big spoilers for Wet Moon 6 and 7 under the cut!!! beware!
Friday, December 28, 2012
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Wet Moon 6 FINAL PREVIEW PAGE!
i did so much research on the hospital equipment, including talking to professionals and relating to them Trilby's condition and what equipment would be used, and one nurse even snuck into unoccupied ICU rooms at her place of work to take secret photos for me! :O she risked her job for Wet Moon!
the boy here is Trilby's brother Mat, who hasn't been introduced but i wanted another one of Trilby's several siblings to be there, since it was mentioned in a previous book that she has a large family. i figure the other siblings are older and off at other colleges or living in other cities. the others, including the already-introduced Minnie (also seen here), are Tila, Truman, and Wily; i'm not sure yet if they will be eventually introduced in the comic or not. i have lot of background material that never or barely gets used.
ANYWAY, this is the final preview page! thank you everyone who's been reading along and especially thank you to everyone who has commented, it's been very much appreciated. thank you to everyone who has bought the book or is planning to, too. i really hope the preview and my commentary were worthwhile, and for those of you who had been waiting since volume 5, i hope Wet Moon 6 is worth the wait.
thank you as always for all the support! it's super amazing and flattering and a total honor for me that anyone reads my stuff and even gives a tiny shit about it. you guys make this all possible, so thank you for this amazing cartooning career i've been able to pull off for the last 9, almost 10 years (i think?). i've been so lucky and i'm so grateful.
THANK YOU!!!! <3 <3 <3
so now that the mushy stuff is out of the way, even though the WM6 preview is over, i want to keep posting here with exclusive Wet Moon stuff. i've been thinking about posting other people's fanart, character profiles/bios (what their favorite books/movies/etc. are, stuff like that), and maybe a behind-the-scenes/making-of for Wet Moon 7, but i'm not sure if that would be too spoilery. what do you guys think? any other ideas or anything you're particularly interested to see?
| PREVIOUS | -- |
| page 43 | -- |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Friday, October 26, 2012
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 38
thank you so much to everyone who came by my table at New York Comic Con!!! <3 thank you!! i truly appreciate it.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 37 | page 39 |
| start at page 1 | |
Friday, October 12, 2012
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 36
i hate drawing showers and characters showering!
a couple people have asked me what color Myrtle is dying her hair, and i'd say it's up for interpretation since it's never specified in the book but in my head she's bleaching it blonde.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 35 | page 37 |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 35
my perspective kind of sucks on this page.
so! i will be at New York Comic Con this year, in Artist Alley at table R8! which is cool because it's like 'R' as in my first name then 8 as in the number of letters in my last name?!? XD
i'll have Wet Moon 1-6, Shadoweyes 1-2, Glory (both issues and the trade), TMNT: Leonardo, Mountain Girl, maybe a couple Water Baby copies, prints (Wet Moon, Shadoweyes, TMNT) which may or may not be free, maybe some buttons/pins if i can fit them in my suitcase, some original art, and i'll be doing however many sketches i can manage.
when i'm not at my Artist Alley table, i'll be signing at the Oni Press booth:
Friday: 3:00-3:45
Saturday: 3:00-3:45
Sunday: 2:00-2:45
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 34 | page 36 |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 34
man, Slicer keeps digging himself deeper and deeper into his hole.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 33 | page 35 |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 32
in case you missed my previous post, WET MOON 6 IS FINALLY OUT!!! it came out on Wednesday!! thank you again to everyone who pre-ordered it, everyone who went out and got the book on the release day, thank you to everyone who has already let me know what they thought of the book, everyone who's planning on getting it, and everyone who's stuck with me and waited all this time since volume 5. i hope more than anything that volume 6 is worth the wait. here's to volume 7. :)
if you pre-ordered the book on Amazon, the site says right now that the book isn't released yet, but Amazon usually functions that way, because of how the distribution works they tend to get their shipments a bit later than the brick-and-mortar stores do.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 31 | page 33 |
| start at page 1 | |
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
WET MOON 6 IS OUT TODAY!!!
thank you to everyone who's been patient all this time since volume 5, thank you to everyone who's stuck around, thank you to everyone who pre-ordered the book, thank you to everyone who will order the book, and thank you to everyone who likes it. i seriously hope it's worth the wait!
THANK YOU!!! <3
i'll continue to post pages from the book, though, i have 11 more pages of the preview. :)
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 31
you guys saw my previous post, right?!?!? :D Wet Moon 6 is less than a week away!
haha, Fall in panel 5.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 30 | page 32 |
| start at page 1 | |
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Friday, August 24, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 30
Fall and Slicer are two of my favorite characters to write, i love the dynamic between them and Audrey overall, i wish i could find more pagetime to give them. this particular conflict between the three of them is difficult but i like the challenge. i like trying to figure out how to present each of their sides of the conflict without making them either 100% likeable or 100% unlikeable.
i wrote a high-school-era flashback of Audrey and Slicer showing them in their early days, before Audrey got sucked into Slicer's whirlpool of trouble, but it got cut. hopefully it'll make it into volume 7.
if all goes like it's supposed to, Wet Moon 6 comes out in book form in just a couple weeks!!!! :O
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 29 | page 31 |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Friday, August 10, 2012
Friday, August 3, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 27
i posted this page a while ago on my deviantart page so sorry to anyone who's already seen it!
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 26 | page 28 |
| start at page 1 | |
Friday, July 27, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 26
i think i've talked about this before elsewhere but sometimes i feel like i've painted myself into a corner with Fern. she has all these mysteries around her and there have been some reveals like her talking about her family in volume 2 or the earlier scene in this volume, but i get the sense that at this point any further reveals about who she is or where she came from or what she's doing will never live up to what readers likely have in their imaginations. it'll probably just disappoint in an "oh. that's it?" way.
there is more to reveal about her (whether it's interesting or not is another thing, heh) so i should probably just say screw it and do it anyway, but sometimes i wonder if leaving things mysterious is the best way to go, but then i also wonder if not providing any real answers is a jerk move. back in the early books i didn't think much of it, i had all the time in the world, i'll get to it and the mysterious stuff is part of the comic, but now that i'm outlining the final few books in the series, it's looming over me to really figure out how much to reveal and and how much to leave unanswered.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 25 | page 27 |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Friday, July 6, 2012
Friday, June 29, 2012
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 21
i may have mentioned it before on my website or livejournal in the past, but Penny, not Cleo, was the main character in the story that would later transform into Wet Moon. Cleo predates Penny by a few years, in a form super different than what she ended up being (i should try to find some old pre-Wet Moon artwork of some of the characters. Cleo was a 4-armed magical warrior faerie originally created for a Changeling: The Dreaming tabletop gaming campaign i was running, but that's a whole other blog post! XD), but Penny was the first real Wet Moon-type character i had and she's remained pretty much unchanged.
anyway, while Cleo was off in my tabletop games and also an unrelated fantasy sci-fi story i was writing, Penny was busy in a short story i wrote for my comic scripting class at the Savannah College Of Art & Design in 1999, sowing the seeds for Wet Moon. i can't remember what the assignment was but the idea was Penny was an interior decorator who was tangled up with a bunch of weird Twin Peaks-y clients and she gets inadvertently sucked into their drama and in turn gossips about it to the other clients, creating a web of melodrama between them all (i believe Fern was even a character in that concept, but she was way more fantastical back then and had an underground palace made of bones). the story i wrote had Penny going on a blind date with a guy who was secretly a monkey or something like that, but i wanted to do more with the idea and Penny as a character so i romped her story together with the more fantastical stuff i was having Cleo do at the time. and even though the idea was still amorphous and a long ways from what Wet Moon would become, that's where it all began and where Penny being Fern's interior decorator comes from.
Penny's name also comes from that original interior-decorator-web-of-drama concept, Penny is short for Penelope which depending on where you look means "weaver" referring to the web of melodrama she weaves, and also named after, of course, Odysseus's wife in The Odyssey who keeps suitors away by continually weaving a burial shroud.
it's a coincidence, but it's cool that both Penny and Cleo (short for Cleopatra!) have names of not only Greek origin, but from larger-than-life Greek figures (one real and one fictional, but both kind of mythological).
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 20 | page 22 |
| start at page 1 | |
Friday, June 15, 2012
Friday, June 8, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 19
i recently saw the movie We Need To Talk About Kevin which was incredible and my mom says the book is amazing, too, i really have to read it, but i think i would've written this scene differently if i'd had seen this movie or read the book at the time (although i don't think the movie had been released yet when i wrote this, anyway). anyway, if you haven't seen it, it's about a reluctant mother dealing with a psychopathic child and how it affects her and the family, and it's SUPER INTENSE.
i would still have Penny say she wants to keep the baby, but it would've been cool to have her mention taking the possibility of having a psychopathic child into account, a child you can't reach emotionally because their brain is simply wired differently and there's not much you can do about it, i think Penny would be morose enough to consider that and it would've made for an interesting facet to the conversation and Penny as a character. We Need To Talk About Kevin does for having children/child-rearing what Jaws did for the water, which i don't think it would stop Penny (sure would stop me, though), but i like the idea of her researching all these unconventional or scary areas of child-rearing. maybe in volume 7!
coincidentally right before i saw We Need To Talk About Kevin, i had read this fascinating article about psychopathic children which made the whole thing even scarier. i could see Penny reading stuff like this late into the night, stressing herself out over it but also strengthening her resolve.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 18 | page 20 |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 18
Wet Moon was long overdue for some more barfing. i think the last time anyone threw up was all the way back in volume 4.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 17 | page 19 |
| start at page 1 | |
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 16 v.2
click for previous version of page with original panel 5
i tinkered with the word balloons in the last panel, what do you guys think about this? i think this is much less confusing. it's not perfect, i should have just designed the panel differently from the get-go, but i think it's way better. i hope there's still time to get it into the finished printed book! keep your fingers crossed!
looking back on pages always brings "what was i thinking? why did i think THAT was the best choice?" moments for me.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 15 | page 17 |
| start at page 1 | |
Friday, May 18, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 16
i like this page a lot.
EDIT: updated version with fixed panel 5!
except the final panel here has something i always do and never seem to get any better at avoiding, which is having the character speaking first on the left side of the panel. i think i've talked about this before but maybe that was on the Shadoweyes site... anyway, it's a tough thing because sometimes i forget, but most of the time it's hard because sometimes like this conversation here, it works up through the whole scene, the balloons flowing nicely and being on the same side of the panel as their respective speaker, but then comes a point in the conversation where the characters are still positioned on the same sides but the way the conversation flows doesn't match up. so it's either somehow swivel the camera (which is the part i usually forget until i get to the lettering stage), or write the conversation differently which doesn't always work because it can seem too artificially back-and-forth, or just say the hell with it and do awkward panels like the last one here where the balloon tails point "through" each character.
any professional letterers reading this? i wonder what they do when faced with panels like this.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 14
which Cleo pairing do YOU like best? obviously Myrtle's got a big strike against her at this point, but some people still seem to like her. hmmmmmmmmmmmm. or do any of you "ship" Cleo with any other character? XD. or any non-Cleo pairings, too, you don't just have to focus on her. i don't think my comics are big enough to get shipped, or they don't hit people in the same spot as really popular things with fandoms like Avatar/Korra or My Little Pony or DC/Marvel comics, but maybe i'll get there one day. :D
in the future i want to have some scenes in the comic detailing Mara's mummy movie, which has been mentioned in the comic in couple times before, hopefully i can fit some stuff in. gotta do some research about what kind of camera equipment college kids use! who should play the mummy... hmm
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 13 | page 15 |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 13
in panel 2 Glen looks like he's grabbing his pec or something. i always notice weird little things like that only after i've drawn something and looked it again later on, it's strange how those things were unnoticeable at the time.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 12 | page 14 |
| start at page 1 | |
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 11
sometimes even though i think i'm drawing straight lines, they're actually slanted and i only discover this after the page is scanned into the computer. this one is really slanty! they always slant to the left, too, i guess because i'm right-handed? on particularly slanty ones sometimes i'll try to rotate the panels a little to adjust them, but then that often makes the outer edges look zig-zaggy, so usually i either leave it as-is or keep the adjustments minimal.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 10 | page 12 |
| start at page 1 | |
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Cleo & Mara 02
click for full size! the full image is a little bit bigger, i had to scale it here because it was too wide and went into the right hand column.
Cleo and Mara's hair will be explained in volume 6, i can say no more! ;)
Friday, April 6, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 10
man, this new blogger/blogspot interface sucks. i hate how it makes you put in all the HTML coding now, like paragraph breaks and stuff, instead of just being able to type regularly and blogspot converts it! what kind of upgrade is that?! and before, i could be editing an old post and jump straight to a new one: what i'll do is go into the edit mode for the previous post and cut-and-paste the page-scroller code at the bottom, and i could jump from that straight to a new post. but now in the edit mode, there's no "new post" button anymore, you have to go back to the main dashboard and then hit new post. hmph.
and despite using the exact same code for the page scrolling widget at the bottom here, the new formatting screws up the width of the bars and i can't figure out why. >:| EDIT: Lisje figured it out, blogger deletes the width value for some reason! WHY?!?
i also hate how it displays how many pageviews you get. maybe the old version did that but it wasn't prominent, in this new version it's all right there and you can't miss it. now i can see how each new post decreases in views from the last and how my Nissa & Nora post only had 5 views, a couple of which were probably me. how does that happen?! i guess the post only gets views when somebody clicks directly on it, not reads it from the main blog page? i don't know. page stats are too discouraging! XD
anyway, meanwhile AGAIN! Mara and Zia trapped in the maze of Fern's house!
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 9 | page 11 |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Nissa & Nora 02
this one was almost a disaster with the ink wash and markers, just like the previous Nissa & Nora picture!
in this drawing i wanted to play up the differentiation between the two of them, both the physical differences like Nora is skinnier than Nissa, Nissa wears glasses sometimes while Nora sticks with contacts, and the personality differences too. and i liked the idea of Nissa dying her hair but courteously keeping it just a small part so there wouldn't be a risk of the dye getting onto Nora's hair.
they've only been in photographs and mentioned in the comic so far, and they're in a brief part of Wet Moon 6, but they'll have much bigger parts in volume 7.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
WATER BABY: Brody!
not technically WET MOON, but that and WATER BABY both take place in the city of Wet Moon/the same continuity. Wet Moon is never mentioned by name in WATER BABY, except that Louisa wears a pair of shorts with "Wet Moon" printed on the butt (meant to be her softball shorts, as she plays short stop in the local team, the Wet Moon Worm Lizards). Wet Moon's location is revealed in WATER BABY, though, to be somewhere in Florida (i don't believe it's ever stated in WET MOON itself, but i might be forgetting...). anyway, Brody made a cameo in WET MOON 3 (and Louisa in WET MOON 5!) so she might as well be a Wet Moon character at this point. can anybody find cameos by Cleo, Trilby, Audrey and Natalie in WATER BABY? ;)
other than Louisa's cameo in Wet Moon 5, i hadn't drawn any of the Water Baby characters since 2007. this drawing of Brody was a sketch i did back in 2006, i believe before i'd even started drawing the book, and when a fan requested a new drawing of her i decided to dig out this old sketch and rework it and finish it up. in my mind this would be how Brody would look if she ever shows up in Wet Moon again, with a bunch of new tattoos.
originally i had wanted there to be a second Water Baby book which would have picked up immediately where the first book left off, and detail Brody and Louisa trying to get back home. regarding continuity, Water Baby takes place before Wet Moon volume 1; the scenes before Brody loses her leg are many months before it, and post-injury the story takes place in the summer before WM1, a few months before WM1 picks up with Cleo going to college. in Water Baby 2 Brody and Louisa were going to have a big falling out and their friendship left in shambles, so when they cameo in WET MOON, they wouldn't be friends anymore after their big break-up. i think i might do that differently that now, though, so maybe they'll be the best of friends if they show up together in Wet Moon again. :D
Brody and Louisa are 18 and the book takes place in the summer after high school is over and the graduating class are about to go to college come fall, so over the years i've had a couple people ask why Brody in Wet Moon 3 is hanging out with Fall, who's 15 and a high school freshman, when Brody should be in college: it's because Brody missed so much school because of her leg injury, she had to be held back to make up all the work she missed, which probably amounts to almost a year since not only did she have to recover but she's also really lazy, haha. i want to bring Brody and Louisa into WET MOON as bigger cast members but i haven't found the space for them yet, and i'd have to re-introduce them in a way that wouldn't be confusing for people who haven't read Water Baby. i don't want to start assuming readers know who the characters are in the way that Marvel and DC comics often do. WET MOON should always be standalone even though it has some connections to another book.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 8
poor Zia!
so i keep trying to think of various sorts of Wet Moon-related posts i could do in between the page updates, like behind-the-scenes stuff or highlighting people's Wet Moon fanart, or character profiles, or how a particular character came to be and developed and what i had in mind.
it's also tough because i'm always wary about getting too behind-the-scenes because i'm afraid it'll influence how people see the characters, i'm afraid if i reveal too much about my thought process or a character's inception that it'll affect people's own personal interpretations.
what sort of posts would you guys be interested in seeing?
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 7 | page 9 |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 7
MEANWHILE AGAIN!! the mystery of Fern deepens!!! >:D and what is behind that little square door on the slanted ceiling?! drawing Fern's mansion is tough, especially in these dimly-lit scenes, i've never felt confident about my lighting/shadows so i'm never sure how shadowy to make the lighting look or how much black to spot. i had harsher shadows on this originally but it looked weird and made the mood all wrong, so i tried to stylize it a bit while still trying to get across that it was a dimly-lit hallway. i think my favorite thing about this page is that Cleo's shadow in panel 3 is a circle.
looking back on this page now i find it slightly confusing, like is it totally clear that Cleo is being startled while coming out of that doorway right as Malady passes by? i've done so many comic pages at this point in my career, you'd think i'd have all the little technical aspects figured out by now!
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 6 | page 8 |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 6
meanwhile again! there's a bunch of intercutting in the beginning of this book, i'm sorry! it probably seems awkward in online format but i think it works well in the printed book.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 5 | page 7 |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 4
Malady totally pressuring her.
i've never had beer before so i don't know anything about it so i had to do some research and consult people on what beer i should use in this scene. there were a bunch of different ones i was trying to decide between but Colt 45 was the winner, it seemed to me like the best fit.
Zia is so full of it! i like writing her a lot even though if i knew her in real life i would probably find her exasperating.
it's hard doing a scene like this and trying to suggest that there are multiple conversations going on in different parts of the room, but i thought the little indecipherable off-panel word balloons work pretty well. if it's too small to read on your monitor, Fern's balloon in the last panel says "i may be drunk..."
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 3 | page 5 |
| start at page 1 | |
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Wet Moon 6 page 3
finally some action sort of! :) we got Mara, Cleo, Zia, Penny, Fern, Malady, Glen and Audrey, i think this is the most characters I've ever drawn in one place together, not counting strangers like at the Bella Morte show in volume 3 and comic convention in volume 4.
Glen has a Friday The 13th shirt, and Malady's shirt is supposed to be a germ but it's too small to tell what it is.
| PREVIOUS | NEXT |
| page 2 | page 4 |
| start at page 1 | |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)