I'm starting to get back to  this  comic. I'm currently  finishing another  illustration project and trying to  write the novel version for Nation Novel Writing Month  ( NaNoWrimo.org ) I decided I'd try to write out the  story What the  Heck in novel format just to try to jump start myself to working on Heck again. It's worked  so far. the 2600  words  I have  written  so far have  gotten me looking over notes and unfinished pages on  the project.  I hope writing  it our   in novel style will help me  flesh out the story  a little  more.   So far  so  good.  but with  Heck they is  always a catch... every time I get moving on this  project I  have to set it aside  for things like...  moving.  I'm hoping not this  time but we'll see.

 I have   set up a  fan page for the  comic.  just  click on the  become a fan on the side of  my blog. For  right now  I'm back to  writing on  the novel and I hope to  come away with  some  new stuff to  get me jump started on  this  project.

Getting back to Heck

I've been away from Heck for too long. It probably didn't help that we moved to a wonderful place with too much to do. I'm finally getting things up and moving again.
After an inspiring trip to Disneyland I decided I have to get moving on this comic again.
I recently go hosting of my own and I am working on setting up my own websites.
www.heckcomic.com it's still forwarded to this blog but will soon be pointing to it's own set up.

Leaving Heck ...

I've often joked ,with my best friend, that the town I've be living in the last four years is Heck.

Well, after four years we are finally leaving. Uncle Sam packed us up and put all out belongings on a truck bound for our new home across the country yesterday. This was supposed to happen over a three day period. I thought i would have the chance to ink up a few pages and work on them during the transition. I didn't get the chance. They pakced up my art studio in the blink of an eye and I had to swoop in and save my current work from being dumped uncerimoniously in a box. I'm glad it all got packed so fast but it my be heck (wink wink) getting everything back together again on the other side.
So for now I apologize for not posting for the next to week because I'm leaving Heck hopefully for a place that everyone has described as heaven.

progress!

I'm slowly getting the first page inked. I snapped a picture of it on the light table. I have been sneaking into the art room and inking the first page. I've been holding off working on the pages I want to get to because I needed to finish my first page. I have been putting off this page trying to get the first panel right. It's been sitting on the drawing board for months waiting for me to get out my reference material and get the first panel done "right." I finally looked at the sketch I had done and said "It's good enough. I'm going to take what I have and put it all together so I can get on with telling my story"
So I combined the what I had and got to work on inking. In the middle of it I realized what it was I needed to fix on the first panel. I knew sub consiously some thing was wrong about that sketch and it had been bugging me. That was why I had been wanting to redo the first sketch. Oh well if I'll edit it later . No, I'm not going to tell you what's wrong but Feel free to leave a comment and guess. I may give a prize or something.

Sneak Peak

My Art room has currently been taken over by my husband as he finishes a research paper. It's the sanctuary from the chaos caused by out dear son and his toddler tornado of energy that leaves destruction of the house in it's wake.
So I haven't been in there to do any work. I snuck in tonight and grabbed a snap shot of this sketch from a scene late in the story. I drew this as a concept sketch. Because I was trying to cram the story into a short format the idea was going to be one of several panels. Now that I'm not worried about any competition rules I can include it as as its own full page drawing ! This also solves the layout problem I was having with that page. I really like this particular sketch I look forward to finishing it.

Rough drafts

I'm posting up a few pages of rough draft of the first few pages. I thought I would have something a little more cleaned up to post by now. But life has other ideas at the moment. I also have a scanner that has issues and a copy of photoshop that doesn't work with my newer OS and that generally doesn't make it easy to get my hard copy drawings into finished form. So I decided to post old stuff I had scanned and already on my computer. I'll be showing the "behind the scenes "of working on a comic/ manga graphic novel.
I start with a rough layout of the page either on an 8.5 x 11 peice of paper or on 5 x8 index cards and some times on 3x5. Next I do a clean up in a blue pencil, then I ink before taking it into the computer for lettering and toning and maybe color.
These first two pages are slight variants on the first page. Currently they are decorating my drawing table as I work to finish a cleaned up first page.


The rest here are the some of the first 5-10 pages. started this project with the idea of having to put the whole story into 20 pages for Tokyo pop's Rising Starts of Manga. After trying a couple of times to finish the project to submit to them, I realized that this story could not be told in just 20 pages.
So I've added a few pages to the beginning. Instead of trying to cram too much into just a few pages I can unfold the story in the way it needs to be told.

Meet Joe

This is an early sketch of the main character Joe.

I met this character one night, a few years ago, as I was thinking how impossible it was for me to finish a story I was working on for the Rising Stars Of Manga Competition. I just couldn't get that story to gel. As I was laying in bed this Character popped into my head and introduced himself.
"Hi, I'm Joe! "
He continued " I'm just and average guy. I wasn't good enough for Heaven or bad enough for hell..." I got up and wrote the beginnings of this story as it came to me.
My best friend and I had been brainstorming months before about story ideas and one idea we had discussed was sparked by a joke we heard about two demons "darned to heck." We wondered what being "darned to heck" would be like. We figured it would be an annoying place but not so bad as to be hellish. But you really wouldn't want to be there. It's a place seeming ruled by Murphy's law. And we came up with an idea for a story about a bunch of kids who died and went to heck. We called it "Oh, My Heck!" Joe was not part of that cast of characters. He got there before they did. I realized had the back story and it was quite a fun story to tell.