Little Shits

There's an amazing comic artist by the name of David Aja (pronounced A-Ha, as in "Take on Me"). He draws the Hawkguy parts of the amazing Hawkeye comic. He calls his layout/thumbnail sketches "Little Shits." So, now, let me show you my... little shits.

Wait. That didn't come out right.

SHIT, neither did that!
(okay, I'm done now).

The cover! Pretty close to what ended up on the page, actually. That will be the case a lot of times. I don't often change my mind past this point. I kept a running list of reference I'd want to look up to help me draw good.

Originally a full on DPS (double page spread, not damage per second- nerds!), I chickened out and boxed up the main elements of pages 2 and three.

You can see me working out the paneling in the margins... after crossing out whatever I didn't like on the layout itself.

Did a lot of my thinking around the sides of this one. I definitely prefer where it ended up to some of the alternate layouts floating here.

Oh! I knew I did this SOMEwhere. The image in the bottom left is my aerial view diagram of Roeke's house. This helped me keep it all straight when I was drawing these scenes.

I had fun making these pages "mirror" each other. Well, mirror and flip.

I don't remember where, but I saw some comics where the framing would cut off a good chunk of the character or action, leaving a lot of open space in the panel. I like that, so I stole it. But then I doodled the whole figure anyway so I could wrap my head around where everything goes.

Sometimes, artist-Jhustoe complains about how many panels writer-Jhustoe makes him fit into one page. What a jerk. Obviously, the panelling stayed pretty much the same for these, so those are my "I've drawn this already" X's, and not my "No, not this way" X's.

I mentioned the progress bar before, right? I think I started that several pages in and went back to add it to the other layout pages, haha. What a dork. Also, pg. 16 technically has 10 panels, but I reassured myself that there was only 7 had any actual drawing to be done.

It all starts with stick figures. Also, the Champion (or ChampBOT) still hadn't gotten its name changed to The Guardian yet.

Oh, look at that! The blackout page was waaay different in the layout stage, it was real boring! I'm super glad I changed that. Now it's one of my favorite pages of the issue.

What angle best captures a yawn?. Also, great note, Jhustoe: "MOAR TREEZ."

Buildings are hard. I stole designs from the background of Mega Man games.

Well, thanks for checkin' this out, y'all!

Next week, we'll chat with James and Amanda about their process (I'm doing the 'interview' tonight, as a matter of fact). Then, on the 27th, we'll maybe sneak a peak at issue 2, which'll start September 3rd.

Good riddance,

--Jhustoe!