Been a while. Here’s a comic. Enjoy.

Hopefully there’ll be more.

It’s been a while, I know… but at least there’s a new comic up, huh?

This particular comic is a bit of a departure from my previous work. In the past, I’ve worked almost exclusively on a wacom cintiq monitor (not that beauty in the link there though… Mine’s about 5 years old.) There are a lot of benefits to working digitally on a cintiq, but the one negative is that it’s not even remotely portable, so to work on comics, I have to be home, at the cintiq. In this comic, only the two panels in the top right were done on a cintiq. The other panels were all done on my new ipad. The obvious advantage to working on an ipad being that I can take it anywhere and work on my comic at any time with no mess what so ever. I’m hoping that as I familiarize myself with this new tool and experiment with different workflows, it’ll help me speed up my production schedule at least a little bit, so I can finish this thing before I die.

Only time will tell though.

Trying to draw zombies getting jiu jitsu-ed is hard. Hopefully it’s semi-clear what’s happening.

DUDES, I STILL MAKE COMICS. Here’s one now!

In keeping with the silent post-apocalyptic zombie action, here’s another wordless page. Our hero has fallen, our damsel is in distress (sort of) and the zombies keep coming. In keeping with my tradition of drawing some real gear into this comic as I’d previously mentioned in an interview on the excellent ‘all things zombie’ site Romero Brooks, I’ve included another piece of serious gear, the Cold Steel Special Forces Shovel. This sucker has been on my shopping list for a while now, and I might need to pick it up once I start going camping again.

Dispatching Zombies with golf clubs. YUP.

Zombies attack! Our Protagonists scopes the scene, and improvises some weaponry.

I thought I’d go a little more ‘digital painting’ on this one – still trying new things, which probably won’t change any time soon.

It’s kinda funny… In an effort to speed up my page production, I decided to simplify the art a bit. Unfortunately, as always, when I started messing with the art direction, I kept messing with it. In this particular page, I did away with all the detail of the previous page, hoping to simplify the character designs, thus decreasing the amount of time spent drawing. Then I decided I wanted to paint the backgrounds…

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Unsurprisingly, I ended up spending more time testing out methods of digital painting, and more time messing with options for rendering things, thus losing any advantage gained by simplifying the drawing process. OH WELL. Expect things to continue to evolve, and thank you for your patience.

DIALOG. The first dialog in a zombie-spit page, and the tightest drawing I’ve done on a page thus far. IT TAKES FOREVER. I think I’m gonna simplify things a bit for future pages so I can eventually get my production speed up to the point that I can consistently make multiple posts a week. Regardless – enjoy. Hopefully it’s clear what’s going on here.

Alright, another new character and a lot of drawing going into that establishing shot in the last panel. If I’m honest, I put too much detail into it. Oh well, it happens sometimes.

Here we go. The first page of the first part. Tuneless whistling, onomatopoeia, icon profanity and a cliff-hanger. We’re jumping right into the action in part 1!

[EXPAND Artist’s Notes (Click to expand!)]
I’m trying to work with a bit more of a stage than I did in the prologue, so this part was a bit more challenging and took more planning than I’d originally considered. As such, I had to try to work faster on this one, and now looking back, I’m not completely sold on my compositions on some of these panels. OH WELL. I’ve got to make comics, and trying to make each page perfect will slow me down too much. Live and learn I guess.
[/EXPAND]