Journal

Cartooning like a madman…

14 Comments

I had a hard time getting to sleep last night. I’d tried for a couple of hours to write Schlock Mercenary scripts, and it just wasn’t working. Lying in bed I realized that I was fast coming up on a WORSE situation than the one I came home to last week: If I didn’t have scripts soon, the buffer would drop to two, and I wouldn’t have anything to draw on.

Fortunately, things broke loose this morning. I scripted a week, and after a break for lunch, I came back and pencilled the whole week. Here it is now, not even 4pm, and I have a full week scripted and pencilled and ready for inks. My goal, ambitious though it is, is to have these all inked and colored 24 hours from now.

My hand is a little tired at the moment, but I’m pretty sure that I can get four or five of the nine rows inked this evening. This is do-able, and if I do it I will have cranked out an entire week of schlock in two days. And that’s the speed I need to be able to work at. The days of single-digit buffers must end forever.

The “turbo-schlock” icon seems appropriate for this post.

–Howard

14 thoughts on “Cartooning like a madman…”

    1. Are you sure you want that all over your medium of choice?

      I’d rather strain for a few hours to get a good comic out than take a mental laxative and end up with a comic that looks like crap.

      2. Mostly true… but when it comes to Schlock himself. We he does look like crap, so I guess it’s OK.

        hmmm….

        You should check out Schlock Mercenary, Schlock is awesome.

        But you said Schlock looks like crap.

        Right.

        Huh?

  3. I was much impressed by the visual quality of last Sundays Schlock. It’s come a long long way since I started reading it, and that was a few years into it – it was already much better than it started out at that time.

    The biggest obstacle I am facing now when trying to get others hooked on reading Schlock is to make them start from an earlier point. The quality of the plot rises dramatically very quickly, but a lot of people are turned off by the early artwork. Still, I’m working on it.

    1. You might have them do what I did, at Howard’s suggestion at Penguicon 2.0: Start at Schlock Mercenary 1001, go forward from there, then go back and pick up the earlier stuff. By the time you get from 1001 to current, you’ll be hooked on the plot, and reading the earlier strips will be more enjoyable because you know the plot will pick up fast.

      1. That is a very good idea! I’ll keep that in mind, and try it with the next victim potential fan that comes along. Thanks!

  4. You get major cool points for listening to Alan Parsons. Not that you hadn’t already racked up an extreme amount anyways 😉

Comments are closed.