Special Friday Patreon work-process post!

Taking a break from the usual Friday routine for a li'l something different, folks!

Wellp, the Marvel one-shot Venom: The End "dropped" this week, featuring script by me and art by Jeffrey "Chamba" Ruiz and Guru eFX. (I'm a bit leery of publicly spotlighting Marvel or DC content on the ol' Patreon, so I'm keeping the book's title out of the post listing.) Howeva, as the galaxy-spanning, time-jumping story was unusually difficult and challenging (even for one of my often-obnoxious scripts), I wound up drawing 30 pages worth of highly detailed thumbnails for the project in the Procreate iOS app, as seen above.

Believe it or not, I don't particularly like having to produce roughs this tight, as they can be seriously restrictive on the book's actual artist; however, The End's story was so rife with abstract concepts and montages—and even abstract montages!—that I felt obliged to do very specific page roughs.

The experience of working up Venom: The End—which included writing a 92-page-long script(!), due to needing to explain and clarify the narrative's endless stream of scene changes and time jumps—was definitely a learning experience, to put it mildly.  Afterward, I decided that I need to cultivate "anti-fragility" in future scripts for other artists, as The End's story was ridiculously "fragile," in that many, many things had to go exactly right with the pencils, inks, coloring & lettering for the story to read coherently.  (For the most part, things did go right, but a handful of glitches and errors on my part wound up in the published version of the book.) 

That's a nerve-wracking and time-consuming way to create comics, so down the road I'm hoping to pursue a more robust writing approach that won't require quite so many creative "moving parts" to mesh together perfectly.

Also, Venom: The End changed my mind about development of an ultra-ambitious SF comic I've been mulling over, which I've referred to by the faux "working title" of Project X on this Patreon before. The idea of having to write multiple issues of The-End-style absurdly long and detailed scripts to explain Project X's even more challenging concepts to a potential artist now repulses me, to be honest; so, I'll probably be tackling that project's art chores myself, and saving my scripting worktime for stories that are simpler and more outside-artist-friendly.

In closing, note that Procreate's text tools are a frickin' joy to work with (as seen in the first few pages of roughs), unlike the often wonky and troublesome text tools in Clip Studio Paint, or so I've found. 

Anyhoo, have a good weekend, folks! (Patrons of the $10 tier, please stand by for an art request post either today or tomorrow.)