A Comic Seminar and Pitch. “Attic” Comic Completed. Another Comic Project Begins.

I’m beginning to think I really should be more focused in my blogs. Pick a theme or two and stick with it and not go off on tangents and trivialities. Keep the ramblings to a minimum; probably as an anecdote at the very bottom. And include at least 1 drawing/picture in each post. I claim to be a visual person and here I am putting up word after word after word without any pictures. More images it is then. Come to think of it, I’ll just make my blog’s theme be “visual storytelling” from now on. Comics. Storyboards. Animation. It’s so painfully obvious isn’t it?

Waitaminit. Did I just make a few late new year resolutions?

Anyways. So today I’ll talk about comics. I attended the “Comics to Films” seminar organized by Imaginary Friends Studios yesterday afternoon. They had Barry Levine from Radical Publishing come down and give a talk about what it takes to get comics to film. He also showed us a few sample artwork from upcoming comics/film projects both companies have been working on together. Two things stuck prominently in my mind after the seminar: (1) Radical Publishing doesn’t do superheroes. (2) Barry really likes painterly style artwork.
They had a pitching session afterwards where aspiring writers and artists present their ideas and Barry decides if he wants to help publish it. I took the opportunity to pitch one of the ideas Hafiz (my comics collaborator) and I have been working on, and was told that he’ll read through it and get back to me as soon as possible. Actually, part of the reason why I participated was to see what it would be like to pitch a comic idea. It was surprisingly easy-going and brief. Right now I’m cautiously optimistic over the outcome.
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Remember that b&w comics project I’ve been working on these past weeks? It’s called “Attic”. After all this time it’s finally finished and we’ve submitted it to an independent publisher to put in their anthology. The guy in charge seems to really like it so here’s hoping it’ll see print very soon. As a teaser, this is what the 1st panel looks like:

I did all the artwork and letters, and found inking to be something totally alien to me. Don’t get me wrong. I never had the mistaken impression that inking was “just tracing pencil lines”. I guess the tricky hatchings and the finality of inks place added pressure on me. I had to do quite a bit of research and practice before coming up with something I was more or less satisfied with. I ended up using loads of tracing paper to test out the lines and hatchings on top of the pencils. However, the upside of going through the whole process is that I’m slowly gaining confidence using the pen. In case you’re wondering, I used Copic markers primarily for my inks.
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As we’re putting “Attic” to bed, another comic project opportunity came our way. We discovered that another independent publisher is currently looking for submissions for a horror anthology. Being the prolific writer that he is, Hafiz came up with a cool short story in no time and handed me the script for a 6-pager comic. I’m at the character designs and layouts stages at the moment. I really need to step it up a notch and get the serious in-panel artwork going. The deadline this time is end January. Let’s hope I can finish it on time.
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Anecdote: I went to Dream Theater’s “Chaos in Motion” concert at Fort Canning Park last Thursday and - despite the pouring rain mid-way through - enjoyed myself tremendously. For almost 3 hours, they played most of “Systematic Chaos”, some blistering guitar and keyboard solos, and a choice selection of songs from their lengthy discography. The fact that more than a few were my favourites was definitely a major plus point. To sum it all up in one word: “AWESOME!”

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