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Writing and drawing can blind you of one another. Work a book in pictures alone such as Iron Horse Ghost and you’ll find yourself with nothing to say and a lot of work to get back that meaning.

While drawing breakdowns of this story one thing became painfully true. I needed 2 more pages. Otherwise the story was too crammed, too vague. Got lucky that time and because of that I am able to provide calm before the storm.

Now for you comic artist out there. Don’t forget to also leave space for your word balloons and captions.

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It’s back to reality for our friend. Now that things heat up it’s fun to bask in his naivety. We all know what’s to happen. We’ve seen it before in countless monster movies.  This time it is just a little different. He still looks at it like the first time a a child would look at ant marching from an ant hill or hornets swarming a nest.

Combustion is a funny word. The type that makes common event’s sound just removed enough that they feel foreign.

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I had shown this page to some artist back in 2009 at the Stumptown Comic Convention (Portland OR). Their general feedback helped me a lot in the inking. Panel 1 for example uses a lot of little white lines to create the form of the car in the foreground I had to pay close attention to my inking to keep the foreground, middle ground and background  in that spot from getting blurry. I give myself a “C+” on that. To get an “A” it would have been easier to make the truck white but that’s not then the color of my truck. I was determined to have robyn and I in this picture.

The feedback I got is more visible on panel 4. That black area that makes a half circle on the top of the panel used to be white. Aliens hard at work on the BG and our hero first person view hands on the foreground. Not sure I like the rock texture on the last panel.

All in all I enjoy justapoxing the monster’s in the background and the people (panel 1). You’ll see lots of those.  Not so much into over the shoulder monster shots. You won’t see many of those.

This page features all the backstory I have for our monster. Is the last thing it remembers. It may be a little confusing. If you need help. That’s their ship on panel 3. That’s their escape pods on panel 5. Next week our hero focusses more on the present.

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As I examine this story in retrospect I like how simple it is. As you can tell already it is told in 1st person and in a generally progressive pace. Still for some reason it was really hard to write at first. Just getting the pacing to be slow and descriptive.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to visit an alien world. The best approach is to draw from real life experiences.  The firs time you get lost snorkeling in a coral reef and discover all the little life moving to and fro. Heck just think up a time where you sat in a field and took note of all the little insects.

This is perhaps the one page I would like to do over. There  are some elements of the backstory that are not quite clear. They were not important enough to require delay and yet I still think some folks would find it interesting.

The ship here was buried under a mountain. Opening the door created a small land slide. I liked how the moon in the last panel came out.

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This is the third and final fully illustrated story from my newest book Monstrosity. The goal here was to create a spooky giant monster story. In it, I did a few different things from the previous two.

For one I went into a more elaborate process where I did detailed thumbnails, scaled and traced on large 10 x 15 inch comic pages. I had not worked that big since college. Supposed to make your errors seem smaller when you shrink down.

Me? I just wanted to try something new. I used brushes pigment pens and dreaded sharpie markers.

Almost went blind.

This is story that made the whole project feel like a real giant monster that had to be defeated with lots and lots of hard work.

Enjoy.