The Empire of Frans

Every Saturday night I get together with pals and watch some bad movie and make fun of it. Thing is, unless you're a professional comedian like the guys at MST3K, riffing is not going to keep your mind from wandering away from a cinematic turd. 

That's why I took to drawing Fran from Final Fantasy 12 on my Samsung tablet.

I don't like much about using a phone or a tablet to do things that are much easier in other mediums, and drawing on device glass is certainly one of those dislikes. No tooth to it. Like ice skating. 

 They say that the point of doing something hard is that eventually it becomes easier. Like exercise. People who say that don't have their lower half failing, looking at life wheelchair within the next decade or so. But this is just me being bitter about getting old. 

 I can see that saying being true here with the Frans. There is a lot more control even though the line quality is somewhere close to a quick sketch in a sketchbook than finished art. 

While it's hard to point at directly, every success builds upon what you're capable of doing normally.

Turns out having limitations makes you find ways to do what you were planning to do anyway. Even if it's just to spite those limits.

  

I'll keep doing these Frans for as long as it remains more entertaining than the Godfrey Ho movies in front of me. Making art on glass holds no interest to me given everything I don't like about it at least the option is there.

Two Stories About Being An EFL Peddler

 

Miyakonojo, Japan. 2009? 

 

I was back home in Canada in the early Aughts because, once again, I got screwed by a sleazy South Korean employer. It was the wild west days before the Korean government put their foot down on everyone in 2008 and mine was just one of a thousand similar hard luck stories. 

Not wanting to throw in the towel on living in a place that was actually paying me a living wage... 

Sorry Nova Scotia. You have always massively sucked in this regard. 

...I spent a lot of that down time looking for ways to get to Japan instead. I found out that shitbag lying criminal EFL chain NOVA was running a job fair in my hometown. I dusted off my suit and went in to enjoy a long lecture about how awesome the company was to work for.

If you follow the link above you'll know that this was all a lie. No one but their teachers knew at the time.

I already had some experience running a class at the time so I wasn't some fresh-faced kid whos balls only recently dropped. I didn't have enough experience to know that this was exactly who they wanted to hire. That wasn't me. So they pulled what I later found out was a very old trick;

The interviewer, pretending to be a student, asked me a question about something that no kid would ask and any adult would just open their Japanese-English dictionary to find out. It was meant to trip me up and leave me sputtering, and it worked.

Confession: You can easily trip me up. All you got to do is come in from an angle that has little to do with the reality of a situation. Then I'll be stuck in a loop of trying to figure out what the fuck sort of game you're playing. 

Basically I'm too busy determining the size and shape of your bullshit to call you on it. I'm really glad the block button exists.

I was rejected, of course. Dodged a bullet. But it left me sour. I found out when I finally was working in Japan that Nova were always like that. Poor guy I knew, handsome, fluent, got caught up in Nova's well-earned collapse. He was a polyglot so he went to China the following month, already speaking the language.

Some people just got it. 

Gunsan, South Korea. 2016?

 

OVER A DECADE LATER... 

I was standing in a science lab in a small elementary school in South Korea. Before me were three of the school's teachers who were confident enough in their English to judge our demo lessons and pretend to be the students. Next to them was the principal and... I can't help myself sorry... Super Nintendo Chalmers. (sorry!)

 To my right was my boss and my partner teacher who despised me and I despised her right back. A story for later. To the left were the business owner and teacher of the EFL chain we were competing with for the contract to teach English in Gunsan elementary schools. 

They had just finished their demo lesson. It was a real quality presentation too. Power point, toys, flashcards, wowzers! It was real TV, man! How was I gonna compete with that? I barely prepared anything. I had a whiteboard and three coloured markers. 

I did wear a nice cardigan over a button shirt. I just hoped they didn't notice that my black trousers were actually jeans.

Sounds like I was doomed? Nah. We won the contract and I got all the teachers of the school saying good things about me. Now how did I pull that off?

I used my five minutes to teach them how to say who they were and where they came from using easy to remember drawings and memetic hand gestures.  I engaged with them directly. As if they were kids fresh in the class who only knew English via early morning TV. I talked to them. The competition talked at them. That shit works in university, not with kids.

Most importantly: The Korean teachers took acting like like a legit student seriously. Asking questions a kid would ask. Not the questions a shitbag lying criminal EFL corpo would because they wanted to hire some pretty young thing instead of someone who knew their shit.

Some people just got it.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Google

There have always been gatekeepers. And even if there weren't any to begin with, they quickly arose.

 Hip-hop, for example. If you could rhyme over your buddy's beatboxing, you were a rapper. Congrats. You can start a career on that.

Hey! Look! It's Biz Markie!

 (Man, YouTube integration with Blogger sucks. I guess AlphaGoogTube didn't think they could mine enough data from this.)

 As hip-hop became big business the gatekeepers kept out anyone who didn't talk about their guns. What if you wanted to rap about your delicious breakfast? Didn't matter. The white audience paying all the money wanted to hear about black people shooting each other. Can you rap about a drug deal gone wrong? No? Fuck off.

Gate closes. 

Comics had the publishers as the gatekeepers. Not just Marvel and DC. Fantagraphics and the artier publishers too. Heck, even the Japanese industry after Goku Spirit Bombed Shueisha into the biggest publisher on the planet.

Can you draw Spider-Man? No? Fuck off. Can you draw a punk rock cheese wedge? No? Fuck off. Can you draw a pointy-haired muscle man with a power scale? No? 消えろ.

Fuck off with this fun hobby shit, loser.

 Then the internet arrived. It was a weird place filled with passionate weird people and it was relatively small. Word of mouth worked like magic. You could hang out your shingle and there was a very good chance folks would come. You wanted to be seen for your ideas and creations and now you are seen.

YOU HAVE BEEN SEEN. FUCK YOU RIGHT BACK, GATEKEEPERS!

Then people started making money from it. They didn't have the name for their method of making money just yet. We'd later know it as The Parasocial Relationship. All they knew is that it worked. 

The cherry on the top was that, if you were petty and manipulative enough, you could use that relationship as a weapon against people who displease you. It's a gun so effective that it's still in use today. 

Moneyed classes saw this and realized they can make a shitonne of money by promising everyone their own parasocial relationships. They can make money from it and punish their enemies! Who can resist that? All they wanted in return was all of your personal information and that you watch this nice advertisement they made for you.

That parasocial relationship isn't just as addictive and mind-altering as the blue meth is. It's also mandatory if you want today's gates opened up for you. Can use your parasocial relationship to deliver people to have their lives invaded and turned into a sales pitch? No? Fuck off.

Sadly, most folks don't want to fuck off. They want the blue meth. Considering the world we live in, they're right to do so. You can't walk away from Omelas when everywhere is Omelas.

Here's a fun sketch of Fran to take your mind off of your neo-serfdom.

 I have been hearing whispers that there is a growing resentment from towards their only options being the gates or the blue meth. That a lot of folks are preferring to simply walk away from the online world like it was Omelas rather than make that choice. 

No idea if it's a real social change or just newsblogger horseshit, but I often have a similar urge and there are many days I wish I would just listen to it. There's no place for me to hang out my shingle anymore like there was in 2002 and no one will be reading this unless an algorithm tells them to do so.

Yeah.

But.

Is that right though? I'm blogging right now. Blogging is dead last I heard. Xitter killed it.

The gate is attached to a fence and fenced in spaces are finite by nature. Reasonably there should be more outside of it. That's something to consider. 

I have been. I just haven't figured out the best dirt road to tramp down yet.

(And that's why I'm so unreliable.)  

AID 6: More things to keep in mind

 Overall I'm pretty happy with the growth my art is having and the directions I'm going in with it. 

As always there are things where I didn't reach the goals I was aiming for. That's what this blog series is for. For me to see if I can pinpoint where execution and intent failed to meet and try to keep it in mind for the next time I put ink to paper

_____ 

 The hand-lettering is definitely unpolished, but it fit with the look of the comic far better than any font ever has. The polish will come with practice, but there are a couple of letters I plan to try and keep an eye on when I'm drawing them;

 Keeping the letters consistently touching the guidelines is a general issue, but drawing the U as a single line makes it too easy to have the letter float. Same happens with the O. O also has... tails?... from where the two halves fail to meet.

I think the U in squirrel here is the best way to approach it. R in general has a good shape. It's attaching the right leg in a good spot I need to remember. 

As for the visuals...

 Digby could have used some thicker lines on the right side and some shadows being cast by the shelf to get across the idea of the lamp being the room's light source a bit better, but this is nitpicking. You can see the sequence of events on the page clearly and that's all that matters.

This installment was laid out with the idea of using a digital font. Large for the phone user, space consuming for the artist. 

When I decided to pull the trigger on hand lettering I did a few trials finding the best height on the lettering guide to be readable for as many people as possible without it overpowering the art. That's what you see there.

It left me with a lot of empty space though. Redoing the panels to have a better balance would have required an amount of work that wasn't too far off from just doing them from scratch. Nah. Roll with what you got.

 Now that I know I'm hand lettering, the old "Balloons First - Art Second" method will be used for the layouts. Which should carry through all the way to the inks if I did it right.

On to character design;

 Sydney's design was made as a contrast to Digby in every way. Tall bubbly space babe vs the short frowny Earth woman. Long hair vs short. Wide open sparkly eyes vs half lidded and dull.

The long bangs and bored half-closed eyes were a poor choice IMO. We're a face focused as a species and the eyes are the anchors of that. What I have makes it hard to depict subtle emotions and I find it too easy to get the proportions wrong. And even if they're right they look off. 

 Going forward I'll be shortening the bangs and having them combed off to the side a bit. I plan to grow out her hair as well.

Lastly, hands.

 

The pencils were fine. I always go off the rails when inking the fingers. I don't know why. If I had to guess I'd say that I tend to make long dramatic lines and tiny stuff is always wibblies. Fingers need a lot of fineness and carefulness that I'm lacking. I'm either making mad lines or tiny wibblies instead of fingers.

I'll just have to grit my teeth and keep fighting my own hands to ink hands.

_____

So what is my intent for this comic? 

1. I want to make something that feels like an indie comic from the 80s or 90s. Something you'd see photocopied, folded, and stapled with a single staple.

2. I also want to revive some of that old Archie comic skill of telling a complete story in five to eight pages.  

3. Just generally become a better writer and artist than I am now.

4. MAKE A BILLION DOLLARS!

That last one might not happen but the rest will. I just need to keep banging at it. 

AID 5: Letters

Lettering is one of the toughest skill sets to learn in comics. Most people don't learn how to do it, leaving the job to Blambot or some unknown on 1001Fonts. It's the only skill I can forgive comics artists for avoiding. 

 You're fighting a life time of hand writing... or thumb typing depending upon your generation... and lettering is not writing. Lettering is drawing shapes that look like your alphabet.

Shapes that need a lot of consistency. Computers do that a lot better than people. 

Hand lettering or ransom demand. You decide. 

"...thirty thousand in unmarked bills behind the 7/11...

 But I see it as another tool in the kit that I need to work on if I want Project Git Gud to have any meaning. 

_____ 

Today I laid out some lines with the Ames Guide and got to work. Goal One was simply gaining more control over my lettering. Goal Two was figuring out how small I can make the lettering on the page while kindly keeping it tall enough to be readable on a phone screen.

Not gonna lie, I'm considering telling the phone-only audience to go kick rocks. Yeah, they're 99.99% of the comics readership in the 2020s, but I want to have more dialog in each panel and I can't do that and give them something easy to read on their baby screens at the same time.

It's actually a magical talisman only wizards understand.

 IYKYK- The above was mostly done with the guide set to 7 or 6. IIRC print comics like Spider-Man are usually around a 3 or 4. I think I'll settle with 6. 

We'll see.

_____

The things I learnt today while practicing that I'll keep in mind; 

 1. Calligraphy nibs lay down ink a lot faster than a g-nib or maru nib. 

I need to keep the nibs wet as I go or they dry out in the middle of a letter, creating a ragged look.

2. Laying out the dialog space and the word balloon dimensions is a vital first step. 

 I haven't been doing that simply because I could move things around in software to fit everything in. For this installment I'll be wedging dialog in awkwardly. 

3. G... o... s... l... o... w...~ 

Whenever I started speeding up I stopped drawing alphabet shapes and started just writing. I can see it up above and I assume everyone else can as well. It causes an inconsistent visual.

_____

p.s.

I think I need to adjust my scanner settings. A lot of smoothness is getting lost. It's probably just the threshold for what's considered white and what's considered black. A small tweak, but I just need to remember to do it. 

AID4: Gag a Day

 

A desk full of chaos

 

Looking Back

I'm constantly trying to figure out a format that can work as a page and a scroll... and as something I personally find visually appealing. The previous installment wasn't able to stick the landing with the scroll IMO. It needed taller gutters and taller page breaks and the result was too dense for the scroll format.

It worked better as a "page". 

Dialog also remained a bugaboo. Too big. Too few words. Too 3rd grade reading level. I don't like it. It overpowers the art. I'm making a comic, not a visual novel.

But the world insists on looking at things on a tiny phone screen and they need giant text. What can be done besides giving in and drawing in a Webtoon format?

I'll keep chewing on that one. 

Looking Forward  

Plan 1. As you can see above the next few pages will be two by two. Newspaper style gag strips historically work well online so I'm going to borrow from that format. 

I decided to abandon the 4-koma approach to the next installment simply because it required changing the cadence of some of the story and I wasn't happy with the additional panels needed to keep that beat up. 

Having them scroll by one panel of a time creates far too much empty space. It's one of the reasons I don't draw in Webtoon style. I just don't think it's a pleasing reading experience seeing more gutter than comic.  

Plan 2. I'm still thinking of making the reading experience smoother for phone scrollers. I've started making the horizontal gutters and the page breaks taller.

Plan 3. As always: Hands. I find that my pencils for hands do look okay. It's when I ink them it all goes haywire. That's when I need to increase my vigilance.

Plan 4. I'm going to attempt some hand lettering. It'll be limited to emotes and sound effects first going on. But I will hand letter the dialog with blue line pencil to get a good gauge of how big I should be making the text in relation to the art.

Status

Layouts are mostly done as of this writing. Three pages left. 

Finished pencils are next.

Art Improvement Diary 3: Random Musings As I Gear Up For Pt.4

Click to embiggen

 _____

I decided that five to six traditional pages per installment is the format for Digby. I decided this after reading a lot of old Archie comics AND a lot of old 2000AD progs. 

While the 2000AD progs were segments of a longer story, they did tell a complete event in their five pages. Archie generally told a full tale within its limited page count. I admire the skill of being able to tell a story in such a economical way. The first John Wick was like that. Dead wife, dead puppy, stolen car. Fifteen minutes in and Russian mobsters start dying in entertaining ways.

 In theory it'll make the posting come faster, but I'm not leaving my "When it's done" schedule. Comics are too much work for the sole reward of knowing I finished it.

_____ 

Up above you see a three panel gag. I noticed in part 3 that a lot of the cadence of the story was very 4-Koma like. You might have seen the formula in manga like Azumanga Daioh and K-On! A comedic version of old newspaper adventure strips where a story was told in three or four panel chunks.

Part 4 had that cadence as well. I decided I was going to move out of my comfort zone with it and actually do it as a series of 4-Koma. Pushing yourself to do difficult things is all part of any Project Git Gud.

The thumbnails look good IMO. Next is the actual getting-it-drawn part, which I'll start next week.  

_____ 

I accept that keeping Digby a black and white comic is not going to get my comic eyeballs. Comics readers only like black and white comics if there's a ninja turtle or anime titties in it. Otherwise they hate it.

Personally, I always see a lot of excellent comic art marred by adding colour. I also see a lot of bad comic art being carried by the colours. I definitely need to keep working on how I do my black and white, but I feel that's the look that works best for the comic I'm making. Colour won't improve anything visually. 

Colour will pander to the limits of others, but if I'm going to do that, I might as well start drawing Digby as a big titty anime girl and tracing Clip Studio assets.

 Bah! to that! 

_____

However the saying "Know your audience" is a wise one. I find in 2020s the audience for comics online are generally weebs and Tumblr kiddies and they only like certain types of comic. No hate. The middle-aged Wednesday crowd at comic shops are the same way. It's just in the nature of fandoms.

I won't lie to myself about most of it being my fault. If I want those eyeballs I must draw in those styles. Even if it's done badly, it's like what they like and that's the important thing. When all is said and done, me not doing that is me kneecapping myself.

 On most platforms. 

When I look at the platforms I've been using since I started drawing comics again;

Site A - All of my love came from other artists.

Site B - All of my love came from site runners. 

Site C - All of my love came from readers. 

I do appreciate all of the folks who showed me love on sites A and B, but it makes sense to put all of my focus on Site C, doesn't it? In theory they're the ones doing the word of mouth.

Dare I put all of my eggs in one basket? 

Okay. Egg. I have one egg.  

_____

None of that matters until I can level up my skills to the point that it's undeniable the people not reading Digby are missing out! I will keep in mind every bad habit I uncovered drawing Part 3 and strive to not repeat them. 

Back to the grind next week.

Next week because I'm still sore from my return to swimming yesterday and I'm a giant ball of ouch.