Blackjack Redux

There's one more flashback in Love and Capes #6... one with Abby and Mark.

With this, there are three pages left. I should get page 22 done tomorrow. And, depending on things, I should have everything wrapped up on Tuesday. That's way ahead of schedule, and I'm crazy jazzed about that.

Breakfast of Champions

In Scene Magazine today is a little illustration I did for them some months back. Every year, they do a Best of Cleveland issue. I've been lucky enough to work this, their highest-profile issue of the year, a couple of times and even won an award for it. This year's theme was a kind of Wheaties/Breakfast of Champions thing. They needed some artwork for the back of the cereal box that they gave to award winners and called me.

The final image features a lot of Cleveland items, including newspeople Dick Goddard, Paul Orlowski, Denise Dufala and Sharon Reed, Yankees fan LeBron James, Iron Chef competitor Michael Symon, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, The Rock Hall, the Veteran's Memorial Bridge, The Terminal Tower, Slider and, of course, orange construction barrels.

I really like the way this came together. The image is running in Scene this week as well, so if you'd like to see it, pick up a copy.

The Big 2-0!

Here's the page where the Other Shoe drops. What shoe? I can't tell you. Sorry. You'll have to buy the book for that.

I'm surprised, sometimes, how well things come together. I kept trying to figure out how Amazonia would make her entrance into the bookstore, and then came up with the idea of having Abby borrow a portable teleporter pad. It got her in position quickly and cleanly. And having it there allowed me to transition Mark into the bookstore.

I've got four pages left, exactly the number of games the Tribe needs to win against the Boston Red Sox. Heck, depending on how fast we both do our jobs, we may finish on the same day.

I Can See the Finish Line Now

Page nineteen is done! Five to go!

In this page, Mark confronts Zoe about her book and portrayal of him. It's not as confrontational as I'd originally intended, and certainly not as much as this panel may indicate. But it is the first real indication of The Second Shoe that's going to drop. It's also Amazonia's last appearance in this issue.

When I first created Amazonia, I never thought she would be as popular as she became. She wasn't even supposed to be in the second issue at all, but as I was working on it I started receiving reaction about her and knew I had to give her a scene. There's a temptation to use her too much, but much like Worf in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation she works better in small doses. But issue #6 is the most she's appeared in one story.

Heck, she may have more screen time than Mark or Abby in this one.

Hopefully, the character becomes a little more well rounded (metaphorically, as physically it'd be hard to add any more curves) without losing her edge in this story.

Torre! Torre! Torre!

I put page eighteen to bed just as the Indians were putting the Yankees' season to bed. Go Tribe!

Six pages left to go, and this is Amazonia's penultimate appearance in this issue. I got to create a new super villian, the Kingfish, for a one-off joke, which was nice. This is the first bad guy who shows up in this book, and is one of a handful to appear in the six-issue run. The only recurring foe in the book is The Evil Brain, who much like Vera in Cheers or Merris in Fraiser, never appears on screen.

I probably won't get a page done today, but there's a good chance I could have the book wrapped up by the end of next week. How cool be that?

The Sound of Helicopters

The obsession's getting worse, given that I've had my first double day, where I did two pages of Love and Capes. I had the advantage of a full Sunday to work, a fairly simple page where I'd already designed most of the backgrounds, and an Indians game to watch. Well, the Indians game wasn't so much an advantage after the fifth inning.

This page was oddly painful to write. Here, we see how Zoe and Mark end their relationship. Over the years, I've broken up with a few people, and been broken up with a couple more times than that. I had to call on a lot of those experiences to write the super break-up, which wasn't particularly pleasant. And I like both characters, so making Mark say those things, and having Zoe hear them wasn't all that fun either.

But, I think the page works. And, I'm pleased that each end panel (four and eight) does end with a joke. Not one that takes the edge off the scene, but given that there are a lot of "serious" beats near the end of the book, I'm glad that I could keep some smiles in this section.

And, here's a little bit of trivia: In issue #4, I did a "How a page comes together." In that, you can see that I've drawn a lamp, based on an IKEA lamp that I saw once. It was supposed to go in Mark's apartment, but it didn't work. That lamp appears in Zoe's penthouse in the left hand corner. Nothing's ever wasted here in the Love and Capes universe.

En fuego

I have officially reached the "obsession" stage of Love and Capes. I now have eight pages (or one-third for you mathies in the audience) left to go. And I'm sorely tempted to start, and maybe finish, page 17 tonight if I can. I'd love to blow off the next week and just finish things up, but that's not feasible.

I guess when I hit this stage, I'm pretty set on the finish. There are chunks of the middle where I write something like "put funny stuff about Abby's taxes here" but no real concrete idea what will happen. By page 16, I've already got everything up to and including the dialogue locked in, and it's just kind of going through the motions and I just want it done. In a good way.

Flying (Sequences and Insects)

If you could read all of page fifteen, you'd say "Aha! That's the big reveal for issue #6." And you'd be wrong, because there are three, count 'em three, major revelations in this issue. Wow, that's a lot to pack into 24 pages.

In this page, Amazonia and the Crusader are flying back from meeting the winner of the Who Wants to Create a Hero contest. And, obviously, Amazonia was not impressed.

For the most part, I write LNC as if it were a sitcom, complete with the occasional budgetary restraints. I don't show superhero fights or do big special effects sequences. I'm playing fast and loose with this as a flying sequence might be a little too complicated to film on a TV show budget. But, on the other hand, it's still not an action sequence, so I think it fits in seamlessly.

And, I have to say, I think I'm pretty good at staging flying sequences. I'm not sure why, maybe it's years of watching Star Trek and Star Wars movies learning how to orient objects in space.

As dopey as it is to point out, notice that Mark and Zoe are flying to the left in this sequence. They flew to the right when they went to meet the Hero-to-be-Named-Later.

On a completely unrelated note, how evil and soulless do you have to be for God to send a plague of locusts to attack your relief pitcher? Yankee Evil, that's how much. Maybe next frogs will take the field or the East River will turn to blood. Go Tribe!

And Presenting [Name Withheld]...!

Fourteen already? Why, ten more to go and still 27 days left in the month (and my deadline)? Things are kind of going okay then.

A lot of times I have to decide what panel to post. This one was simple, though, as every other panel features the winner of the Who Wants To Create a Hero contest. I don't want to reveal that character or the winner yet, and this is the only panel that the winning character doesn't appear in. So there really was only one choice.

I'll talk more about who won and why at some later date. But the winner created a character who inspired the first joke of the page, and I certainly appreciated being served a hanging curve to nail out of the park.

Speaking of baseball, the Cleveland Indians start the playoffs against the soulless New York Yankees. Go Tribe!

Come Fly With Me

Finally past halfway!

This is from an extended flying sequence between Crusader and Amazonia. You can't see it here, since I chose this panel because it was a cool image and not the dialogue, but I worked hard to show the passage of time without any of those much-hated "as you knows". For instance, Amazonia calls Crusader "Mark", showing that they've been together long enough for him to reveal his secret identity. There's also reference to her being a member of the Liberty League, too, another change since the first flashback.

I'm pretty happy with how this sequence turned out, especially with how well the clouds worked. There's nothing like the interweb for doing a little photo reference to get these things right.