Jan 20 2005

Boxing Bucket Pg. 2, pt IV

…And here’s page 2 inked. I’m not as happy with the overall drawing on this page as I am with the first, but I like the panel layout. In most of my work I tend to stick to a pretty standard grid based on either 9 panels per page, or 6 panels per page. So many cartoonists try to get creative with their panel layouts and wind up doing nothing but confusing the reader, so I tend to err on the side of consertavitism when it comes to layout. Panel layout is like the bassline in a song: if people notice it, you need to tone it back a bit.

That being said though, I’ve been really enjoying Roger Langridge’s brilliant Fred the Clown book (I’d link to his publisher, Fantagraphics, but like the fools they are, there’s virtually no mention of him on their site). He uses some really interesting panel layouts that never get in the way of the story. So, in this story I’m goin’ crazy I tell’s ya, and using all kinds of circle panels and borderless panels and whatnot…

bucket pg 1 inked
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Jan 19 2005

JonathanStrange.com

JonathanStrange.com

I was just poking around this site while eating lunch–there’s a lot of cool stuff to be found there about this very cool book. It’s a difficult book to describe… but it’s kinda like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and J.K. Rowling all rolled into one. Interestingly the author, Susanna Clarke, sites comic book writers Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman as two of her favorites. At any rate, the book is great… my only complaint is the illustrations. I mean obviously this is what Strange and Norrell really look like:

Jan 18 2005

Boxing Bucket, Pg. 2 – Part III

I’ve just finished tightening up the rough pencils for page 2 of the Boxing Bucket story I’m working on with my friend Chris Reilly (he wrote the story). I really struggled with a background for the second panel of this page–everything I put in there looked wrong somehow, and you can see that it’s been drawn and erased several times over. But, I’m thinking, maybe there’s a reason for that, so for now I’m going to leave it empty and see if it works as is. I’m thinking it might, since it’s got the potential for a nice comedic panel-to-panel transition between that panel and the next one in which the Einsten/alien appears. If it doesn’t, I’ll keep working on it.

I have to say: I’ve really been enjoying working on this and I can’t wait to ink this page. In fact, I’ve found that I’ve been subtly procrastinating of late, putting off good-paying freelance work to make room for the ol’ Boxing Bucket. This is a dilema no one should face in a rational society.

bb pg 3
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Jan 17 2005

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Bonefish Grill declared crappy!

Ok, first off, let me say that I was most certainly predisposed not to enjoy my dining experience at the Bonefish Grill. I generally avoid all these stupid “P.J. O’Quackenbush’s”-type national chain restaurants…but, frankly, the dining scene here in Winston-Salem is so lacking that I’ll try pretty much anything at this point. (And I had initially gone earlier to one of Winston’s really great restaurants, the Ishi sushi bar, and the line was out the door–usually I’d wait, but I couldn’t this particular evening.)

So what were the big problems?

(1) The waitstaff is apparently required to wear chefcoats. WTF? Maybe all the local police officers should dress like the mayor…or firemen. Whatever…

(2) The usual annoying prepared speach/schtick that these chain places make the servers do. Does the management really think people find this appealing?

(3) For a fish restaurant, they have a suprizingly paltry, and quite boring, selection of fish. Just the “usual suspects:” tuna, sword, salmon, mahi, trout, sea bass (which is usally not sea bass at all, but a variety of grouper). How about something you can’t get at a restaurant that doesn’t (supposedly) specialize in fish: mackerel, turbot, amberjack, wahoo, etc. You know that expression, “There’s a lot of fish in the sea?”

(4) Most stunningly… They apparently don’t actually have any of this fish. That’s right, Katherine ordered trout…no trout. I ordered mahi….no mahi. Katherine then ordered tuna…no tuna. I tried salmon…no salmon. They did have bread, though. Maybe they should call it the “Breadcrust Grill” in the interest of truth in advertising.

(5) After this disaster, the manager comped our $7.00 appetizer. Nice try…but, I worked in food service for almost 10 years; when you have a screw up like being out of 80% of the stuff on the meny, you comp the meal. Period.

(6) And to top it all off, the food we finally did get was mediocre at best. Maybe this is because by the time we got through this whole guessing game about what menu items they actually had, the kitchen was closing down and the chefs no doubt just wanted to go home.

I’d link to their website, but it’s entirely in Flash. This is also annoying.

Jan 15 2005

Boxing Bucket, Pg. 2 – Part II

..and here are the in-progress pencils for page two of the Boxing Bucket story. The first panel is pretty well tightened up, but the rest of the page is still just roughs at this point. I’ve placed the borders of the oval panels with Photoshop because I can’t draw a decent oval freehand–I’ll print out the oval borders and then lightbox them onto the bristolboard.

pg 2 pencils
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