I ART FRAZER IRVING

And so we’ve come, to the end of the road….yes, I am quoting Boyz 2 men. Sue me. The last pages of Frankie are here, and I feel I have just passed a massive creative stool out of my system.

I wasn’t sad to see the end of this book. It had, from the very start, been a pain in the backside what with creative misscommunication, money, contracts, deadlines, and limited technology. It gave me a great deal of insight into the process of making comics, something I’ve been doing since I was just a tiny wee lad and something I still engage with daily, and probably will until the day I transform into some beautiful cosmic butterfly as I shuffle off my mortal coil, but none of that was evident at the time and when I emailed the last pages to Byron I was glad to see the back of it.

After all, I had different fish to fry, Klarion The Witchboy for a start! Colour! Grant Morrison! Decent page rates! 22 page chapters…

I didn’t get the creative freedom I had with Frankie, but that was ok, I knew there was a trade-off. And I’m glad I had the experience, as the learning I took from those 144 pages-plus-cover I’ve added to everything I’ve done since. At the time my colleagues said I was a chump for doing all that work for such silly page rates, and I would always defend it saying that it would pay dividends later on in some other form. After Byron died I knew I’d never see another penny from it, and thus all I was left with was the experience of doing it.

I have to say that experience was worth far more than any money they could have paid me. It’s easy to get distracted by the shiny, the fluttering whispers of paper money, the promise of silver. Ultimately I want to make the best work I can, to become more than my heroes of my youth, to affect the world in a positive way, and to do that one needs to learn craft. Slaving over these pages helped me learn that craft in a very intensive manner, and i do suspect that had I not done it, that my work would have suffered a little. A touch less adventurous perhaps, maybe a little more timid.

To this day, despite my taking on many gigs for the dollar, I remember what the goal was, and how money serves that goal not the other way around. More money means more opportunity to make better Art, and maybe that leads to more money which leads to swimming pools which leads to swimming which leads to stories set in the arctic ocean which leads to…well, I could go on. Suffice to say that making this stuff is an all-inclusive process that affects and is affected by everything, regardless of content or subject matter. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.

I hope someone out there has found some small treasure in these pages along the way, I know I did. I’ll leave it with you, and I’ll head off to bed to dream of men in Bat costumes. And to those who draw, keep at it. Some day I’ll stop, and you lot need to fill that massive gap. So get doodling!

Back when I started out doing this stuff professionally I noticed a bad habit. By the time I was reaching the end of any given project, my interest would wane and I would be thinking about the next gig a lot, which meant that the final pages (almost always up against deadline as well) would suffer a dip in quality.

One way I tried to avoid this (if I could) was to draw the final pages earlier, so that any dip in quality of the real final pages would occur somewhere in the middle of the last chapter thus allowing the strip itself to end on a higher note. This wasn’t always a good solution, and it didn’t solve the problem of me subconciously devaluing the final stages of each job.

As I look at these pages here, in my penultimate post of the book, I can see that some fortuitous planning at the start helped me avoid this trap. Because the novel bookends the narrative with the same scene, I followed this structure faithfully. What this meant in practical terms was that a lot of the repetition in the panels (remember I told you that repetition is a comic artists BFF? Hell yeah) was already established with characters, settings, and even actual frames which could be modified and resused to create the exact effect the story needed.

So even though I had raced to the finish line in a mad 10-day dash to get those last 70 pages drawn, and despite the typical end-of-gig blues that I suffered a lot back then, the ending of this book kinda goes out with the right amount of craft and passion, maintaining a consistency thru the entire thing.

Since those days I’ve tried to plan stuff in advance (not always possible when scripts come in late, or I’m not told how stories end until I get the last part of the script) to give the strips a solid foundation on which to hang my doodles. The end-of-gig blues is a rare occurence as well, thanks in part to this planning, but to tell the truth, I haven’t drawn a project with this many pages since I finished Frankie all those years back. The true test of my artistic mettle is yet to come…and I can hear it rumbling o’er the horizon…

Tomorrow I post the last 9 pages, and then it’s back to the usual crap of quick sketches and brightly-coloured imagery.

Two of my favourite pages are in this set. I’ve never been a landscape guy, preferring the figure over scenes of trees and things when it came to drawing, however when I got to the point where I had to show Victor’s lonely trek thru the wilderness is search of his Monster I discovered that scenery is not only quite easy to draw, but it is as much of an actor as any of the humans involved.

This is one aspect that a lot of comic artists neglect IMHO. Often backgrounds are seen as something to be avoided, or they detract from the drama of the human story, but in reality the scenery is an actor too, conveying emotion and tone using the same visual language that we use to get the humans animated. It’s almost abstract in that backgrounds can be simple shapes and textures that affect us on an instinctive level, and as an artist I found that to be an extremely compelling thought. 

Not every background gets to be Laurence Olivier, some have to be content being mere extras depending on the complexity of their construction and the skills of the artist. Many of mine have been quite basic and lacking in any real intensity, but I try to compensate for that by making the important ones really sing out. And in these pages you can see that they don’t even need to be detailed. Simple shapes are powerful enough to evoke feeling in the reader, as long as they can relate to the shapes in some way. That way a flat horizontal can symbolise the bleakness of a man’s soul, or the winding path of a river can suggest the difficult journey he is on. 

I have so much fun when I get creative control on a project. It’s the power. It drives me mad with excitement.

A busy weekend in Irving Towers. I still have to do the art for my 1000th follower (I haven’t forgotten) as I have been wrestling with starting my latest job. I have discovered, after many years, that starting is always the hardest part. It involves familiarising myself with new characters, new locations, new ideas, and this often requires me to start making actual pages as opposed to endless layouts and doodles. Only once I actually start telling the story do I get a handle on the visuals, only once the characters are put in motion do they begin to “act” in my head. It’s at that point when all my preparation and carefully thought-out ideas get chucked out the window and what appears on the pages after that bears little resemblance to what I had expected.

Frankie was no different. Before I started, I had a very strong idea of what this book would look like, and I even did sketches to explore various methods. The layouts were extremely rough (I think I did them in a day) but they had no indication of the sort of rendering I would use, as they were very very basic scribbles of what went where and some verbal guides for the writer to understand what I was doing.

The opening scene was the first that I drew, and it has the most detail. It’s also the least caricatured of the lot, and I think it has the least personality. By the time I reached the pages you see above, I had gotten fully into the swing. This is how I managed to do those 70 pages in 10 days, because I knew all the cast by this point, I knew how the landscape was formed, I knew what the shadows were saying.

One could see this process as a mirror for life: by the time you’ve figured out how it all works, it ends (so they say). With my career/job/calling, there’s always another project that follows, and it is always different, and I always get to carry what I learned from the last one over to the new one and marvel at how the art evolves into new surprising forms. With any luck that’s also what existence is, so I hope I can carry over the wisdom I am learning as a human over to the next level of existence as a quantum-folding pan-dimensional space jellyfish.

Standard American comics use an average of 5 panels per page. This isn’t a rule as such, more of an instinct. That number of panels allows room for art and text over a 20 page story quite nicely, tho many scripts go up to 7 or 8, and of course there’s the occasional splash page that happens, and that’s all part of the process of creating a rhythm for the strip.

When I took the Frankie gig on, I was told by Byron that it needed to be 4 panels or less per page, partially because they didn’t want to smother the young readers with overly complex storytelling tropes that would be distracting and confusing for those who had only just started readings comics, and also because the book was being printed quite small.

This did present me with problems, but then problems are just opportunities that need a bath and a shave, so my solution to much of this book was to compress or decompress certain scenes to fit. Anytime I read a scene I would jot down any specific events or moments that I felt were required for ease of reading, and this led to scenes which covered a broad span of time with snapshots of Victor trekking thru different countries, as well as pages that followed the actions of the characters as they made them.

I feel this added to the variety of tone in the book, and it’s such a good restriction to have that I have been thinking that maybe it’s a path worth following on future self-generated projects. After all, I want clear storytelling as well as fancy doodling.

Less is very often more, rite?