6. Issue No. 0 - The Prologue (Part 1)

It seems like these blog posts are becoming a regular 6-month thing, but that's only because it's taken so long to get to this point. As you can see from the video at the top of The Warrior's Journey page, I have made some significant progress since the last post from December. Back then, I only had about four pages sketched and was struggling big time with page number five. I was getting repeatedly stuck in trying to compose the page in a way that made sense to the story and was readable to the viewer. I literally got stumped by that page for several months - I would look at it, try something, didn't like it, and then ignore it for a couple of weeks ... it was a viscous cycle.

What finally broke that cycle was giving myself a hard deadline. Last September, I sold some prints at a local Comic Con, and when I told people about the idea for my comic, they were very excited and said that if I have it when I come back the following year, they would definitely buy a copy. So with that in mind, I gave myself a hard deadline of having a completed comic book printed and ready for sale by September 19th (when I return to that Con). At the same time, I also made the decision to break up what I had originally planned to be Book 1. I decided to make the prologue a stand-alone issue, dubbed Issue No. 0 (I recall thinking about this in the last post...). Making this split allows the work to be completed by the deadline I set because it's less pages than what would have been Book 1. It's still a mountain of a workload, but it's manageable ...as long as I stick to the plan. Both of these decisions forced me to push through my own metal block regarding Page 5, and get something down onto the page.

Finally finishing the pencils for Page 5 gave me the motivation I needed to finish sketching out the roughs for rest of Issue No. 0. I literally did that in one shot while at the beach. I ended up with 11 pages, which I thought was a manageable amount given the deadline. So, for the 12 weeks until the show, I wrote up a plan to complete the finished pencils, inks, colors, word balloons, front cover, back cover, and a couple of written pages talking about my journey so far and where this story is going (called the Creator's Corner). It was a tight schedule, but still manageable. However, me being me, as soon as I uploaded these pages to my computer to work on them in Clip Studio Paint, and got to work on Page 6, I realized that I was missing quite a few details in the action sequence. Thankfully, I was on vacation from my day job for a week and was able to use that time to not only add five more pages, but also finish the pencil work for the whole thing (minus the covers, which I plan on doing once the interiors are finished).

Now I'm at a point where I am inking the interior pages. My original plan was to ink all the pages first, then add the flat colors, and then the final colors. But... once I finished inking Page 1, I couldn't help myself and decided to go all the way with it. It was a fairly easy page to finish because it's mostly in space - and I love drawing/painting space stuff.

What I like about Page 1 is the simplicity of it. There's a spaceship sling-shotting around the Moon, heading towards Earth, and coming from Mars. We get a first look at the ship itself, and the narration boxes introduce the readers to the crux of the story - how humans exist. This seemingly simple page sets up everything that is to come in the larger story. The narration boxes also tell the reader that this story is being told by someone - that someone will be revealed at the end of this prologue. Next, we move right into Page 2 - which I have also just finished.

This page was a lot of fun! Drawing the fighter jets brought me right back to my old Air Force ROTC days when I would dream of flying those jets. That didn't work out due to less than perfect eyesight, but I digress.... This is a much more dynamic page that was designed to bring the reader right into the high-flying action. The narration/speech balloons also inform the reader that there is both some kind of history here and also a bit of a mystery - the "Unidentified spacecraft" implies that these people are not familiar with this ship (which is reinforced by the red lasers shooting at the jets), but the "violating Terran space" implies that these fighter jets are reacting to this ship entering the Earth's atmosphere through some sort of protocol - which further implies this kind of thing has happened before. The reader may notice that there are no markings on the jets. That was intentional because the organization behind those jets (and the response to the spaceship) is not known to the world at large. What I did include is the symbol I plan on using for the Meta Force Army (or should I call it Meta Force Agency??) Either way, this symbol of a winged disc is important to the story. Winged discs have always been associated with ancient gods, and that will play a very big part later on. Also, the front view of the space ship almost looks like some kind of menacing face coming right at you - that pareidolia wasn't intentional, but I like that it's there. All of these things are subtle, but they're there, and hopefully the reader picks up on them.

Those are the only two finished pages thus far. Page 2 was fun, but also challenging because I don't normally draw a ton of mechanical stuff. That will change as the story moves along, but still, it was a challenge. The fighter jets themselves were based off of an F-35 Lightning, but I simplified it, and it actually looks more like an older F-18 Hornet (minus the yellow and blue coloring of the Navy). Now, technically, I am almost two weeks ahead of my original schedule, but with the five additional pages, it's probably going to balance out. I've got two pages completed and another 14 to go, plus the outside front cover, interior front & back covers, and the outside back cover.

I'm sure I'll post another update in a few weeks when the book is completed. Until then, there's a lot of work left to do, so I'm going to get back to it!

Cheers!

-- Matt