The Making of 'Prisoner in Your Own Mind' Part 1

First I was on to Scott McCloud and his theories, now I'm on Dave Sim, creator of Cerebus. I've been reading some of his old letter columns at http://www.cerebusfangirl.com/artists/nftp/notesindex.html and I've been brought some more realizations that I've haven't been doing as much as I could've been doing. I've thought about this before, but I've always had my reasons to delay. Sim was saying, look at those things that stop you from doing your comic. These are the things holding you back from realizing your dream. Yes.

Generally, I know that I need to just do something, but even when an idea comes my way or after I've written a script, I'll typically sit on it for a little while if it doesn't feel right and maybe revise it. That goes for drawing ideas as well. I used to just do them, but now they have to reach some standard of perfection before I even touch the page.

Sometimes I wait for it to "feel right" as if there was some divine intervention going on. Hell, that's how I used to do it. Now, I've filled up many a page with sketches that I don't like. Never seeming to be able to get my style just right. Other time photo reference or the perfect thumbnails are needed. So I'll know for certain that when I sit down at my desk for the next 8 or so hours, that I'll come up with something that I am happy with.

That reasoning is flawed in several ways. I have so many distractions now with a family and school, that the right times to do anything are few and far between. Often times this waiting phase will be prolonged because if I start on something, I feel like I'll miss a good show or won't be able to read a book I've wanted to get to that day. Those were misplaced priorities, I can admit that now.

At least I don't have cable anymore. I'm not surprised I don't miss it. Where I live, there is bad reception, so even with deluxe antenna, I can't catch broadcast channels. I don't miss TV at all much. I don't feel the desire to need things quite as much and I'm more content with what I have. I generally feel I have more time to do important things as well. I bootleg alot of movies and make a night out of watching them every once in a while. Podcasting and streaming news takes the place of everything else. And no ads! I can draw while I'm listening to podcasts too.

To the comic:

A couple days ago, I don't know how to compute it, I woke up during the evening and just felt like doing 'Prisoner in Your Own Mind.' I was really feeling the first sentence and the vision of the first panel I thought up when I awoke. So, I got up, still needing to pee badly, went downstairs and quickly rewrote the script and it came out the way I wanted it to.

Taking a cue from Eisner, rather than going on to the next page, I did the thumbnails to the story quickly. I had the drawings all bunched up in my hands, but still I had to go pee, eat, and watch a show. (Bad, I know.) I still maintained the feeling for a few hours afterwards, so I took some ref photos just for the poses and started on the first panel.

The first panel came out with practically no flaws, but I was nagged with the feeling I needed to do tight pencils because I was using some good art board that I had been saving for years. First time I used them for any occasion. I even used comic strip boards of roughly the same quality during that time. So, either this was a special occasion, or I just realized that this comic would never fit it a three panel strip. Well, maybe that is a special occasion. I wrote a comic that I actually feel could go beyond the bounds of a three panel strip with no challenge. In fact to two pages, further if I let it. Two pages was all I thought I needed though. If I stretched it to two weeks or two different days, that would keep the story like I wanted it. Not too short, not so long that I feel I could waste time.

I've written longer stories. A number of short stories under my belt and many "Scenarios," but no novels yet. As far as word-wise, longer than graphic novels, but not story wise. I know how, just haven't yet.That's one thing I learned in my creative writing class, you have to crawl before you can walk.

I've been doing comics and even comic book length stories practically all of my 25 years, but I've never stuck with anything long enough to do long range stories. It's funny when I was taking the class, I looked back at my thick portfolio of drawing since grade school to see all the comics I've done stories I've written, but I can't honestly say I've done any long range stories. Most writers don't though until they're my age. I should feel secure in that. I wasn't prepare mentally yet. Not that I honestly haven't tried, because I have tried to write novels. I just let stuff get to me.

That hardly means I'm unqualified to be in this business. I still steadfastly would rather think of myself as a "writer" than only a comic artist/writer. Drop the comic part. Some of what Dave Sim said still applies to me though even then. Not like Stephen King didn't say the same stuff.

After the first panel, it took me a while to do the rest or the page. I had to eat several times, my body clock didn't exactly know when it was supposed to eat not sleeping and all. I had to watch Poetic Justice and had to mess on the web a little bit. But all the while, I was working on the comic in between, still needing to do tight pencils before I could go on to the next panel.

It was maybe 1 or 2 in the afternoon before I was down to just one more panel. The pencil I use is hard so I don't get too messy, but as a result after ever so many erasures, the pencil won't lift from the page. So I just did a little "place holder" inking where the eyes and mouth would go on the second panel and moved on. By the last panel, I was tired, but I knew I didn't want to go into my nap without at least having one eye and the mouth done on the close-up. I did one eye, which was coming out a little too realistic, so I had to make it look a little bit more stylized. I'd previously noticed that is hard to get the feel I want out of a story when I get too realistic. Even though this story is serious, I didn't want it to be slowed down with too many details. So what I ended up doing after I redrew the stylize eye was call it finished and scanned the page into the computer.

After piecing it together in Photoshop, I touched it up in Alias Sketchbook Pro, fixing panel two and flipping and reworking the right eye so it wouldn't look like a mirror image. Damned if I didn't work on that for another hour or so before I called that done. It still didn't turn out just like I wanted it too, but I wouldn't have even had that opportunity if it was just pencil and ink. I would've already screwed up the page and would've had to just ink what I had.

The stage I'm at now is bliss. All I have to do now is bring the pencils into Painter and ink it. Then add the word balloons in Adobe Illustrator. That way it'll stay editable. After all I've needed to censor one of my comics already. It's not quite victory, but as far as I'm concerned, this process is like post-production seeing as how I've done the heavy artwork already. I should have kept the pencils loose. I'm much more sure with the pen in Painter than I am doing unfinished pencils now. It helps me go faster when I can get immediate feedback of how it's going to look. Just use "Preview" to check the progress every once in a while.

Well, I'm going to bed now. I just know this thing is too long to read and it'll be another podcast. If (and it will) it becomes a podcast, I'll definitely put it alongside page 2 of 'Prisoner in Your Own Mind' that'll come out next week. Look for the first installment on Saturday or Sunday.

Tomorrow I'm doing page 2 as well, so maybe I'll tag that onto the podcast going up next week as well.

Rain

It's been raining for two days here in Tulsa and I love it. I was raised in Houston, so I'm used to alot more rain than we get here. It gets so hot upstairs in this apartment with no central air.

When the storm started a couple days ago the wind was blowing fiercely. Everybody in the neighborhood came outside practically to see what was going on. It got real dark and cool out, no signs of any tornados or anything. I was hoping for the rain while my neighbor said it "looked nasty." I wonder why everyone always has this negative disposition about weather in Oklahoma. Can't it just be a nice day?

I like the atmosphere rain creates. And for a while good things used to happen after it rained, so I associated rain with good times or good fortune coming. Unfortunately, we had a drought in Tulsa a little while after I started thinking that way, oddly enough one of the rougher parts of my life (if life ever stopped being rough, I should do my next podcast on that).

When it did start raining again regularly, I didn't like it as much. Usually because I had to drive in it. I used to love that, but the blower in my car wasn't working, so the windows would fog up. Also, when the water got high, my electrical system acted like it wanted to go out.

Without the fear that anything would be ruined I don't mind the rain. I'm water-proof and so are many of my clothes.

My son is starting first grade in the morning and my daughter pre-k in the next week. I don't think I'll mind going back to school next week either. I really enjoyed this break. My brain really got a chance to breath. In fact all of this internet presence essentially arose during the summer. Very little of it came before.

I have Scott McCloud to thank for a lot of that I suppose.

Final Thoughts on "Reinventing Comics" (Podcast)

Listen to the podcast:

My new site Scenarios is as done as it's gonna get. Take a look and tell me what you think. A redesign of this blog is coming.

I'll use and image map next time.

Almost Finished! (Censorship is Inevitable I Guess)

Read the last post!

The site is nearly completely finished. I spent all of today trying to figure out a problem with FireFox on the Mac. It was weird because it was working fine in the long in the tooth Internet Explorer and Safari. Well, I rebuilt the thing from scratch with tables. In this case, ImageReady's HTML was just too jumbled to make any sense of. The slices were fairly clean, but still too many little spacer images floating around.

The HTML I did took longer, but it was way more efficient and works on all browsers. I wanted to spend today doing a few comics, but I wanted to make sure that FireFox users weren't left out. I accidentally leak my site with the uncensored content and was contacted by the Gutterflycomix administrators. He said he liked the comic, but I needed to change the language, chiefly "fuck" and "goddamn." I understand "fuck," but goddamn really isn't a curse word, well it is. It's one of the only ones (hell & damn curse people, while other "curse" words are just profanity, cursing no one). The slurring of the words "god" and "damn" are not referring to the Judao-Christian almighty god, but just in general, It might mean "Zeus." I got the slurring from a friend who actually was uncomfortable using it as the separate parts. It's telling said deity to curse something anyhow, not cursing him. It is subjective whether it's using his name in vain or not. I'm not going to argue about stuff like that anymore anyway.

I'm not going to argue about stuff like that. It's their site and I can get by censoring myself for a while. It'll be like working under the "comics code." Or the MPAA rating system. We have larger works coming up anyhow that don't require censorship. Even though my story stay fairly tame except for a few characters that act wilder than the rest. True enough many people curse in the comforts of their own home, but I hardly ever here people cursing in public and this is 2005 in the year of our Lord.

Anyway, look I'm off track. Well, most of the visitors who came during the period my site leaked were using FireFox, so it would be suicide not to fix it. It's done now, I just need testers.

Using Microsoft Windows or any other Mac browser other than Safari, FireFox, or Internet Explorer and care to test it for me you can go to Scenarios to tell me if everything is okay.

Scenarios

The Scenarios website is almost finished (just needs links and meta tags), which means I'll soon redesign this blog as well. I just have some details I need to iron out with my brother. Scenarios will be a a periodical of sorts that we'll be doing.

How to describe Scenarios? Well, it's a whatever, whenever variety comic, brought to you by the Nwadiei brothers, Onyema & Ashiedu.

Scenarios is a comic that is a comic, but not a comic. The subject matter will vary just as much as the style of artwork. Expect the slow, expect the fast. Expect to laugh and...well, expect to ponder some ish at least. I'll work on the crying part.

(That's kind of my predefined answer :). ) It should be ready to launch in two or three days. Check for the link then!

You know, I really shouldn't go into why I redesigned this blog or did my own site instead of paying to get it done like I originally planned, but I will anyway. It's not a long story. I entered a bartering agreement with this chick I met on the internet, who came to give me some web space and promised to design my site for free in exchange for some art work. A drawing of her.

I did it. Took me a week to do it, not 100% of the week, but that was the time it spanned. When I was happy with it, I gave it to her like a fool. She claims she was so busy with her web design business, that she didn't have time to get back around to finishing my site. She virtually ignored most of my communications for the longest. I didn't get the hint. When she finally came around, she told me she didn't even know how to do my site like I wanted! So, I did it myself with this blog. I like it, but it's raw. I'm a n00b at this after all (yeah, I admit it, I'm a newbie). When she did do my site, I didn't even like it and I have already committed my mind to hosting the comic on another site.

This is gonna be slightly cruel, but after all that dodging and the piss poor site she gave me, I noticed that she wasn't even all that cute after all. I made the girl in my drawing cuter than her. I guess I was romanticizing her because she was cool. Well, I thought she was cool anyway. All she talks about in her forums is sex and her boyfriend who doesn't even seem to want her.

Maybe I'm a bad judge of character.

Periodicals v. Graphic Novels

I'm currently reading Eisner/Miller and there was some things they were saying about periodicals and what have you. From that, I've realized that I really don't want to do periodical comics. I would much rather do stories released as volumes that come to eventual conclusions.

I didn't plan on organizing this thought, so I'll break it up as much as possible to see if that will help. First, I don't like to be rushed. If you have a schedule, yes you are forced to do something and you often come up with spectacular things, but you always feel pressured. It makes you feel like you're procrastinating and wasting time, when you really aren't. You just want time to put your ideas together. Something moving forward is more important than strict time tables. Book authors, which I consider myself more as than a periodical writer, don't release books at regular intervals. In fact, many wait years in between writing books for whatever reason. I want to think of my works as doing a volume of Harry Potter rather than a monthly magazine.

I don't like the restrictions in storytelling of a 20 or 30 page comic either. Sure, chapters in a graphic novel could fit in the constraints of that, but I'd much rather have the flexibility. Also, the quality of a monthly tends to fluctuate because of schedules and such. Not just from repetition, but from the need to constantly put on something new in with a title. When you look at it, the reason why Superman, Batman, or Spider-Man's quality fluctuate so much is because they really are more like magazines than stories.

Anyway, I want to do finite unscheduled stories. I hate time. That is one thing I've learned to live without this school break. I don't like it and don't need it. Yes, I will give people an idea as when to look out for things, but not enough to make it feel like a whip. Especially how my life is now, promising to do anything with regularity and failing makes me feel like a <b>loser</b>. I really don't bullshit my time away.

As far as stories are concerned, I'm writing a graphic novel now. I'll be doing a periodical of sorts soon alongside that. I've decided to just allow my Black-Man story wait to be written in book form after I finish this project with my brother. The writing is basically already done, but it'll probably take another few weeks or months to iron it out. So far for now, I see that it is better to give one thing your complete attention at a time creatively.

Frank Miller, Tokyo Tribes & Censorship, and Reinventing Comics

I just purchased three books that are and are about comics. Tokyo Tribes, Eisner/Miller, and Reinventing Comics. I will likely return all three, but at least two seem to be good reads.

I was quite disappointed with Tokyo Tribes. I didn't know how fast manga could be. I whipped through 200 pages in a couple of hours. It sucked. So much for blacks in manga. They didn't even use the slang right at a lot of parts, but at least they tried. The whole setup with blacks running Tokyo dividing it by territories and tribes was far fetched and the story didn't back it up. I can't say anything about it other than it's faults. Nothing else to cling to. Okay, I guess I was disappointed because I thought it would be well, good.

It was the censored American version, which was okay, but I was really expecting the censoration to be different. As I read through I noticed that some instances of violence were pretty heavy, so I was wondering how much heavier could you get than two guys have tears in their eyes after being decapitated? What they did censor later was the crime boss Big Bubb raping a pretty boy. Yeah, it was pretty gruesome. By the time Bubb was done, the pretty boy's asshole was bloody and he had a tear going all the way up his back from his ass. They couldn't show the rape or bloody asshole, but they could show the rip up his back.

So one has to ask themselves, is even a rape of that magnitude worse than decapitation or getting a limb chopped off?

Eisner/Miller is good so far, I'm already halfway through it. Only problem I have is that Eisner really seems to be a storyteller contrasted to Miller. Miller really only seems concerned with freedom, cinematics, and violence. He's definitely not the almighty comic deity some make him out to be. His stories are often entertaining, but they are also often very thing. He definately works best with licensed characters. Sin City is boring what I've read of it. DK2 sucked bloody asshole as well. It was sort of like a slap in the face seeing that Miller couldn't even describe a story to Eisner, then he couldn't tell Eisner exactly how the story was supposed to be exciting and what kind of devices he used to tell the story. Obviously Miller just wanted to be really violent and different in Sin City not tell good stories. Guess he just get inspiration from other's creations, envisioning how he could do different twists on them.

Lastly, I like what ol' McCloud has to say about comics. Alot of the same things that Eisner talks about overlap in this book. It's pretty excellent so far. At the point I'm at, he's only been complaining about certain aspects of comics and exploring what has been done differently, but it seems as if this title will definitely be inspiring.