Page 11 in the Reboot to the Head saga is live!

This page fooled the hell out of me in a number of ways.

For one thing, I thought it was going to be ridiculously easy to do compared to the first two pages of this chapter.  We’d already set the mood, picked the layout of the bar’s interior, chose the colors and lighting.  Most of the major decisions about stuff were out of the way.  And I’d decided when I wrote the script that these 3 panels would use flat perspective, which is just insanely easier to draw when compared to the one, two, and three point perspective used in the previous 10 pages.  I’d done a quick pencil sketch of Trebarg sitting in profile at my desk at work (which was the basis for him in the first two panels here).  And by Sunday I’d drawn the most difficult piece of background work, the “St. Pauli Cat” poster that you can see hanging on the wall.

So imagine my surprise when 11:30 pm on Wednesday night rolled around and I still hadn’t finished drawing.  It felt like I wasn’t even close.  I had maybe 2 cats penciled in the first panel, and roughs for only one cat in the second.  I was in a dead panic, and falling asleep at my desk.  By 12:45 or so, I was saving and checking in the completed strip, and in another surprise, I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the way it had turned out.

But I was being totally unfair to Dave.  He told me what he wanted way back in the early Fall when we first decided we were going to get serious about relaunching the strip.  He told me he wanted a backlog of at least 8 strips.  We ended up going live with only 2 strips finished.  He told me that he wanted the finished inks to him by Monday so he’d have 3 full days to color.  I typically get them to him Tuesday or Wednesday.   I accept full responsibility for these things.  It is very difficult to motivate myself to dive into the strip without some pressure on me, and this week I clearly failed to plan and took it way too far.

And, as usual, Dave saved the strip.  As recently as early this evening he had declared that we would not be making the Friday deadline.  He had a ton of work left to do, and he wanted to spend at least part of his evening relaxing and playing mass Effect 2, which he’s only playing because I begged him to so I would have someone to talk to about it, though at this point I think he’s invested enough in the series to keep going on his own steam.  Of course I told him to relax, we’d post the strip late, it was my fault, it would be OK.  And I would be playing WoW for much of the night anyway.

So, of course, Dave spent all night coloring, and he finished, with an hour to spare.  I really cannot emphasize how much of what you see on the page is Dave’s work.  It’s ridiculous how much depth, character, and life he adds to these pages.  So, if you do post any comments to this week’s strip, please take the time to thank Dave for busting his hump in getting this page finished on time!

Page 10 in the Reboot to the Head series is live!  Enjoy!

I’ve talked a lot…

…well…I just talk a lot.

But!  One thing I have talked a lot about recently is “panel density.”  That I’d like to fit more panels into each strip.  Given that there is a week between page updates, I want to give folks a little something to look at/read to tide them over until the next update.  Unfortunately, when writing the script for this chapter, I got a little carried away.  This page was supposed to be 6 panels.  What you see here was to be the first 3.  So I was supposed to squeeze Trebarg, 8 cats, two tables, and all that dialog into panels roughly half the size of what you see here.

Yeah, no.

So, instead, I decided to stretch this out into two pages, which would give me room to actually show what was going on in these panels.  As I reread the script I realized that I had committed the same crime on subsequent pages.  Too much action and dialog to actually squeeze into small panels on a single page.  So, instead of a 3 page chapter, this will be at least 4 or 5 pages.  I think it will work out a lot better in the end.

At any rate, I hope that you have enjoyed the last couple of pages.  As always, we look forward to your comments and e-mails.

HEY! The strip IS live. Click that Latest Comic link in the menu bar!

Bob will be back to post something that he believes to be witty soon!

Enjoy

-trebarg

The new Reboot to the Head page was live as of 12 am last night, but for those of you (Hi, Powers!) that may have stopped by before about 10 o’clock this morning, you would have seen an empty news post to go along with it.  I apologize for that.  Last night I was suffering from a splitting headache that only got worse as the night went on.  I typed a 2 or 3 line news post and hit the “update” button in WordPress but, alas, it did not update for whatever reason.  I know that the loyal fan….er…fans of Towne Pub hang on my every word, so I want to express how deeply, deeply sorry I am for the oversight.

I would also like to say that I’m sorry that this page is late going up.  This chapter of Reboot to the Head sees the return of Marc Trebarg, which I am very excited about.  It also features the first in-strip appearance of the redesigned character: now with 100% more necky goodness.   The reason that this page took so long to finish is that, unlike the previous chapter, the backgrounds in the panels of the next few pages will feature relatively static, interior shots.  I won’t get a chance to draw different stuff (like cars and buildings) to fill the backgrounds and try to make each panel look unique and interesting.  I want to avoid the old shortcuts from the class TP strips where backgrounds were just ill defined blobs (or, in some cases, just…nothing).  Back in those days I was trying my best to update 4 times a week, and corners had to be cut to keep up with that schedule, especially given that the strips were hand drawn and inked, which made art reuse painful and laborious.

This time around, I wanted to ground the scenes in real-feeling places, and avoid the cut corners.  I would rather post a new page late, and be happy with the results, than half-ass my way through it with empty backgrounds, or shapes to fill space.  So Dave and I spent a lot of time and effort on the background of this page.  It’s setting the stage for this chapter, and it needs to feel like a place.  There has to be stuff in it.  Stuff that will be shown again in future panels.  So, I spent a lot of time drawing, and redrawing, and redrawing again.  Getting things to look good enough to make me happy.  And Dave, to his credit, did a fantastic job with the color (as always).  In particular, the lighting effects in this are just the bees knees.  Check out the mix of purple, blue, yellow, and green highlights from the neon signs.  The way that the ceiling gets swallowed up in the darkness, and the foggy atmosphere.  I think he knocked it out of the park on this one.

At any rate, the extra time and effort we put into this strip will make the next few pages flow a lot faster and easier.  We won’t have to agonize over what decor to put on which wall, what colors to use, the orientation of the tables, how many aliens there should be, etc.   All those decisions are out of the way, and now we can just go with the flow.

I expect that we will be posting the remaining pages in this chapter on time over the next several weeks, though Dave has some incredibly hectic weekends ahead (with lots of travel) that may make that difficult.  I will do my best to continue Towne Pub’s new tradition of completely open honesty, and I’ll let you know well in advance if we’re going to miss a date.

As always, we love to read your comments and e-mails   Also, this Tuesday we have a particularly fun update coming.  I hope you’ll check back in.

Happy Friday!

This one really came down to the wire, but Dave pulled through like a champ and colored artwork that I was still tweaking at 9 PM tonight.  With page 8, the first chapter of the Reboot to the Head saga comes to a close, and beginning in a couple of weeks we’ll be starting the next leg of the storyline, which moves beyond Phinn’s solo storyline.

Before I go on, I’d like everyone to do me a favor.  Click on that link, the one that heads on over to the Reboot to the Head page, where you can see large thumbnails of every page in the series so far.  They are listed in reverse order, so please take a few seconds to scroll up and down once or twice to take them all in.  Dave and I posted 8 full sized, full color comic pages over 7 weeks.  Looking at them all end-to-end there I can’t help but very proud.   I still think that these are some of the best strips Dave and I have ever done.  I hope that you agree.

As I mentioned last week, and earlier in this very post, today’s page wraps up Phinn’s solo chapter.  Next week we’ll continue with chapter 2, which picks up with another beloved character in the Towne Pub cast.  Well, beloved by me, anyway.  I’m really looking forward to switching gears, but I’ve done absolutely zero prep work beyond writing the script, so I’ll be taking some extra time over the next week to build up some art assets (character designs, rough sketches, environments, etc), and Dave will be using the assets to experiment with color palettes.   I expect the first page to be posted two weeks from today (March 5th), after which our weekly update schedule will continue for the duration of chapter 2.  If I fall behind for any reason, I’ll make sure to let everyone know.

I think Dave will be doing a Tuesday update this coming week, and it’s a fun one that features some behind the scenes detail from the last two pages Phinn’s chapter.  I hope you’ll stop by to check it out.  I’m also planning on posting some original artwork next Friday to give people something to look at.  So please bear with us for the brief delay!

As always, we loves the comments.

Better late than never, right?  Right?  How’s this for a Tuesday update?

With page 7, we’re approaching the thrilling conclusion of Phinn’s solo chapter of the Reboot to the Head saga.   Page 8 will be posted on time, this Friday, and we’ll be taking a brief break of a week or so to begin work on the next segment in the storyline.  I expect page 9 to be posted on or around March 5th.  I hope you’ll bear with us.

This strip was drawn over a period of a month or more.  The first two panels were done before I even started work on page 5.  I knew page 5 was going to be difficult, and I’d written the script up through the entire second chapter, so I decided to skip ahead to page 8 and work backwards while I was still working on page 4.  One of the really nice things about working ahead is that i can jump from one page to another and back whenever I hit a snag, or start to get bored.  Of course the problem there is that you end up with 6 pages in various stages of completion with nothing actually done.  And then you have to delay posting page 7 by 4 days.

But I digress.

The first two panels of page 7 were laid out, and the foreground images were penciled, weeks ago.  The last three panels remained blank for the better part of a month.  Last week I decided to bridge the gap between paper and digital, and sketched out the rough Phinn drawings for panels 4 and 5 on a sheet of scrap paper in my office at work. Instead of taking a photo with my iPhone like I did for the last panel of page 6, I brought the sketches home and scanned them in.  I’ll probably be doing more of that in the future because it lets me sketch during down time at work, which is normally a time of day when I can’t get anything done.

True story: the first few TP classic strips were almost completely written, penciled, and inked from my cubical at Nortel.  I used to waste a lot of time there.  Ah, the good old days.

Anyway, I hope that you enjoy page 7, and page 8 is coming along later this week.  As always, your comments and feedback are much appreciated.

Page 6 in the Reboot to the Head series is up today.  Please let us know what you think!  The production of the last panel was fairly interesting.  I had been struggling with digital roughs at home, but I had a clear image in my head but was having trouble getting it down on paper.  It’s hard to describe, but I’m sure other artists understand how you can see something so clearly in your head, but the translation on the page just isn’t working.  While I was at work one day, I started sketching on some loose paper on my desk.  I really liked the result, so I snapped a pic of it on my iPhone, and mailed it to myself and Dave.

Panel 6.6, Phinn roughs. Click for larger version.

Dave was actually the one that opened it up and dropped it into panel 6 in the strip.  When I got home I was able to begin penciling right on top of the photo, which, I hope you’ll agree, turned out just fine.  It’s cool to know that, if the inspiration strikes, I can sketch something out at work and quickly get it into the strip without ever needing to touch a scanner, or even be at home.  Man, I love my phone

Speaking of which (sort of), I’ve decided that I probably won’t invest in an iPad, at least not the first generation.  It’s not that I don’t want one.  I absolutely do.  But my wife and I got a nice tax refund this year, which means we’ll be able to tackle some home improvement projects that we thought were out of reach this year.  I’ll be contributing any extra cash I have to that.  In the longer term, I’m seriously considering an investment in a Wacom Cintiq to replace my Wacom Graphics Tablet.  I love the tablet, but there are some drawbacks.  While I’ve gotten very good at looking at the screen while I draw on the tablet, not being able to “turn the page” so to speak, makes drawing sometimes very difficult.  If I do decide to make the investment, it won’t be for at least another year.  I also haven’t decided whether I’ll go for the 12″ or the 21″.  But, hey, it’s always nice to dream, right?

Even though Dave and I began working on these new strips months ago, we’re still learning how to do things.  Not just techniques, but ways to do artwork that we’re both satisfied with in a reasonable amount of time.  This strip is a good example of adjustments that we’re making to speed up the process a bit.  You may have noticed that the buildings in the second panel of page 4 were very different from those in the other panels and pages.  Dave and I both liked the look of the buildings, and they were much faster and easier to draw while accomplishing more or less the desired effect of providing perspective, and depth.  We decided to run with it in this strip and use the same (or a similar) style in every panel of the 5th page.   The big problem is that this strip has a distinctly different look from the previous pages.  I’m not sure how well it will flow, or how much it will matter, but I’m fairly happy with the result.

What I am not happy with is that some of the panels look barren or blank.  I feel like there should be flying cars in the backgrounds of some panels where there are none, and more in the backgrounds of panels that already have one or two.  But I tried inserting some and it gave the panels a cluttered, busy feeling that didn’t help at all.

Of all the pages posted so far, I have the most mixed feelings about this one.  I’m absolutely thrilled with the foregrounds.  I love Phinn in virtually every panel, and particularly the last which was a joy to draw.  I hope you guys like it as well.  As always, we’d love to hear your comments and feedback.

One last thing: I would like to apologize for missing the Tuesday update this week.  This week has been nuts.  My wife works full time, as do I, but she also attends classes at RIT four nights a week and does not get home until well after 8.  As a result, it’s up to me to help with homework, get the kids doing their chores, make dinner, and drive to and from after school clubs, classes, and other activities.  This week was one of those perfect storm weeks were commitments to work, family, and the strip were difficult to balance.  I hope you’ll forgive me.  I plan on doing Tuesday updates whenever I can with behind the scenes updates, goodies, sketches, and other fun stuff.

4 weeks, 4 pages!

Solar Phinn is based on a character I played in the Star Wars role playing game for a couple of year’s in high school.  I was obsessed with Boba Fett at the time, and I wanted to play a character that wore Mandalorian armor, similar to Fett’s from The Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi.  Of course Phinn’s armor is very simplified, to make it more stylized and easier to draw, and there are some other changes as well.  Obviously missing is Boba Fett’s iconic T-Visor helmet.  Additionally, Phinn wears a full cape, while Fett has a cape over one shoulder.  Notably absent from Phinn’s costume are the wookiee scalps that Fett wears as trophies.   There are many other minor changes as well, but the similarities are inarguable.  The grey jumpsuit, the large pouches, the bracers shielding his forearms, etc.

For the past 10 years Phinn has been parading around in Towne Pub comics in this armor, but he hasn’t done much other than show it off.  He’s fired a few shots from his blaster, and even pulled out his obviously lightsaber inspired sword from time-to-time (the one you can clearly see attached to his belt in the first panel here), but he hasn’t really used the suit to its full effect before now.

I’ve decided that, in these new reboot strips, Phinn will be very keen to use the many gadgets built into the armor, and hidden in those huge pouches on his belt. For the first time ever, we also get to see what’s under the cape (which should come as no surprise to anyone).

I’m pretty excited about these new strips because it’s giving me a chance to take a fresh look at the characters, and the way that I tell stories.  I’m enjoying the artwork, which I think is some of the best stuff I’ve ever done.  And Dave’s color is a work of artistic brilliance that really brings my humble drawings to life.  But beyond all that, it’s fun to take these characters that I love so much and just play.  I really hope that you enjoy reading these pages as much as we’ve enjoyed making them.

Before I wrap this up, I would like to let folks know that we are on target to have a 5th page up a week from today (Dave is already hard at work coloring it), and the 7th and 8th pages are really coming along nicely (with the inks for the 8th page nearly complete).  Unfortunately, I have hit a bit of a wall with page 6, and it’s been stuck in limbo for the past few weeks.  I see no reason why it won’t be ready on time, but I do see a slight hiccup coming down the line.  We may need to take a brief hiatus when this first chapter is complete in about 4 weeks to give us time to queue up a few pages from the next chapter before we begin posting them.

I do not anticipate that it will take more than 1-2 weeks at most to get back on schedule.  In fact, I am not even certain we will miss a week at all.   At the same time, I do not want to sacrifice quality to keep to a schedule, so if it comes down to it, I will delay a page for a week or two rather than post one that I’m not completely happy with.  Hopefully we won’t miss a beat, and the art for page 6 will come quickly and easily this weekend, but in the interest of full disclosure, I wanted to keep everyone informed.

Page 3 of Reboot to the Head!

Dave and I have spent a lot of time talking about how we create strips, both in blog posts here on the front page and Dave’s excellent (and very detailed) behind the scenes article.  Over time I think we’ll flesh that article out to include chapters on each stage of the process, along with detailed examples from several strips, but if you haven’t already read through it, and you’re curious at all about the process that we undertake when creating a strip, please check it out.

Today’s strip is a very interesting one, for me.  I was extremely proud of the first two strips.  I’ve got the 3rd panel from page one as my desktop wallpaper (on both monitors), and the splash page for page two is one of my favorite things that I have ever drawn.  But this strip was incredibly painful to work on.  It was slow to write; where the first two pages popped into my head all at once, writing the action in this third one was like pulling feef.  But rather than go into nitty gritty detail about the strip, even though it’s tempting, I thought I’d share a little snippet of why it’s so fun to work together with Dave.

Many times when I hand off a black and white strip to Dave, it can be very confusing for him to decide which little squiggly lines belong to which part of which character.  He makes a best guess, and usually gets it about 95% correct, but sometimes he misinterprets what I meant in the art.  It’s totally understandable, especially when we have so many overlapping, transparent layers in each panel.  In some cases the coloring missteps even make it past me, and end up published on the site (we later correct them once we find them).  When I drew the first panel of this page, I was concerned that Dave might have a hard time figuring out which bits were Phinn, and which were the cat alien, especially around Phinn’s left hand.

Confusing Inks (click for larger).

To make things a little easier for Dave, I thought I would provide him with a color guide (because I am such a nice guy) pointing out some of the more, er, hairy parts of the image, as it were:

Handy dandy color guide (click for larger).

So, of course, the next time I opened the file…

Dave wins.

So here was are on page 2 of the Reboot to the Head storyline.  I don’t have a lot of time to blog right now (I need to get to work).  I would have posted this last night, but it slipped my mind until I was already in bed.  Later today I’ll add more to this.  In the mean time, please enjoy!