Retrospect on issue #6 and #7

It's been almost a couple months since the last entry, I'm happy to say that I just finished colouring Neozoic #7... 15 minutes ago.

September had been a crazy month for me, some freelance work kept me busy on top of winning a couple film festival awards and hitting NYC to attend the New York Anime Festival [run by the same people behind NYCC]. Soon as I got back I had to scramble to get the next issue out the door. By far it's been one of the toughest ones Korim and I worked on, for the amount of detail the both of us put into the pages this time around. Me I'm pretty happy how a lot of them had turned out.

There weren't a lot of reviews of issue 6, but here's a couple I found:

Kleefield on Comics
Comics and... Other Imaginary tales

In issue #6, many of the pages had been either night scenes and dark interiors, it's been difficult making the colours pop just right. Overall that book had been a joy to put colours on, at least for the first 5-6 pages where I got to paint a jungle scene or two.

I braved about 3 tropical thunderstorms and power outages to finish this particular beast, which by far is my favourite double page spread -


[Read more ▼]
To my horror, Quebecor had been the new printing company we had been using since issue 5. The paper they used was so thin, much of the ink soaked into the paper fibers resulting in a very dark desaturated look in the pages. In addition to having the same paper stock for the cover again for the second time, you can imagine the look on my face when I flew into a great flaming inner rage.

I died a little inside.

So in order to try to overcome that, I started overcooking the colours on issue 7 - by overcooking I mean cranking up the contrast and the saturation. WAY UP. A good chunk of the book takes place at dusk, sort of like with issue 3 and 4, for me that instantly means the green light to abuse all sorts of atmospheric effects.

Which I did in excess.

Issue 7 was by far one of the toughest books Korim and I worked on for the sheer amount of character detail we shoved into the pages. And we got to see more blood spilt, yay~! Crowd scenes still kinda scared me though, I haven't done those in a while. Time flew by pretty fast in the book, I got to do vary up some colours in the sky to show how much time had passed between each scene. Took a few all-nighters looking out my window to figure out which ones to try using, watching the sun rise was fun. And it made my eyes burn.

The work files I kept had varying levels of brightness of the pages, one version of those would be for the final print at Quebecor, and the not-as-bright version in case we switch printers again for the trade-paper-back.

Yes you read right, there will be a trade.

I got the affirmative from our writer Paul Ens that we'll have one for next year. When? I have no idea at all.. Might get a better inkling once we finish the last issue, from there we can start planning book tours and all that jazz.




Moving on forward, I had already coloured the issue 8 cover a while ago but I wasn't too happy how it turned out. I'll need to go back and fix it before we start working away on the last issue. I got no idea what to expect in the next script other than the slim possibility of a massive dinosaur stampede orgy. Ahhh... How nostalgic. Fun times.

FanEXPO day one-three!

[Edit 18.10.08]
Forgot to throw in some photos I took of the whole event, so here they are!


It's been crazy sitting in the same area as J.Scott Campbell, Adam Hughes and Tim Sale. The people traffic was through the roof for all three days. Would've been nice if all the Red 5 guys could sit with us but ah well. Maybe someday.

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So Friday's come and gone, but overall was pretty chill.

High points:
- pretty much broke even
- met old friends from previous conventions
- EAST SIDE MARIO'S PASTA!
- Curry's Art Store gave us some free art swag
- Korim and I did an impromptu interview on camera with FanEXPO staff
- took a photo with J.Scott Campbell
- grabbed two of Adam Hughes' new sketchbooks, the ones left over from the mad rush at SDCC

Low points:
- Liana K didn't seem to be around FanEXPO today, but I wouldn't be surprised if she was too busy to attend
- I got lost around the harbourfront area this morning
- the convention was not in the MTCC's North building, but in its South building [up 3 escalators, 5-10 min trek in the skywalk, down 4 escalators]
- con food sucks, not a single decent place to get grub in a 1 block radius so I had to walk a couple blocks further to find food


[I'd upload some pics, but I'll wait till all 3 days are done before I do another one of those compilation photo commentaries.]

Time to pass out, g'night everybody!

FanEXPO countdown

Time flies wayyyy too fast. T-minus 7 days till FanEXPO hits downtown Toronto!

As it turned out on this PDF of the floor plan, it looked like we ultimately didn't get that bonus guest booth BUT we still have a spot in the Independant Press/Artist Alley area and on the FanEXPO listings for "Special Guests".



You can find J.Korim and myself over at table A28!

We're just behind the cluster of DMF, Marvel, and G4 Tech TV booths. Be sure to look out for this lovely piece of table display and the stacks of Neozoic comics we'll have piled up on the table for your perusal. Fingers crossed we'll also have our early copies of issue 6 to display as well.

According to the map, we're also just a tiny skip away from comic giants J.Scott Campbell and Adam Hughes - *doubletakeWHAAAT?!

I'm looking forward to meeting those guys at Udon Entertainment again, I haven't seen them for aaaages! I missed Jo Chen at Otakon, but at least Alvin Lee will be around for FanEXPO XD~

Agh, so exciting, this year is gonna be awesome!

Otakon!

I made a small surprise visit to Otakon just last weekend and peddled Neozoic issues 1-5 and our FCBD special with Atomic Robo. I didn't expect to find comic fans familiar with Red 5 walking around the Artist Alley, but they seemed pretty happy about picking up a bunch of FCBD issues that their retailer ran out of or didn't stock back in May.

There were plenty of OOOHs and AHHHHs when con-goers were flipping through pages, but I had something else on hand that made them go completely ballistic:

I included a 5 page sneak preview of Neozoic #6 in my pop-up portfolio, everyone made happy stank faces at a certain double page spread that looked as if it'd come out straight from a videogame concept art book [best analogy I can come up with].

By Sunday afternoon, all my Neozoic issues were GONNNNNE.

Comic fans I'd tend to think are hard to please in general, but if they like what you have, they'll always come away from your table all happy and super lit. I think that's one of the best kinds of compliments an artist can get.

I survived Toronto Comicon, and all I got was an Atomic-Robo t-shirt.

Everything you need to know about my two days at Toronto Comicon is in the image below:


[Horrible photos and LOLZ-inducing narrative deftly written and edited by moi.]

Toronto Comicon was fun. Short. But fun.

Met shitloads of artists and con goers, most of whom were very nice and generous people. Met a TV personality and didn't know about it till I Googled her. Liana K co-hosted a show with ED THE SOCK. That's so awesome.

Sunday morning sucked for me though. Woke up at 6am. Got to the train station at 7am. Found out the trains wouldn't run till 9am, so I was stuck out in the drizzling rain zoning out with a mp3 player for 2 hours while dying for some form of caffiene.

My badge kept falling out so much I swore it was prejudiced against asians. At least until someone kindly handed me some duct tape, and some wine gums. Yum.

Over the weekend I yoinked an Atomic Robo trade from Scott Wegener's table, and later on grabbed one of his t-shirts for twenty bucks. I didn't go around asking for autographs or sketches from some of the big artists wandering around like Greg Land or Joseph Linsner, but I did get to shoot the breeze with them for a bit.

There was a Women in Comics panel that I missed the intros for, at first I was paranoid it was going to be some sort of feminazi schtick, but I was surprised at the boozing and schmoozing going on at the hotel bar and grill. While I was there I had a Sling and a Mike's Hard Lemonade, nothing crazy as I had to be sober enough to make the 2 hour trek home on public transit.

Now that it's all over, I'm fried and happy. Now to get busy on the last half of Neozoic #6!