Page Nine Complete!

Okay, so I've already posted the complete pages for a little more than half of the first issue. At some point I'll gather these into one place for an easy to view preview of the story. But in the interest of not giving away the entire thing before it's digitally published on Comixology or whoever takes it, I'll be posting samples of the pages from here on out instead of the whole thing.

 

So as I said, page nine is done. And this one takes us to the traditional mall stop of the music store...

 

Okay, not MY usual stop (probably why I show Psycho looking at the music while Stick's chilling), but a common one, none the less. The store name was basically inspired by how expensive music (and just about everything else) is at the mall.

 

For the kids, the two boys are just generic kids (I love my little 90's skate punk rocking the green mohawk). For the two girls on the right, they're based off of two characters from my all-time favorite superhero concept that I created, imagining them here as little kids. The one with her hair down tends to wear black and white so I went with a white dress (figured there was enough people dressed in black already). The other character is inspired by a girl I knew in high school who wore a red jacket and the character usually wears pink with the jacket. Even if it's kiddie versions there as an inside joke, it's still really, really cool to see them in color.

 

On the CDs in the background (those are thicker, multi-disc ones on the back row), I used a coloring technique I've avoided thus far of making background objects one color. When I started this, I thought colorists only did that to either be lazy or because their brushes weren't fine enough to color very tiny details. But when I was doing this panel, I remembered a blog Jim Shooter did on coloring in which he said that color (like inks or pencils) should create depth by having things that are more specific and detailed in the front and things that are less so in the back. So it occurred to me coloring each individual CD and the cover art on each might make the background too busy in an already busy panel and distract from Stick and the characters the reader needs to focus on. If Jim Shooter says it's okay to do it, that's the final authority to me.

 

And then we have Stick talk to the music store clerk...

 

 

 The design on him was just me trying to figure out how to make a music store clerk look interesting. Nine Inch Nails is one of favorite bands, so putting its logo on his shirt was the first thing that came to mind. It was a lot of fun creating the logo since, like I said, I love the Nails.

 

There were A LOT of false alarms sent to schools nationwide after the Columbine shootings that I'm lampooning here. It turned out children weren't homicidal mass murders, but a lot of them were insensitive pricks who thought something like that was funny.

 

And that's it for the preview of this page. I promise you'll be able to read the whole page (and the rest of the comic) once it's released.  Let me know what you think of the new commentary format here.

 

So next up is page ten, when our heroes finally arrive at the county high school...