Eben07

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At the suggestion of a ghostly assassin dubbed “Dead Grant”, Ninja Dan has trekked across Eastern Europe to arrive at a gypsy camp where he hopes to revive a mysteriously incapacitated Eben07.

(D. Bethel’s!) Declassification Notes

A lot of people have been pointing out how this mini-strip looks different from all the previous strips.  I’m trying out something new, stylistically, to see how well it works with the type of comic we’re making and if I can even do it.  But first, let’s take a look back at how things were done.

My previous method involved typing up a script with Eben07 (click for a larger image):

Of course, we still type up a script, but I also wanted to show you how I work.  As you can see, sometimes I start doodling on the script just to get warmed up and started.  Getting started, like with any creative endeavor, is the hardest part.

From here I start working on panel layouts.  I know, my panel layouts aren’t very exciting in general, but I still have to know where I’m going to be putting stuff.  Simply because it’s easy to use, when laying out panels I have used the program Comic Life (in fact, the all the strips up through the end of Old Pain in the Asp were actually done in Comic Life, I started doing the comic exclusively in Photoshop with the first strip of Idols Unfit for Display) because it is easy to manipulate the panels.  Recently, since I’ve started being a little more adventurous with my panel layouts, I just hand draw them.  When that’s done, I get to the penciling stage.  Sometimes I spread this over a couple pieces of paper just so I can have lots of swinging room:

Again, I like to draw in the margins.  I don’t know what the thing on the left is.  As you can see the bottom panel is rather sketchy and the background on the top right panel isn’t even drawn.  That’s because once I got comfortable enough with my Wacom tablet I was able to more loosely draw the strip with a pencil and do the majority of the drawing in Photoshop itself.  Plus, since I can monkey around with stuff in Photoshop, I can pull together a complete image from a variety of different places.  Take the following panel for example:

Around the head there are some strange lines.  That’s because I drew the head on a separate piece of paper from the body and just attached the two in Photoshop.  It’s not a problem in the finished strip because, in the end, these sketches are not in the final file at all.  With my Wacom tablet (an Intuos3 6×8, to be precise) I do what I call “inking” (though, since I’m not a very good inker, a more accurate term in this case would be “tracing”) on a separate layer in Photoshop so that all the lines can have the same weight and quality, giving the strip a more unified look.

This leads me to completed line art for the strip, which looks like this:

I’m not going to provide samples of coloring and such simply because it’s tedious and I’m doing mostly guess work.  To be thorough, though, next I add color, then text and dialogue balloons, and then any special effects sounds that need it, until it becomes a finished strip:

Most of the backgrounds in the strip so far I drew exclusively in Photoshop.  I don’t know why, I just feel like I have more control and more room to screw up/erase/screw up again on the computer than I do on paper.

But, right now, that’s the old way of doing things.  Inspired by the recent guest strip and Lauren Monardo’s steady hand, I decided to see what my stuff looked like if I did all the steps above by hand on paper.  The above strip is the immediate result, which is why it’s a quick four-panel strip and why there’s some cutting and pasting involved:

I didn’t want to screw up an entire strip with my reckless experiment, so I retained a couple of my old tricks.  I drew the characters separately this time, but I actually drew and inked the backgrounds by hand, with which I’m mostly pleased.

So, that’s the deal with this strip.  The feedback has been positive so far, and that’s kind of encouraging.  I just hope this will speed things up as I’m slow enough as it is.

Keep a good thought,

-D.Bethel

Illustrator, Eben07.com

email: dbethel (at) eben07.com