College Follies #3 Creator's Commentary Video is up!

Creator's Commentary for College Follies #3, the Power Ranger parody issue, is now up on YouTube. If you already own the comic, let me know and I'll shoot you a link to the behind-the-scenes commentary video, made exclusively for readers who bought the issue. If you don't already own it, what are you waiting for? It's available both as a digital comic and in print, here.

My Elect Psychoboy sign was stolen!

So the Elect Psychoboy sign I put up near the corner of University and North Point in Winston-Salem is no longer there. I hadn't had a chance to check it in the last couple days so I'm not sure when it was taken. All the other political and adverting yard signs in that area were left intact, it was just mine that was missing.

I'm not printing another one, due to the expense of the sign (it costs nearly $30) and how long it would take to print (It takes 24 hours for the ink to dry, so the soonest I could get one now would be sometime on Election Day, when I have to do a double shift at work).

It's a shame. I was getting hits on Psychoboy's site from people seeing the sign, which I'm sure would've increased as we approached Election Day, and I was hoping to use the sign for future conventions and such. I'm pretty bummed out by this. A lot of disappointing things have happened since I started work on the comic, but this probably tops the list. I'm sure whoever took it probably meant no malice, but the damage is done none the less.

Issue Four...Psycho Goes To Washington!

So issue four is called "Psychoboy Goes To Washington." In it, Psychoboy runs for the House of Representatives, recruiting his best bud Stickboy to be his campaign manager.

I haven't written the script yet, but I'm thinking it should be around nine pages long and cost 99 cent online. Since I'm capturing an entire campaign in a short story, obviously they'll be lots of jumping around in time and summarizing in the story. But the comic will only be part of it.

I also want to tell the story online in an interactive way. Psychoboy will have an actual virtual campaign while I'm working on the issue. He'll have a campaign site and be posting on social media. Having no convictions of his own, he'll be asking you what he should stand for, letting you write his platform. He'll also be posting hilarious campaign ads, both memes and the occasional YouTube video as well as various other miscellaneous nonsense. It's going to be a lot of fun and I hope a lot of people sign up for and share his posts.

If you want to be an early adaptor and join Team Psycho you're more than welcome to look Psychoboy up on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and start liking and following him now. I'll be launching everything within a couple weeks and I'll let you guys know when the campaign is ready to go.

With the added virtual campaign, I'll be posting on here a lot less. There will still be posts to let you know what my progress is, I always want you guys to know where I'm at, but they'll be less detailed and less frequent. I'll still posting announcements and whenever I completely finish a page. Showing every bit of the creation of the series was great when that's all I had to show, but now that the series is out, it's time to switch gears and try something new and different that I hope you guys will enjoy.

My goal is have the issue done in October. I doubt I'll hit my original goal of having it done the first week of October but there shouldn't be any problem getting it out before the election.

In my next post I'll be announcing my fall convention appearances. Until then, remember to vote early, vote often and vote Psychoboy!

Issue One Re-Submited to Comixology!

Alright so issue one has been re-uploaded to Comixology with all instances of Comic Sans replaced. Glad to have that over with. Hopefully there will be a quick turn around since it's already been looked over once. Since they described it as "tentatively accepted" except for the font, hopefully you'll be seeing College Follies on Comixology soon!

Re-Fonting Finished!

It's a bit later in the week than I'd like for making this post but work has kept me busy.  I just got through with the final pages of font replacement on issue one. All instances of Comic Sans have now been replaced with another font. I'll look over the last few pages to make sure nothing got messed up and will be sending them off probably this weekend. 

Raiders of the Lost Font

Still replacing all the Comic Sans in issue one for Comixology. Got four more pages down last night. Very close to scrubbing all the offending font from the entire issue, but unfortunately I won't have access to the computer I originally lettered it on over the weekend and I don't want to go between computers due to compatibility issues. So the final re-fonting will have to wait until Wednesday or Thursday, when I can wrap this up and finally declare issue one done (again!). I'll be working on issue three in the meantime this weekend.

 

Comic Sans, I Will Hunt You Down...And Replace You.

Alright, so the epic effort to replace every bit of Comic Sans in issue one continues. Got 5 more pages knocked out yesterday. 

Working On the "Sans Comic Sans" Version of Issue One

So now I'm changing the font on all the word balloons in the first issue for Comixology. This is going to slow me down on working on issue three for the next week or two but getting on Comixology is a priority. I got five pages down yesterday.

Replacing Comic Sans isn't the exciting most thing in the world, so I'll just leave you with this panel this re-lettered panel of Jesse Jackson....

We need to ban Comic Sans too, Jesse!

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...

Page Seven Colored...

So the colors on page seven are done. I doubt I'll get a chance to work on the lettering this weekend so most likely I'll be finishing this up on Wednesday or Thursday.

Page Seven Touched Up Inks

Just finished touching up the inks and I'm about to start on colors for page seven.