Progressing Forward

 

Things are moving along smoothly. Mike's doing very well the the schedule he has and we're near complete with page 2. If all goes according to plan, pages 1-3 should be finished by the end of the month.

On the left is an early version of page 2 Mike sent my way and the image on the right is what he has added. A rough version of the rest of page 2.

My plan is to show pages 1-6 on here when they are complete, but after that all I will show are a few selected pages that are unfinished just to show our progress. I don't want to show the entire issue, now do I?

Now I'm off to watch The Walking Dead.

Now We're Getting Somewhere

The first page of my opus. It's unfinished and still needs to undergo some minor finishes, but you pretty much see the first page. I'd really like to thank Mike for this. I know he's got a lot on his plate right now and I'm very appreciative that he' stuck with me on this project.

I can't wait to see and share more.

Life Likes to Get in the Way of Life

Things are and will remain kind of hectic for the time being. I'm in school trying to finish up my remaining classes that will get me a degree and transfer to the four year university of my choice. Mike recently received an internship with a digital media company and I'm very happy for him. Not to mention this company does work for Marvel and Dark Horse comics, so that may come into use sometime down the road. Yes, I'm selfish.

Mike has sent me some rough layouts of first issue pages, so we're on a roll right now. They look good. I can't stop writing. I've been writing outlines for future issues. I'm also working on my other collabortation with my friend Jen. That's been moving kind of slow due to me writing for Unwanted Children, editing Mike's novella and me just being lazy. I need to learn to balance this stuff better if I ever hope to do it professionally.

Until next time.

In Related News...

I've kinda broken my promise to myself that I'd take a short break from writing anything further for Unwanted Children. Well, I haven't actually begun to write anymore issues, but I have been working on story ideas, story arcs and such. I've been up until 4am every night this week working on Unwanted Children. I already have all of issue 4 mapped out (I wrote the outline) and issue 5 is already undergoing its process in my head. It's like I'm on automatic pilot. I think once I get done with issue 7 I'll be able to rest easy because that's when the biggest plot twist takes place.

 

Been talking to Mike pretty steadily. He has informed me that he will be taking his trusty digital camera out on the town to take reference pictures of San Francisco for certain scenes within the first issue. Looks like we'll be breaking ground on the artwork for issue one very soon now.

 

In related news, a favorite writer of mine, Robert Kirkman, has created his own little comic book publishing company. Skybound is the company. He's not currently accepting submissions from new creators, but the site says he is actively searching for new creators and the best way for him to notice your work is to self publish and bring your work to conventions (like the Long Beach one I'll be attending in October). This sounds promising. So I'm hoping that Mike and I will have completed most of issue 1 (if not all) to bring to the convention. Kirkman's company is definitely one I'll submit my work to.

Skybound is an imprint of Image Comics. These are the people that publish Spawn and other great comics like Haunt and The Walking Dead.

I'm a Rather Busy Underground Freelance Writer

I just sent off issue 3 to Mike. He'll probably give me some genius critique that will make the issue even better from my original draft and I look forward to it. Things are moving along swimmingly with the comic. Besides me writing up issues that may never see the light of day, Mike should be drawing up some pages for issue 1 (is it bad that I have hopes for the entire issue to be near complete by the end of October?) which I hope to bring to the Long Beach Comic Con.

I'll be taking a small break from writing this particular story for a little bit, now that I've finished issue 3. I think I'm putting too much pressure on Mike by pumping out these issues nearly every week. I have another small project I'm working on with another friend. It's a kind of modernized twist on the old Beauty and the Beast tale. I'm still doing research on it (no that doesn't include me watching the Disney movie over and over again) to give this story some credibility.

I already have a full outline of the story written up from beginning to end and I'm kind of excited to start really working on it. And just like Unwanted Children, I'm more excited to get some pages done to see the artwork.

On top of those two projects, I'll be attending classes this semester of school, so I'll be rather busy. But that's a good thing.

Back to the Corner, You Whore!

Clearly I'm one of the most inconsistent bastards anyone of you have ever met. I started this blog to keep things on track for the comic and that didn't exactly go as planned. Then I tried to make this a weekly thing and if you look at the dates of each post, you can see that I strayed from that plan as well. Now I'm back with a small update, which is actually kind of big in my eyes.

First, Mike and I are back at the drawing board, getting the ball rolling with Unwanted Children again. I rewrote issue one from scratch (for the most part), sent it to Mike and now he should be working on pages for that (hopefully some character designs too, we'll find out). Then I went ahead and completely rewrote issue 2. This is completely from scratch.

I took out everything I didn't like and threw in what should have been there from the start. I wrote out six pages of outlines for just this one issue. It came out much better than its previous incarnation and I have a stable cast of characters now. Before I had a few characters kind of just pop in, then we wouldn't hear from them about six issues down the road. This time I fixed that and found a way to keep everything tight, connected and fluid. I'm quite pleased with the roll I'm on. I'll probably have the first ten issues of the series done by month's end.

Second, Mike has sent me some of his written work my way to be critiqued. I'm acting as an editor for this little novella of his and I'm having fun with that role. I have a system of writing my stuff one day then skipping over to editing his the next. Keeps everything fresh for me so I don't get burned out.

And lastly, like last year when I went to San Diego Comic Con to pitch my comic to multiple publishers, I will be attending the new Long Beach Comic Con this year to do the same. I had one publisher really interested in the comic last year, but due to a small debacle with a stable artist, I was never able to reply to the publisher and get him what he wanted. Too much time has passed and I'd feel uncomfortable (or more accurately, unprofessional) to send him that stuff now. I'm gonna try to go for all three days of the convention and I'll try to have a good time while also trying to whore myself out to the people that can change my future.

Hope I still have some people reading this. I need to try to build an audience. 

Devoid

I think Unwanted Children just became much bigger than I ever intended for it to be:

Devoid