Broken Frontier

Starting today at Broken Frontier is the first in a major multi-part article series. For the next three weeks we'll be presenting, for your consumption, the fruits of a round table discussion on the creative process from Indie creators David Moran, Alex Sheikman (Robotika: For A Few Rubles More) and mpMann (Some New Kind of Slaughter, The Grave Doug Freshley, Inanna's Tears). To fully appreciate the insights the team give on their work click on the thumbnails of the individual pages discussed and enjoy them in their full glory! Look for the second offering this Friday...

David Moran : I love comics! I mean, I probably should, as I now write them (especially considering what it pays…), but I mean to say that I’ve always loved comics; and I know that I always will.

To me, there’s simply no better medium in which to tell stories, in this day and age or any other, because comics – I’m sorry, I should probably say good comics here – are the perfect fusion of words and pictures, a pairing together of both Art and Literature; plus, they’re so darn cool.

Now, as a writer, my artistic ability is probably a step or two above nil (I can’t even draw a decent stick figure to save my life), but I’ve always been both in awe and more than a little curious as to how artists work their magic.

So, for a WHILE now, I’ve been bugging my artistic collaborator on Robotika: For A Few Rubles More, the amazingly talented Alex Sheikman, to submit to something like this, basically me just asking him a whole bunch of questions about how he does what he does, why it works so well, and why it’s so darn cool, and Alex answering them, pulling back the curtain on the level of craft, care, concern, and thought that goes into producing a comic (and probably missed sleep).

But, much to my delight, another amazingly talented artist, the incomparable mpMann, whose works include the award-winning graphic novel The Lone and Level Sands, Inanna's Tears, Some New Kind of Slaughter, and The Grave Doug Freshley, also agreed to participate in our little discussion.

So, what you are about to read is a back-and-forth, round table discussion between two artists (who are both also writers) and one writer (who couldn’t draw the broad side of a barn) about the craft of comics, what goes in to conceiving them, illustrating them, inking them, writing them, lettering them, and even coloring them. Any fan of the medium, or anybody interested in maybe becoming a fan (or possibly even a creator themselves some day), should find it both informative and useful.

And we all sincerely hope you enjoy reading our discussion as much as we enjoyed having it.

But, first, my two esteemed collaborators will introduce themselves:

mpMann: Starting in the late 80s, I did work-for-hire comics for about five years. These were mostly black and white, small press affairs that never established too much of a reputation for me. But they were fun! The Trouble With Girls, Ape City, Flesh Gordon, Lizard Lady, Real Girls, Child's Play II, TAP... mostly I was an inker, but I thought of myself as a penciller who inked. As the industry changed in the early to mid 90s, I fell out of it and shifted gears to learn woodworking and furniture design, followed by classes in 3D modeling and animation. These eventually led me back to comics with a 240-page silent comic strip as a sidebar piece in Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative, which was created using 3ds Max. 

I had the bug again and started with some small press anthologies and mini-comics, then on to a year-long stint illustrating Arcana Jayne at Girlamatic.com. Together A. David Lewis and I produced The Lone and Level Sands , which led us to Archaia Studios Press, the Howard E. Day Prize and a number of other award nominations and accolades.

This last year and a half have seen the arrival of Inanna's Tears with Rob Vollmar, Some New Kind of Slaughter reuniting me with Lewis, and The Grave Doug Freshley , written by Josh Hechinger, and all published by Archaia Studios Press.

Moving forward, I look to begin illustrating more of my own stories. You can also check me out at my website: http://cosmorynth.com/

Alex Sheikman: I did a lot of illustration for Role Playing Manuals and I did a few black & white books, but Robotika represents my first serious effort at trying to publish creator owned material that I am involved with as an artist and writer. It has been a pretty interesting experience and I have created a blog (http://sheikman.blogspot.com) where I describe the daily challenges of trying to live a life and meet deadlines. I’m on the web at: http://www.sheikman.com/

ROBOTIKA: FOR A FEW RUBLES MORE

mpMann: Cover Image: One of the things I've told Alex is how much I like his character and set design, especially with regards to some of the imaginary stuff, which I think shows through pretty well in the cover illustration to the first issue of the new Robotika series (right). So, while everybody else is looking at the stern figure in the foreground, I'm looking at the butterflies behind him. From an iconic perspective, these are clearly intended as contrast and commentary of the warrior up front. The contrast: he is lethal, they are harmless. The commentary: his warrior skills are carried as lightly as these insects fly; his sword flutters through the air in its killing arc.

There's something else, though. The butterflies are unfinished. More accurately, they are not drawn in every detail. This makes perfect sense. They are small, more distant and moving, thus, as in real life, we do not register every detail in our mental image of them. This technique helps to give them the sense of movement that can be a challenge for comic artists, especially for artists with the smooth controlled line that Alex has. In contrast, the flies depicted on Page 1 of the first issue itself are very detailed. Their wings are held back so they don't appear to be flying, but because of the detail they don't seem to be moving much at all.

My own line is quite different from Alex's. I was never able to entirely get that control, so I work with fast energetic lines and strive for a sense of movement always. But I also use this loss of detail, to help direct the eye to the important parts and to suggest movement. For example, take this page from the second issue of The Grave Doug Freshley (Page 21 right), coming in April from Archaia Studios Press. Here you can see that the background figures attending the hanging in the first panel are just blobs of ink. Likewise, the two shots of the moving horse in the next two panels are rendered very impressionistically. In particular, in panel three, distinguishing the horse from rider and background shrubbery would be very difficult without the color to hold it. The color is also loosely applied, but otherwise kept simple, and is indispensable to making the art read.

David Moran: Marv, you noted that your style isn’t as finely detailed as Alex’s can sometimes be. Why is this? Is this a style that you have developed over the years because it allows you to work faster (I know you’re pretty fast), or is it vice-versa, and as you’ve refined your style over the years, you cut down on what you felt were a lot of "unnecessary" elements, thus allowing you to work quicker?

mpMann: A little bit of both, actually. I believe strongly in the energy of line and the strength of simplicity. At the same time, I am doing some very large scale projects, and don't really want to spend my life fussing over secondary details. So I draw small, I use markers, and I simplify the art. These things allow me to work quickly, yes. So does my comfort level with general image making. But it also helps to keep the art looking and feeling alive, and allows me to concentrate on putting the story over.

David Moran: Yet, in a panel of yours that calls for a close-up or a character to be expressing some sort of visible emotion, you always manage to do that very, very well and pretty expressively. So you can be expressive in your detail when you want to be, you just choose not to be most of the time. Why is that? When you approach a page, or even a panel, how do you decide what details should be emphasized in it, and which ones can just sort of be "alluded to" or thinly sketched in?

mpMann: I don't think it’s an increase in detail that makes for expressiveness. Many of my most emotionally expressive drawings are very reduced. Scott McCloud addressed this in Understanding Comics. We read an appropriately placed dot as an eye, and invest it with a living sense of resonance. I find that if the mark has energy, it places that energy into the eye or whatever, that it represents. An element of caricature is also helpful.

But I’m curious, Alex, what’s your work process like? I work form rather unfinished pencils for the most part. Do your pencils look like the inked finals, or are there many decisions made in the inking stage? What kind of tools do you use? Do you have other artistic outlets?

Alex Sheikman: I pencil pretty "tight" because I am very concerned with creating realistic looking figures and realistic environments. One of my biggest challenges is to bring some life and movement into the drawings during the inking stages because by the time I am ready to ink, I have drawn the heck out of everything and there is not very much spontaneity left. I am trying to add dynamics and right now I am trying to use a variety of different tools to create something interesting in the panels. I use a combination of brushes, dip pens, sponges, mechanical pens, markers…anything really.

Artistically, I am pretty limited. I did some sculpting for a while and even though I enjoyed it and the process appealed to my engineering side, I gave it up because I could not do both, drawing comics and sculpting. I just could not find enough time. I do spend a bit of time with the computer, playing with lots of different design ideas and hoping to learn Photoshop.

Join us on Friday for the second part of this series when, amongst other things, the team discuss the role of the colorist in the creative process...