Spoiler Alert!

Just for fun, here’s a distant screenshot of all 466 pages of my rough draft layouts for my upcoming graphic novel (working title The Sculptor). This is as close as I can bring you right now, but as work goes on in the coming months, I promise to show some actual art.

It’s a testament to the speed of today’s processors—well, 2007’s processors—that what you’re looking at actually exists in a single file and if zoomed in, the lettering is readable. To get a sense of the scale, each of those dark gray rectangles is a two-page spread chapter divider.

When heading into rewrites and restructuring, it’s always helped me to step back and look at “the big picture.” For all my previous projects, including the all-digital Making Comics, I had to depend on paper layouts to get that kind of topsight, but for this project it’s all pixels from start to finish.

Oh, and yes, I still plan to make it shorter during the next two months, even though I had to adjust the count upwards from the last blog post.

I’ve updated the travel sidebar with upcoming trips to University of Houston, Philadelphia’s Germantown Friends School, and Indiana University South Bend (not to be confused with the Bloomington campus where I visited last Fall).

Philly is in-school and not open to the public, but both Houston and South Bend are public lectures. South Bend is even selling tickets already.

I’ll also be at UX London this May and Comic-Con of course. I’ll post details on other upcoming talks as they come together.

Belated Happy Birthday to Ivy! We went to Disneyland for her birthday on Tuesday after a very full day of work Monday, and yesterday was a lot printing and mailing, so I didn’t get much blogging, tweeting, or, um… facing… in this week.

Round One of the “rough draft” for the graphic novel is done! I’ll be working on revisions/rewrites for the next couple of months and then, starting in March, I’ll be doing finished art for two years. The book is currently at a whopping 461 pages, but I’m hoping it’ll get shorter in revisions. (Note that my “rough draft” is basically just a rough sketched-out version of what the finished book will look like, all captions and balloons in).

Fun fact: My roughs are done forty pages at a time in a single photoshop document so I can slide panels back and forth and think of the flow more organically and not let the page dictate pacing too much. They’re really big files!

The whole family is getting into the Avett Brothers this year.

Winter and I finally finished watching Deathnote on DVD. All the kids in anime club were yelling at her to finish it already so they could talk about it. That is one crazy show! (And oh, man, that opening theme and animation for Season 2…)

Still loving Mad Men.

The preview for Iron Man 2 makes me feel 14 years old again. In a good way.

Best comic of the year? For me, probably Asterios Polyp, but now that I have a bit of free time, I need to read a few more contenders.

Creatively, I thought 2009 was a great year for comics, music, and movies. Financially, though, it sucked donkey balls for a lot of people in our community. Let’s hope ’10 is better.

Happy New Year!

From the Inbox:

Scott,

Last year, my friend Brad and I created a website with a randomized premise-generator called PlotBoiler. I recently shared it with the (mostly-dormant) Oubapo America group, and Matt Madden pointed out it might come in handy in the creation of 24 hour comics. Well, anytime someone says “24 hour comics,” I naturally think of you, and it occurred to me you might be interested in taking a look at it.

Michael Avolio

This reminds me (both in concept and execution) of a program Kurt Busiek and I whipped up in middle school for generating random superheroes and villains. We used an ancient PDP-8, operated from a dumb terminal, and programmed the thing in Basic, but clicking on Michael and Brad’s link, I swear there’s a family resemblance!

Give it a try yourself and see what you get.

I’m taking this week off from everything but drawing and doing Christmas-related stuff with the family. Look for more posts next week.

We celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, and Ivy’s B-Day all in December, so life can get pretty hectic around here this time of year, but for those of you feeling a bit low on holiday cheer for whatever reason, I offer the above wonderfully insane video from many years ago (thanks to our friend Tom) as the secret to all happiness in the universe.

So Happy Holidays and, well…

Prisencolinensinainciusol!!

Here’s a great time-waster spotted by our friend Lori:

Paul Rogers asks if you can name some of his favorite movies based on just 6 drawings in sequence (with no movie stars).

I did pretty well, how about you?

The Simpsons first hit the airwaves 20 years ago today! Great excuse to congratulate its creator Matt Groening (rhymes with “raining,” guys) for all his great work over the years.

AND a good excuse to link to this wonderfully creepy image by Roberto Parada:

So here is a picture of former U.N. General Secretary Boutros Boutros-Ghali:

That is all.

Here’s one from the vaults: The original Nancy collage that I made many years ago which helped inspire creation of the game.

I did a lot of strange things in those days.

“It turns out though, that because most of my friends are cartoonists, they’re uninsured too…”

Julia Wertz on living with lupus and being uninsured. (link via Mike Lynch)

Ivy and I were uninsured for the first several years of our marriage. Then Winter swallowed a penny when she was two and it cost us seven hundred thousand pennies to get it out.

Getting health insurance is a really good idea (as is fixing the whole system, though that’s another topic). It’s sad that so few in this business—at least on the alternative/small press end—feel they can afford it.

[More on this topic from Evan Dorkin, plus (via Tom in the comments) here’s some older, but still relevant info from Colleen Doran.]