2. "It's a drawing. It's flat."

It's been 2 months (almost 3) that I've started trying to develop my drawing and illustration in order to get going on this series. I started off trying to knock out the first five pages of our first issue, trying to find out what the feel and look should be. Ask my fiance, she'll tell you how much I went back and forth just on these five pages alone. Every time I picked up a comic book, I'd say "it should be more like this". Very, very frustrating. I started out pencilling, inking, and then using heavy shading and tried a lot of "realistic"-looking lighting in the coloring stage. I see a lot of really, advanced coloring techniques in comic books these days that make every page look like a movie. I figured since it's all I ever see, that should be the goal. So I did the first five pages like this one on the left.

The feel was nice and all, it worked for the night time, but as soon as I got to a day scene, the "shiny plastic" shading and lighting didn't work at all. It just looked like it was trying too hard to be real. After playing with it for weeks and weeks, I could almost here one of my most influential college professors in my head. (He said this would happen when we graduated, hah) Mr. Mead, who I studied a year of figure drawing under, would ingrain in our heads about the masters of painting. So, as I struggled with these 5 pages, I could hear him reminding us that a drawing is first and foremost a drawing. It's not trying to trick the viewer into thinking it's an actual person or an actual chair, it's a two-dimensional representation of a person or a chair. So, inspired by Mr. Mead and a handful of early '90s Amazing Spider-man issues I got for a few bucks, I decided that The Fencer is a comic book. That's it. It's a series of pictures that are on flat pieces of paper. So I re-colored the pages without any fancy shading, this time freeing myself up to use cheesy '90s comic book colors and to appreciate my mistakes. I gotta say, I'm never turning back. It takes half the time, and it's a hell of a lot more fun.