New Pages at MTV

So you might already know that Power Out is being serialized on MTV Geek. New updates happen every Thursday. I've made a lot of changes to the book, and you start seeing new pages in this update. In fact; I think somethinig like the next 40 of 42 pages are entirely new material.


I'm a little nervous because I'm certain some people won't love the changes. I even took out a couple of scenes I really liked. Broadly though, I think it's a big improvement, particularly when taken as a whole.

You can read this interview I did with MTV last week that explains the changes, I think it's one of the better, if not the best; interviews I've done.





In this update you start to see one of the bigger developments with this update: Justin and Carrie's relationship. Through all my edits, I began realizing that this was the book, that Carrie's letters were the times in the book where everything really seemed to crystallize. The framework of the relationship is the same, but there's just more tension and tenderness.

Power On?

So some (I hope many) of you might be asking - what ever happened to Power Out?

I was working on the book earnestly in the beginning of the year when a golden opportunity landed in my lap - illustrating Jon Gruber's book on Health Care reform. Paid jobs in comics are rare rare rare, so I put Power Out aside and spend the summer working on Health Care Reform.  I wasn't sure when / how I would return to Power Out - I certainly wasn't making any money off of it (or I should say, what little money I made didn't cover the costs of printing the books) and unless I was prepared to live in my parents' basement for an extended period I wasn't sure when I'd get the book done.

But extremely talented cartoonist / journalist Sarah Glidden encouraged others to apply to a program she was doing in Angoulême called La Maison des Auteurs. I didn't think I would get it but hey, now I'm in France, working alongside some of the most talented cartoonists I've met, finishing up Power Out. And just my luck, mtv.com/geek is serializing Power Out in January, just to add a little more of a kick in the pants to finish it promptly.

This was a fun commission

You may have noticed I've tinkered with Power Out quite a bit - perhaps too much for some folks' tastes. There was a point when I was working on it in 2010 when I realized the story had gotten away from me, I couldn't really say what it was about with ease, and there was no bridge to the ending I envisioned. I hired Tucker Stone - a guy who's perspective on comics is consistently spot-on - to edit what I had and try to make a more focused work. I love what we came up with, even if it meant I'd have to go back and rework a huge chunk of the first two chapters. It's stronger work now, and I owe a great deal of that to Tucker.

So what's going to change? I'd certainly say there's more character development with Justin. He had a tough line to walk originally - he was a unique character but also served something as a cipher, which is a bit discordant. Now he's got harder edges, and since it's a little more clear why he's the way he is, I'm hoping he will actually be easier to identify with, if not someone the reader can substitute themselves for. Carrie plays a larger role, particularly in the beginning which makes sense because she plays a more important role in the end. Most importantly, the central theme of the book - the pleasures and perils of relationships, and the danger of disconnecting (Justin) or engaging too wholeheartedly (Carrie) is clearer while not quite being on the nose.

Anyways, I'll be pimping this come January, along with Health Care Reform. Yay. I kind of hate self-promotion while understanding how important it is. But I hope you like revisiting Power Out along with me, and please don't hate the changes too much!

My carte-postale for MDA

If I were in Santa Fe, I'd go to this....

Forgive the Tom Spurgeon impression - after all, I am in Santa Fe, so of COURSE I'll go to this! Also - it would be weird to not show up for your own book signing. Please join me and the always super helpful staff at True Believers Comics and Gallery for the advance release of Power Out Chapter 3. I'm probably going to bake cookies, or convince someone else they should, and on top of that, I'll be signing books, doing little sketches, and maybe giving a little talk on how I put this thing together.

Please come by! Or at least, visit the event's Facebook page. Please RSVP! A this point, it looks like nobody's gonna be there except me....

New pages of Power Out today: check em out here! It's cool starting the fourth chapter - the beginning of the end...

Drawin' Rocks!

Holy crap - ROCKS!!!

If you've been reading Power Out, then you know I have something of an obsession with natural textures. And I LOVE drawin rocks! There's just something about em - solid, interestingly shaped - like other natural things, you can throw so much of your interpretation to it. When you draw a 1984 Ford Escort, you don't have too much room for interpretation. But you can put whatever you want into natural stuff, and you can fudge the details!

Look! This is what rocks look like!

I got pretty good at drawing rocks when I was doing portraits of Haitian landscapes to benefit earthquake victims. I would draw a lot from photographs, and even though your hardass art teacher will tell you drawing from life is better (which it is), you can still learn a lot from using photos - even lo-res ones off the internet.

Haiti

When you're telling a story though, I advise not to rely too heavily on reference. Practice from reference in your sketchbook, but then do it from your head for the final page. I'm not a hardass - I'm firmly in the camp of "there's no cheating in art." But when you're telling a visual story, over-referencing can hamper things like storytelling and composition - a rock you make can be the perfect  shape for your page, and what's happening on it. So play god, it's fun.

those lines are my outline for the nine-panel grid - this panel is 2/3 of the page

So for this scene, I didn't want smooth, japanese garden rocks - I wanted hard, jagged, "HOLY CRAP - ROCKS!!!" rocks. They're getting pounded by the surf, but still appear immovable. You should feel like if you were in between the rocks and the surf, you'd be totally mangled! It's so much easier to capture raw emotion in a thumbnail, which is what I did here.

I circled the edges - look how many more lines are there

after blowing up my rough and transferring it to a piece of bristol with my handy light table, I start sketching in the details. A key thing about rocks - they're made up of planes, but you see more planes towards the edges. So your lines should "bunch up" around the edges.

When inking I basically outline the planes with a brush and then take a pen (crow quill Hunt 102, the standard) to shade some of the planes. I could just shade them with my blue tones, but when you can get bunch of parallel lines in one direction on a plane, it gives more depth to the rock. When these planes join and intersect, it gives a real shape and definition to the form.

Finish it up with a G-Pen for those fire-like waves, throw in some color and I'm done. Hooray! This page is kinda like an exclamation point - I wanted it to be loud !

!

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Carrie returns

Had to draw Justin's sister carrie again after a something of a hiatus. She figures prominently in the end of the third chapter and most of the fourth, so I really need to nail the character. I took all of my favorite images of her in the book so far and put it on one 8.5 x 11 for reference:

This proved very helpful. One of the biggest challenges of working a on a book as long as power out is that it's easy for things to change. You don't want to dial your style back, particularly as you improve, but the character's still have to look recognizable. I think this page turned out to be one of my favorite in the book so far.

 

Had a somewhat relaxing day to try and recover from the five finished pages (a personal best) I turned out last week. 106 more to go...

Sketchbook drawing!




You're going to be able to win this sketchbook at King Con! More details soon...