ALL EYES ON ME (pages 1 & 2)

Okay, y’all! Here we go! Over the next five or so weeks I’ll be going through my comic ALL EYES ON ME, published last year in BOOM! Studios’ HELLO DARKNESS #4. Hope you all enjoy the ride!

Looking at page one, I am already annoyed by how I drew the brim of Callisto’s hat lmao WHOOPS. I didn’t have great reference at the time like I do now, and I think I just thought I remembered that the brim folded straight down like that (in those bottom panels, particularly), which was just wrong haha. Ah well! We do our best!

If you remember my previous post about the character designs, this comic came out of a desire to draw some kind of cosmic horror thing — and it was to involve this woman character and a giant, eyeball-covered octopus. So that gets my brain thinking: what is THIS character doing? Well, what if she is… STEALING PEOPLE’S EYEBALLS??? Yep! Stealing their eyeballs to put them into the body of her octopus-God-lover. WHAT A PREMISE!

I didn’t draw this first page first, but I definitely always envisioned it with these floating eyes right at the start. I kind of pull a little bit from German Expressionism, and the layering of eyes is something I think I have seen in one of those incredible silent films. I divorced them from any background as to not give the game away ahead of time, but yes, these are the octopuses eyes watching Callisto go about her business — in this case, tying people up and stealing their eyeballs; I figured that a girl dressed as a dominatrix in this world would be perfect to show her power, as well as her dedication to her craft.

I always wanted to do a tilting panel thing like at the bottom of page one (usually I feel like it involves people falling backward, but this felt perfect for her going from her standing position to kneeling over a body on page two). I also really loved the idea of a cinematic approach to her walking over, cross-cutting between her and this tied-up man — we don’t know what’s going on, but we definitely get a sense that something bad is happening.

I think my problem with page one is how… empty it feels? I think it kind of works because the next page is a full spread, and basically every page thereafter is PACKED, and so it lulls you into it in some way, but I dunno, the amount of white on the page has always somewhat gotten to me.

It’s also wild to look at this and know that my drawing style has changed like I dunno four or five times since I drew this a little over a year ago; were I to do this now, it would look so wildly different. I feel like my art skill is progressing so, so rapidly that anything beyond super recently ends up looking like ass to me hahaha.

Page two… we’ll talk about ASS! So my problem with this page is that I had intended to take photo reference for it with regard to Callisto kneeling over the man, and the man himself; I didn’t end up doing that, and so, while I generally think the idea comes across, the perspective angle is all wrong. I also don’t love how I never know how to convincingly shade something I don’t want to be totally black, and so the man she is kneeling over is shaded with a weird combo of hatching and mess. Sometimes I feel like I should be more deliberate with my lines, and I THINK I have gotten better at that since I drew this comic!

But what I DO love about this comic (and this page) is that, while the actual lighting makes ZERO sense, I actually allowed for deep black to fill the brickwork in the background; in my first comic, MY LIFE TO LIVE, I was so timid at this kind of thing - I think primarily because I was drawing it traditionally and I didn’t want to fuck things up - that everything that could have had more juicy, noir-esque vibes just didn’t because it was all just lightly-hatched gray. ALAS! But here we have bricks fading into black, I think kind of giving the world this dark, dark atmosphere that leans into the horror of the proceedings.

The big billboard behind them is a reference to Jacques Rivette’s LE PONT DU NORD, where Pascal Ogier’s character is constantly trying to tear these eyes down; the movie being mostly about surveillance and paranoia kind of made the eyes really menacing, and so I wanted to introduce them here (also because I am a huge film nerd and am always happy to drop a fucking Rivette reference as fast as I can).

I kind of always had envisioned the page in this like diagonal manner, with the credits being exactly where they are, although I had initially wanted her saying a lot more so it just didn’t feel as much like a big huge page-turn (since I have so, so many in this comic); but you know, sometimes a big huge page-turn is exactly what you need for your title page, and so I ended up making her say as little as possible (also because, by the time I got around to scripting the comic (I always do it after it has been drawn), I had not left a lot of room on the page for dialogue unless it would obscure important elements. So… you know…

The lettering on this comic feels definitely sloppier than that in BODY. DOUBLE., but I am not mad about it; in that comic, I ended up feeling that the lettering was almost too clinical, and I wanted it to feel a bit more free here; now when I letter, though, I basically just trace a font so that the letters have consistency, but it still has that “hand-lettering” feel. But on ALL EYES ON ME, it was just me and the page! Hahaha

Drawing asses is hard. In this comic, some are more successful than others (there is a specific one a few pages away in which I feel I failed, unfortunately). This one on page two is okay, but sometimes I see the art of like especially animation people (Shane Glines comes to mind) and I freak out, because they know how to draw something in such a sultry way that I am not sure I will ever be able to capture — like, the poses, the gazes, the camera location: it all works in tandem to produce something so seductively horny, and I just hope I can get there some day! Page two was not that day, but I did give it my best!

Hope y’all enjoyed this! Trying to put these essays out each Thursday! ☺️

Let me know what you think — did you learn anything? Was any part of particular interest for you? Do you have any questions about these pages? I am always interested in how people engage with my work, and getting some comments on it would be of great help and interest to me! ☺️ Thanks so much, y’all!

Stay tuned for the next NSFW drop coming on Sunday! It’s a good one, to be honest!