Okay, so a day and a dollar short yet again, but I assure you that this time it's for an excellent reason. I started page 4 late Saturday night. I am not certain what influenced my mindset in such a way, but somewhere in between laying out the text and drawing the initial "horizon" lines for the corner of the room, I somehow forgot what I was drawing. I devoted about two and a half hours to a scene that I think may have looked more appropriate in "Abyss Stares Back" or "Blood Will Tell." This wasn't just a clumsy misstep either, I went gung-ho into this scene, I literally just shed all the pre-conceived notions I had built up for designing "The Ballad of Shootin' Jed" and I didn't even realize it until I had the image scanned, edited and was ready to start my blog entry.
I sat at my desk, and contemplated the image, feeling my first pangs of doubt, seeing it compared to the last three pages. At first, out of laziness, I thought to myself "maybe I can justify this image, and the way it looks, to being an on-the-fly stylistic re-write." I think that kind of lethargic rationalization comes from hearing Kevin Smith talk about his improvised last line in "Chasing Amy."
I don't want to make this a blog entry ABOUT Kevin Smith, but gently paraphrased, the story goes like this. Kevin berated Ben Affleck constantly during the filming of the movie "Chasing Amy" for improvising lines during shooting. He accused him for being lazy and not knowing the script. When it came time for Kevin's ONE line in the entire movie, he totally blanked on what he had written, and made up his speech on the spot. Affleck immediately called Kevin on his bullshit, to which Kevin replied "I'm the writer, when I improvise a line, it's like doing another draft."
Granted that is a clever response, but it just smacks of laziness, which Kevin does admit to being. BUT! I wanted better for my fans. I admit to being lazy at times to, but this was not the kind of thing I wanted to be lazy about. So I scrapped the page, and the entire blog entry, and resolved to re-draw the page, keeping in theme with the style I had decided upon for this endeavor.
Note: I didn't actually "scrap" the page. I wanted to keep it. Like I said before, it resembles something that would be more apropos in "The Abyss Stares Back", and since I'm still in pretty early pre-production for that, I figured I'd keep it as a possible reference point for when I actually begin work on it.
But back onto this page! This was more of a rushed job, but I'm happy to say that I don't think it shows. I'm actually way more proud of this than the previous page. I'd go as far as to say I like this page more than the three pages previous. The previous incarnation had Lurleen looking more like a classical Victorian beauty slumped on the floor in a pool of blood. I like this Lurleen a lot better as a dumpy white trash housewife with a beehive and a comically large nose and bugged out eyes. Seeing the violent expiration of a caricature is somehow all the more tragic to me, go figure.
you might have also noticed that I included two stanzas in this page.
I've done this for two reasons.
Number one, although my reaction to the first three pages is favourable, I felt like at this early point in the story, one stanza per page was moving along too slowly.
Second, while the image communicated the first stanza pretty well on it's own, I wasn't looking forward to trying to communicate JUST the second stanza with it's own image. I feel like they would have been too similar, and I didn't want to draw the same thing twice... or rather... three times, as the circumstances dictated.
In other news, Dave the Punk Rock Cat #2 should have shipped today, and as such, will become available shortly. I wish I had a more precise "street date" for you, but I don't. In any other situation, I'd tell you to contact the publisher, but in this case, that's still ME, so as far as further information goes, we're all fucked!
In OTHER other news, Anime On Display, or "Anime Over Dose" as I insist on calling it, is this weekend. I'll be there, and you should so... totally... come... [/envyadams]
We are still up in the air for Fanime. We're on the wait list, at a relatively low number (considering how high I've heard the numbers go) so i still hold out hope that I'll be selling there. Even if I'm not, i will still BE there, livin' it up, like a BOSS!
We will simply have to wait and see.
So that's about it, this entry was a little more long winded than normal, so I'll cut it off here. See you next week.
...
Oh, also, I heard that Whitney Houston died and apparently it's Valentines day today or something.
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