Ask me anything
Recent Responses
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Alice is a very friendly person who has had a lot of trouble keeping the people she's close to from dying all around her. She has definitely found someone close to her in Liz, and the reverse is true as well, so they definitely have a very strong bond of friendship they forged in the fire of the end of days. As far as attraction goes, I don't know if I would say one way or another for anyone in the comic unless a relationship explicitly forms within the story itself, not because I don't know but because if someone reads a character a certain way and that way helps them more closely relate I don't want my words to take away that connection when me calling it one way or another doesn't really have a huge impact on the overarching plot. This is one of those things where I feel leaving it open let's the reader fill in the gaps in a way that is most meaningful to them.
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Tombstone is a name with a couple meanings that'll come up in the comic, but one I can say right now is that it was chosen to evoke the Tombstone of western fame. The real Tombstone, AZ is known "the city too tough to die" which is just perfect, and the stories that pass through there are something I'd like to tap into, so it seemed like a more meaningful and evocative name than if I had just made something up.
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Thank you! I have been slower than I'd like to be lately but I'm also under a bit less stress so I feel like the end products have improved and it evens out in the long run.
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Oh gosh thanks! Also sorry for the late reply to this message, formspring slipped my mind for a little while.
I actually used to have a run of bandanas I sold as one of my first merch items. I hand-painted them with white acrylic and they were ten bucks each, but they became too labor-intensive so I had to discontinue them. I think I still have a couple blank red bandanas in a box somewhere, I could maybe make one by request. Kory Bing of http://www.skindeepcomic.com/ is the current owner of the final bandana ever produced, by the way. I don't know how I could sell red shades without finding someone who already makes them, buying them wholesale and reselling another person's product, unaltered. -
It isn't too complicated, it's just time-consuming. Whenever I make a fully-animated page I first thumbnail the page out as a static piece- if the animation can't be conveyed in stillframes then its venturing out of the realm of comics and into full-blown cartoons, and I want to use animation to enhance comics in a way only the Web can while still keeping them grounded in comics. So all these pages start out plotted as normal pages. The next step is figuring out how I want each panel to animate, which is easy enough, that's just how I see everything in my head anyways, I just understand my goals and make sure they're doable.
Once a page is plotted and sketched out I break it up by panel, and put each panel's sketch artwork in a labelled and masked Photoshop folder, so all the bits specific to that panel are contained in a single folder and any bits sticking out the side of the panel from animating is hidden thanks to the layer mask on the folder. Then it's just the long, long matter of painting up all my set pieces, backgrounds, effects, tweens and characters. That takes me like two weeks. After everything is drawn and ready its about three hours of rigging all the set pieces in Photoshop to animate on a timeline, and then I save as a .gif and that's it! There's more trouble bits here and there, but that's the whole process in a nutshell.
Thank you for reading and I hope you continue to enjoy! -
the void, beckoning.
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The visual change in the intermission strips serves two functions: 1) it clearly marks them as being outside the continuing story in the main pages, and 2) it gives me a bit of a break from the rather intense artwork that goes into making all the other pages. So every couple pages I'll give myself a three-page breather so I don't get burned out and I can also expand on other parts of the story setting without it being a confusing interruption from the main storyline!
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When it started it updated every Tuesday and Friday without fail for like three years. It also got more complex to paint as time went on, and when I started I also worked a night job, and I used to push myself so hard to keep to twice a week I'd be going to work on anywhere from three hours to 45 minutes of sleep until eventually (page 300) I broke down and missed the schedule, and ever since I've just been posting them as often as I can get them done without putting myself in an unhealthy living cycle. It averages about five days to do a page but lately I've been travelling a lot and having other problems or obligations so it's been slipping a bit, but I think Once a Week is a rough average right now, though I'd love to go back to updating more often than that. I just don't want to kill myself doing it.
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Yes, actually! I posted them all on my Tumblr: http://deadwintercomic.tumblr.com/post/34367875870/happy-halloween-to-celebrate-the-holidays-i-made Also I have a Tumblr I post things to! Everyone in the world should follow it!
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Those are the zip-off seam for her cargos, as illustrated early on: http://deadwinter.cc/page/159 There's tassels tied to the zipper so they're easier to unzip. It's a kind of pants I swear I knew existed when I designed them way back then and I guess I've been stuck with them since. I think that design bit confuses a lot of people so when presented with the opportunity for a wardrobe change I might see to changing that particular element.
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I went to school for Illustration and studied a lot of oil painting, watermedia and classical fine arts. When I got out of school I tried to dig in as a freelance illustrator, but I had a lot of bad run-ins with dropped projects and non-paying clients, so I made the decision to try and do something for myself. I also got tired of drawing static illustrations without context or direction, so the sequential arts were the answer to both my problems. I'd never done a comic or written a story before, so it took me a little bit to learn the ins and outs, but after my first 100 pages I think I got the hang of writing a good story! It turns out I really like writing narrative stories, so the decision to start was a good one for me.
If someone wants to start out, the best advice I can give is to really commit to it. If you want to do it for a living you have to love what you do because you'll be doing what you love for hours and hours, every single day. When you start out you'll be totally unknown and you'll be pretty unknown for *years* before people start to notice what you do- a lot of cartoonists people believe "came out of nowhere" have actually been working for years and years completely unknown, and that's why they seem to appear out of the aether- no one noticed before. You also need to present yourself as a professional- be friendly and mingle with your peers, engage your readers, be approachable and generally present yourself as a halfway-decent person. You don't want to sling mud at your fellow cartoonists and you don't want to be a prick. It's a long hard road and the obscurity and isolation when you start out is a huge deterrent for a lot of people, and working through that slump is a lot of tough work, but in the long run it's totally worth it.
I hope this was helpful! -
There's three big words in the second panel of mouthful talk. I don't want to give the whole thing away but one of the big words is "hospitality".
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There's three big words in the second panel of mouthful talk. I don't want to give the whole thing away but one of the big words is "grateful".
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When you work for someone like Frank for years and years it hardens you to people who are bigger and scarier than you, to a degree. And Monday has to play ball because he needs something, and he has a great deal of patience.
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RED on black sneaks and the RULE????
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Judging by this and your last couple messages it sounds like you're really tripping on the idea of a woman holding any authority over a man and you gotta hash out those hangups because for real, it's 2012.
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It's the "best" if you don't mind coming out the other side a withered emotional Gollum. There's a balance that needs to be struck, otherwise you're left no better than the things you're supposedly running away from.
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This is kind of a loaded question so I'm going to write up a whole bunch of hopefully-relevant words about it, so please bear with me a moment.
Thematically, Liz and Monday represent opposite ends of the same scale- Liz embodies civilization, morality and the arts while Monday represents the savage brutality of animalistic survival- both are components of the modern human condition and both depend on one another to maintain their humanity. Civilization that doesn't get its hands dirty becomes devoured, and survivalism without morality holds no human distinction from feral fauna.
Liz and Monday don't mix well, but they've been working together out of a perceived mutual necessity. Alice recognizes the importance of Monday's methodology but neither she nor Liz has figured out the sinister reason why Monday keeps Liz and the group around where he could handle the savagery of the world outside on his own. As the story has progressed, however, both Liz's and Monday's ideologies have bled into one another- Liz has seen the importance of self-assertion and physicality in a hostile and savage setting in preserving the self, and Monday has come to recognize that working towards social interests helps him progress towards his own personal goals- where Liz learns you might need to squeeze the trigger so the self can endure and Monday discovers that sometimes the best way to self-interests means not squeezing the trigger. They don't like one another but their union of necessity has caused each to lean a bit more in the other's direction; this has been mutual and worked in both directions.
As for Liz's self-righteousness, if everyone has a mortal sin she would probably embody the sin of Pride- she thinks very highly of her beliefs, and this can be taken as a personality flaw and not a shining virtue. She's a writer and possesses the gift of words, so while Monday's skillset can manifest in a tornado of bullets Liz can always outlash him in a battle of words, and her assertion of morality often comes about through verbal flagellation. Monday's presence as the mysterious gunslinger needs a foil to maintain a sense of balance within the story and Liz keeps him on a short leash- a killer without a curator like that can dance through a story blowing everyone away, and then that isn't very entertaining. He's powerful, but she still holds a degree of power over him. But she's not always in the right herself.
Liz's idealism has caused its share of problems over the course of the week. She opens the story by unwittingly leaving a man to die in pursuit of her self-assertion, and this almost kills her when it comes storming back to haunt her. Later on her pursuit of social harmony almost gets Monday killed via shotgun blast to the chest, and the ensuing firefight serves as a big bulletmark in favor of Monday's methodology, Alice shares her sense of empathy, and her attempt to appeal to the human element in Arlen almost results in her death, and it ends up taking Liz's adoption of Monday's violent confrontationalism to save her. There's a give-and-take between the two, and a growing balance as each learns from the other.
In the end, though, Monday is a violent and amoral killer and his methods are not something we prize in the world through which we see the story. He's been right at times, and he's been proven right, but the way that happens is often more subtle than the points where Liz is in the right. It needs to be this way, I think, because violence and amorality being "right" in an overt and blatant way is a brutal and jarring thing, and highlighting this too strongly wouldn't match the tone of the story I want to tell. I want to maintain a degree of fun, and blowing people away needs to be very carefully dosed out to keep it from just becoming bullet porn. Monday's a quiet, dangerous animal and Liz is the woman holding the tiger on a leash- she has to assert herself or else the tiger could just turn around and devour her and the leash. -
She's deaf and she's signing in American Sign Language. Her pal is Rastafari and he's speaking Iyaric. I've been doing my homework to make sure both come across clearly and naturally.
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