and the story would be strong enough to carry the artwork if it wasn't exactly up to snuff.  Lesson learned:  Make EVERYTHING as strong as possible.  Put as much work into prep as into execution.  Better to take four years to make one project than one year to make four projects.

Chandra, Page 3: WOW!

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Hey, he's really excited.  I would be too, it's too bad we don't go back to the moon.  Like all kids, when I was six, I thought we'd be living on the moon by the time I reached the age of 30.  Flying cars too.  Well, I guess we have cellphones and computers instead, baby steps, baby steps.

But, imagine for a moment that colonies had been established on the moon.  The moon would be the next great Wild West, everyone out for themselves.  All those people that have bought real estate on the moon would be fighting over their scrappy plots of moon dust.

It's a simple composition, meant to bring us into the story and the next page...

Chandra, Page 2: It Looks Like A Rabbit

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It's true, I can't NOT see a rabbit when I look at the moon.  It's always been that way.

I have to say that these first five pages came out a little more purple than I would have liked.  I sort of envisioned them as a bit more tangerine when I was conceiving this.  The thing is, an artist's effectiveness is dictated by his ability with the tools he chooses.  So, when hindered by the challenges of a new material/medium one can find it difficult to get right at that idea that's hovering in their mind.  You can see it, but it's a matter of getting your hands to do the mind's bidding.  It's tough, and frustrating and it leaves a lot of people weeping in the corner, including me.

By the by, who are this guy and this kid?  They don't have names, hmmm...