Exciting Comic News!

Your excitement may vary. 🙂

Last weekend was the Kelowna Comic Expo and incidentally also my second non-artist-alley-table-having convention since my retirement! When I was considering retirement I had wondered what I would be doing with myself, apart from assisting my unretired wife, and that turned out to be:

– still drinking trenta iced coffees, as I did when I worked shows;

– not sleeping enough as a result, and;

– banging a complete 24-page comic script into my iPad that I wrote in my head whilst not sleeping.

The script didn’t suddenly spring forth Athenalike from my brow; its roots are here, on this Patreon. I like to draw original characters, but I have never bothered to flesh them out at all: one of my best friends for twenty years now is a writer—Michael McAdam of Two Gargoyles Comics, go check out his Patreii—and apart from doing joke-passes on scripts I’ve always been pleased to leave that ball firmly in his court.

But then I started drawing original-character gargoyle girl pinups here. I drew a cute shy freckled blue girl, and a devil-themed confident joie-de-vivre red girl, drew each of them (wildly inconsistently) a few times aaaand… left them there. Being pinup-girl archetypes and not much else. You can see them up there on my banner image.

I wasn’t satisfied with that. It felt like I owed them more than just forcing them to be puppets? As a pragmatist it makes no sense; as a fantasist it’s probably inevitable.

I named the devil-girl Veronica (after Veronica Mars) and I toyed with the name Molly for the blue girl (after Dresden Files’ Molly Carpenter) but I already know a Molly who is just the best. (Also on Patreon.) And while I despair that the Internet will EVER reach its saturation point of pervy old weird dudes, I strongly do not wish to join their throng, and drawing the sideboob of someone named Molly felt like going over that line. So I named her Maeve. It has a similar feel and I don’t know any Maeves. (Heard it on a podcast.)

Not good enough. And so, in the dark, not sleeping, I gave Veronica and Maeve THINGS.

One of Twogargs’ comics is Twilight Detective Agency, where two gargoyles (Hawkstone and Riverdale) hide their nature from humanity and investigate crime. It’s not set in Disney’s Gargoyles universe; Michael and I had bounced ideas around and set up an entirely different biological nature and cultural history for them, which of course they, as exiles, do not know and has yet to appear in the comic. But it’s in my head! And that was my starting point, and I thought of a setting and all the jokes and the plot. (In that order.)

And then during the two days of the show I turned on Pages’ Collaborative Mode and bashed Twilight Detective Agency: Girls Out into my iPad Pro. (I didn’t want to step on what is really Michael’s universe, so I let him watch me do it in real time, which doesn’t seem like it would help except that what I was actually doing was telling him a story.)

I’ve only done this once before. During a 24 Hour Comic Day while sitting in a mall I once wrote and drew a comic about a villain I’d created for another of Michael’s comics (Ball. Court.) and that comic turned out very much like a 24 Hour Comic Day comic. So this is new ground for me!

The script’s done, my next step will be panel layout and lettering in inDesign, and then actually drawing each panel, probably in whatever order I feel like. I know that lettering-first is not the way comics are done but as a graphic designer that makes the most sense to me so that’s what I’m doing. And I’ll post my progress here as I go! (It’s pretty Light Side, probably T for Teen. There will be a not-unreasonable amount of sideboob and Veronica does like to say fuck when needs must.)

I’m really excited about it! I hope you’ll enjoy it, too.