Zombie Tales is out today

Well it’s out, Zombie Tales #1, with 3 cool zombie stories.  This is the zombie project I did that I couln’t talk about before.  Ready for this? My 8 page story was on a script by fu&%#’ Steve Niles!!!!!!!!!!  How cool is that???  It was also a great feeling to be contacted by the great Mark Waid to join the BOOM! team for a tryout!  All things considered, it turned out okay but there are a few things that needs to be mentionned though…the credits say that I did the coloring, which is not true, to this day, I have no idea who did the coloring.  Also, the letterer messed up BIG TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He forgot to write in all the sound FX…On page 4, he forgot the “CLICK” for panel 2, to show that the gun is empty. Panel 5, he forgot the “CRACK” when he breaks her jaw. Panel 7, she’s supposed to be yelling “SCOOOT”.  And on the big splash page, there’s supposed to be a big “BANG” at the top of the page…right now, it looks empty and lacks impact!  On page 7, I’ve also indicated a moon reflexion on the window of the last panel that really looked cool in my version…but they didn’t do it…oh well…

What have I learned from this experience?

First:I am not a colorist!!!  Even though I don’t agree with all the color choices the colorist used, it still looks better than what I did at first.

Second: That I cannot control everything, it is frustrating, but if I want to do more commercial comics, I need to just focus on my part and hope for the best.  I wasted precious time trying to do it all, from coloring to indicating where the lettering should go, I should have just focus on the art, and it would have been better!

Third: Carefully select what ’job for hire’ to do.  As I learned after the fact, I have no rights to this story, so at the end of the day, all I have is exposure, which with this book, is GREAT! But I’ve had a few offers in recent months that even though the page rate was better than what BOOM! paid, the publisher and the editors involved where not that great, so I said no to those and instead, I’m using my precious little spare time to work on my own projects that don’t pay but that hopefully will get good exposure.  It’s my ‘Revenge’ story that got me the BOOM! gig…

Like I just said, I don’t own the rights to this story and I’m not allowed to use it for anything, so I’ll just post one page, the only one I think that ended up close to my original coloring suggestions.  This is a bad scan of the actual comic page…Click here to see all my original pages.

 

‘Death of an Outlaw’ prelim 3

I’ve been invited to contribute to the second book of the anthology ‘Outlaw Territory’ and I’m very excited because I always wanted to draw this kind of story.  So I’m the artist on ‘Death of an Outlaw’, story by Adam Freeman and Marc Bernardin.

Here’s pg 3 at the rough layout stage.  There’s obviously some dialogues that’s going over…. 

‘death of an outlaw’ prelim 2

I’ve been invited to contribute to the second book of the anthology ‘Outlaw Territorry’, and I’m really excited about it because I always wanted to draw a story set in the old west.  Here’s my second sketch for the design of the kid, he’s actually too old here, but I think I’m getting there in terms of ‘look’. 

morning sketch

1/2 hour sketch while on a break from cleaning up my storyboard work, which consists of drawing little cute bunny rabbits with big eyes over and over, and over again…but it pays the bills, so I’m not complaining here!

Cover process

I’m thinking of putting all my short stories in a comic and I worked on the cover this morning before starting work…I don’t know if this cover will survive or I’ll do another one at one point, but for now, this is what I think I’ll use.

Here’s my first rough, which was okay I guess, but lacked in terms of catching your attention as a cover should do.

Next I tried this one and I liked it better.

So I fixed up the drawing a bit and did a color study.