Workflow

Okay, I'm finally off to a good start with the first Chastity Towers story, "The Appearance of Respectability".

Here's how my work process usually breaks down:

1. Birth of an idea.

Usually a story is inspired by some specific idea or concept which is the kernel from which the rest of it grows. In this case, this wasn't the first story we'd developed but it seemed the best choice for the first to appear because the basic idea is this:

"A new potential student comes to Chastity Towers and Mina and the girls give her the FULL taste of what life is like at the school."

Stephen and I came up with this concept ages ago when first developing Chastity Towers and from there it was just a matter of specifics.

2. Brainstorm the plot.

We had a short plot synopsis so all I had to do was flesh it out a bit and break it down into events. I used Google Docs for that, since it's an easy-to-use word processor and it can keep my documents together in an easy-to-reach place. For some reason I don't like keeping scripts in folders on my computer, I just don't like organizing them that way. I prefer being able to tag them and sort them that way.

3. Script.

I wrote up a simple script in Google Docs based on the breakdown. I had the basic idea of how long the story would be, how much space I wanted to allocate for the sex scenes and how much for the plot. I had the first draft finished in January or so and recently changed it a bit, adding a few more pages of sex and tightening up the point of view on the first few pages.

4. Sketches.

Once the script is done (sometimes before the actual dialogue is complete, but once I have the story broken down into discrete events) I rough out the pages for the whole story. I like sketching the entire thing before I start, it's good fun to get it all down in rough lines so I can read through the layouts and see how it flows. I had these roughs done in January or so too but changed up the first few pages and added some pages to the middle as well.

5. Set design.

As part of my new working method, I'm using SketchUp to design the sets for the comic, so before I begin I make sure I have the sets I need designed. They don't have to be perfect, but they're a big help and at this point I can also edit the layouts if necessary.

6. Lettering.

After the rough layouts and before the proper pencilling, I like to letter the whole comic. I get a good groove going doing the lettering and it's a good feeling to get it all out of the way. It also means I can make sure there's enough room in the layouts for all the words I need before it's too late. At this point I can edit the dialogue or the page layouts to make everything fit.

7. Inking/toning.

When I have everything lettered, it's time to start at page one and do all the inking and toning, adding speed lines, grey tones, textures, etc. Depending on how I'm feeling, I may mix it up and ink a few pages, then do the tones, or I may just drive through and completely finish one page at a time.

And then it's done! Since my comics are webcomics there's also the question of exporting them to PNG at the right size and resolution for the web, but that's a simple task in Manga Studio. Then I just upload them to the webcomics host and celebrate!

Sad Mina in color

Sad Mina in color
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

A new version of the "sad Mina" sketch with the official Chastity Towers uniform and a splash of color.

When I was twelve...

I drew a comic called "Game Quak".

Based on an imaginary "hacker" handle I had created for myself, "Game Quak" was a Donald Duck-looking guy who had wings instead of arms. But he was clever enough to create special super-sleeves for himself that could form his feathers into hands. When he needed to escape, he'd press a button and his gloves would fly off, his sleeves would roll up and he'd take off into the air.

I spent Junior High School drawing three- and four-page stories for this character on notebook paper. He was some kind of fever dream amalgam of all my interests at the time. I was reading superhero comics and playing video games on our Apple IIe. I'd get pirated copies of games that had been "cracked" by mysterious figures known as "computer hackers". These guys had crazy names for themselves, they lived and operated in a shadowy underground and they were noble figures, bringing prohibitively expensive games to the common people. The "Game Quak" of the comics was the story of a young boy and his pet duck "Quakkie" (again, I was 12 years old). One day they were playing in the field when a nuclear bomb went off and they were bathed in radiation.

Rather than burning them both alive and turning their world into a living hell, the boy and his duck fused together and became the anthropomorphic hacker superhero. He lived on Mount (wait for it) Kump Yooterg Ayme, with his friends RAM Master and ROM Mistress. I believe he had some arch-enemies but I regret to say I've forgotten anything about them.

UPDATE: Found this draft in my blog archives, but I don't think I ever posted it.

Chinese gangster

Chinese gangster
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

a smug-looking Chinese gangster. Drawn in my sketchbook and colored in Photoshop. I've been experimenting a bit more lately with airbrushing and coloring in Photoshop and Painter. It's fun!

Fleurette in uniform

Fleurette in uniform
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Fleurette in the Chastity Towers uniform. Shortened the skirt a bit (and indeed, Fleurette is regularly reprimanded in class for the shortness of the skirt!) but otherwise it's pretty much straight from the reference.

I wasn't sure whether the original costume in the illustration includes stockings or socks, but for now I'm going with dark socks and black shoes. That might change--either stockings and black shoes or white socks and saddle shoes. We'll see.

Uniform reference

Uniform reference
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Found a terrific school dress from 1908 to use as the basis for the Chastity Towers uniform. The New York Public Library has an amazing reference set of old magazines with fashion illustrations.

I'm not sure if this outfit was actually a uniform, or just a dress designed for wearing to school, but it has a good "uniform" look, it's double-breasted with big buttons, has a pleated skirt and just looks great.

I didn't really want to use a contemporary-style Western school uniform, nor a sailor-suit style, because neither of those would look quite right in the period setting, but this is just right!

Dennis Kucinich

Dennis Kucinich
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Sketched from the Democratic primary debate on MSNBC.

Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Sketched from the Democratic primary debate on MSNBC.

Chris Dodd

Chris Dodd
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Sketched from the Democratic primary debate tonight on MSNBC.

Mr Hyde's House of Mystery

It's been a long time coming, but my erstwhile partner in crime, Stephen Hyde, finally has a site on the web:

Mr Hyde's House of Mystery

Stephen's the co-creator of Progressions and a writer of fiction who's set up his site to post "reviews, reccomendations, musings, ramblings and other entertaining stuff." He's gotten off to a great start with some book reviews, so check it out!

Jeff

Subliminal message?

On Fox News just now, they featured the press conference with the Democratic leadership on the passage of the Iraq funding bill. Harry Reid and then Nancy Pelosi spoke about how proud they were of it and how they hoped the President will listen to the American people and sign this bill.

Underneath, on the crawl at the bottom of the screen, ran a quote about someone (I missed who) saying "These are people who will not hesitate to kill you, your family, your friends..."

Nice juxtaposition.

Jeff

David Brent in color

David Brent in color
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Ricky Gervais as David Brent in "The Office".

David: "'Dutch girls must be punished for having big boobs' Now, you do not punish someone, Dutch or otherwise for having big boobs."

Gareth: "If anything, they should be rewarded."

HOT FUZZ

is the incredibly awesome new film from Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and director Edgar Wright, the brilliant team behind Shaun of the Dead. In Hot Fuzz they do for action movies what Shaun of the Dead did for horror films.

In a way, a more appropriate comparison would be Wes Craven's Scream, because part of the fun of Hot Fuzz is that the characters call out every single action movie cliche you can think of, giving special honors to "Point Break" and "Bad Boys 2". Both movies work pretty effectively as both a film IN the genre they're parodying, and a parody of that genre. Hot Fuzz is hilarious, but when it gets down to the action, it's as exciting, enjoyable and over-the-top as any badass action film.

Simon Pegg plays Nick Angel, the best London cop there is, who is so good that he's transferred to the safest village in England to avoid making the rest of the team look bad. Once there he brings his hard-boiled cop style to the sleepy village and gets mixed-up in a bizarre undercurrent of mysterious deaths. Nick Frost plays his partner Danny, who has an immense DVD library and encylopedic knowledge of action movie cliches, but despairs of ever seeing any action in real life.

The razor-sharp visual style Edgar Wright developed in Shaun of the Dead is pushed even farther in Hot Fuzz, and the dialogue is even wittier and more off-the-wall. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are again excellent and show an incredible rapport with one another that the movie, like a lot of action films, can be read on one level as a love story between these two partners. It's just that in Hot Fuzz, the people making the movie are aware of these subtexts and not afraid of them. It's funny, but it's sincere and heartfelt as well. Timothy Dalton and Jim Broadbent give great comedic performances and the whole cast of oddball villagers is terrific.

Hot Fuzz is probably the most hands-down enjoyable movie I've seen so far this year, excepting possible Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror. As a comedy it's hilarious, as an action movie it kicks serious ass. Definitely recommended in the highest possible terms.

Quote of the Day

"It's a single-entendre pretending to be a double-entendre"

--Reed, discussing Fergie's "London Bridge"

WTF Mac Store

WTF Mac Store
Originally uploaded by Jeff Carlson.

This is awesome. Check the name of the store (look at it sideways as well).

The Landlord

The Landlord



Directed by Adam McKay, starring Will Ferrell and Pearl McKay.

Jeff

Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike

Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

from Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" segment of "Grindhouse".

Some muscley guy

Some muscley guy
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Haven't drawn much lately. If I don't draw every day I get real rusty real fast and I feel like I've totally forgotten how to do it.

One of the bad habits I have is to draw nothing but faces, just easily defined, really simple faces that don't stretch or push me at all. I feel like it's kind of a rut I get into, but drawing full figures can get extremely frustrating because they just look wrong if the proportions aren't right. Anyway I need to do more drawing!

Drew this to try out the new Painter X. They didn't change much that impacts on me since I mostly do cartooning in it. They did add a couple of really clumsy bugs though, making it tougher to zoom in and zoom out sometimes.

Is "emo" the new musical trend that scares the establishment?

From Henry Jenkins, this is an interesting follow-up to my original post.



A news report on the danger of kids being "emo" which not only fails to interview any actual kids who identify with that culture, but uses as reference points websites and videos which are clearly mean-spirited parodies of that culture.

Like I mentioned in my original post, I don't have any firsthand knowledge of this trend myself, but just going from cultural history, the fact that every generation there seems to be at least one big new musical trend which terrifies adults and becomes a scapegoat for their fears about how they youth will inevitably destroy them and must be stopped.

In the 1950's it was Rock And Roll, juvenile delinquency and comic books. In the 1960's it was psychedelic rock, drugs and hippies. In the 1970's it was punk music. In the 1980's it was Heavy Metal, and hearings were held on heavy metal music supposedly making kids commit suicide. In the 1990's gangsta rap was the scariest music around. It just seemed inevitable that something would take that place in this generation.

Jeff

GRINDHOUSE

Robert Rodriguez' "Planet Terror" was absolutely great, worth the price of admission by itself. Gory as hell, gruesome and funny, with great action and a surprisingly tight script. Rose McGowan and the whole cast gave great performances, really throwing themselves into this admittedly goofy material. Doesn't take itself too seriously, just good solid exploitation fun. The thing I admire about Planet Terror is that it's so DENSE--every frame, every scene seems packed to the brim with material that both references the classic exploitation and horror movies of the past, but is also just funny and intense in the present. The dialogue bristles with repeated motifs and phrases, the technical gimmicks are used to rich effect (the "missing reel" which happens just as the steaming hot sex scene is getting started) and everything about the movie was pushed just as far as it could possibly go.

I have to admit I was disappointed in Tarantino's "Death Proof". I'm as big a Tarantino fan as you could find, but something just wasn't clicking with me. I don't mind that the first half of the movie is basically long, fetishy shots of girls' feet, legs and asses (anyone else notice QT's slight case of foot fetishism? :) ), but the dialogue didn't sparkle the way his scripts usually do. There was a LOT of character and a lot of dialogue in the first half of the movie, but very little in the way of memorable lines or moments. Kurt Russell was pretty good, and the case did decent jobs, especially real life stuntwoman Zoe Bell as herself. It was pretty cool, but left me a bit underwhelmed.

I decided to make some smart playlists in iTunes, grouping my collection by decade, just to see how many songs would be in each period.

Here's the breakdown:

pre-1920
149 songs, Beethoven sonatas and symphonies. I don't have much other classical music but Beethoven has been my favorite composer since high school. I used to have some Tchiakovsky and Bach but that's been a long time. At one point I had a set of Beethoven's complete string quartets, which was amazing, but that's long gone too.

1920s
12 songs, Mississippi John Hurt's classic 1928 album.

1930s
83 songs, mostly Billie Holliday and some Gershwin. I'd love to have loads more blues and jazz from this period.

1940s
112 songs, mostly John Lee Hooker. From this decade I'm missing mostly swing and jazz, I'd quite like to have some more of the popular music of the day--Bing Crosby, Andrews Sisters, Benny Goodman, etc.

1950s
184 songs, Miles Davis/John Coltrane, Chuck Berry and James Brown. Definitely could do with some more rock and roll: Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis. The 1950s isn't really a particular favorite period of mine, though. With the exceptions I listed, most of the true "rock and roll" of the period was vastly improved on by The Beatles in 1962 to 1964, so I don't need too much more, really.

1960s
1646 songs. I might have expected a bit more here. 1,257 of these songs are The Beatles, taking into account bootlegs and live albums, plus the albums. The rest is mostly Hendrix, Pink Floyd and the rest of the Miles Davis/John Coltrane stuff.

1970s
712 songs, mostly Zeppelin, Funkadelic, Paul McCartney, Neil Young. Great stuff in this period, especially the funk.

1980s
1030 songs, mostly The Cure, Prince, They Might Be Giants, and others. I came of age during the 80s, but once I started seeking out my own music rather than just what was on the radio I was listening to hip-hop, Suzanne Vega, Pet Shop Boys, as well as all the 60s music like Beatles and Dylan. I don't feel a real compulsion to actually own too much of the real "80s music" you might hear on the radio.

1990s
3215 songs, no real way of telling what the majority is without really going through the playlist. Plenty of Prince, Madonna, Pop Will Eat Itself, They Might Be Giants, Primal Scream, Public Enemy... these are all groups I collect and they put out a lot of material in the 90s. My musical journey in the 90s is a pretty involved subject that I'll probably write more about in the future. My tastes changed a lot, I got turned on to a million different types of music, and really branched out.

2000s
2939 songs, again, plenty of Prince, Madonna, Kool Keith, The Donnas, The Apples in Stereo, Fantastic Plastic Machine... far too much variety to declare an easy majority for any one group. I'm not sure how to filter out TV shows so technically this category includes a bunch of TV like Law & Order, The Office, Battlestar Galactica and Extras.


According to iTunes, my entire music collection consists of 9968 songs, 27.9 days worth of music, taking up 51 GB of space. Somehow I thought it would be more than that.

By the way, here's my Last.fm page, which shows what I've been listening to and has awesome charts showing the breakdown by group and so on:
http://www.last.fm/user/progressions/

Jeff

New musical style?

It seems that, generally, there's a new big dramatic musical shift (at least) every generation or so. From the 40s, it went from Swing/Big Band into Rock and Roll in the 1950s, to The Beatles and psychedelic rock in the 1960s. The 1970s had punk and disco, and the 1980s had hip-hop. The 1990s had grunge.

What's the latest big new musical style been? Has there been a big stylistic shift that brought condemnation from the establishment and cries of "going too far" etc, the way almost each of those previous styles did?

I like to think I'm pretty hip to music but I haven't really followed what the kids are listening to for a while now. The most modern music that I'm into lately has been Gnarls Barkley, Gym Class Heroes, Lily Allen.

I'm not really sure what "emo" music is, but is that the big style? I guess if you can identify the newest transgressive style by how much crying there is about it from older folks, I'd have to say emo is the one I hear the most about. Even without knowing the music itself, it seems that people complain about "emo kids" and the like. It's not strictly comparable to how they complained about "juvenile delinquents" in the 1950s, or hippies in the 1960s, punks in the 1970s, or rap fans in the 80s, but there does seem to be a lot of emotion about it.

Anyway, if it's not emo, what IS the new style?