Skyline

Constant Reader writes:

Here is the actual idea, in the words of the committee chair (and feel free to jazz this up...whatever you would want to wear as a T shirt with maybe 2 colors of ink):

"So my idea was to have a pirate (and it doesn’t have to be peedee the pirate) swinging a golf club at a golf ball. The shaft of the club says ‘fights’ and the golf ball says ‘cancer.’"

That's doable. I'll work up some sketches through this weekend and send you them via email.

The inking slowed down a little as I redrew panels, including the schematic I mentioned yesterday. The latest panel was a birds-eye shot of an arena, and just thinking about making the perspective grids that made my eyes cross. I instead redrew a close-up of the caged ring on the arena floor.

The comic's biggest perspective challenge ended this weekend. I had in mind a specific shot of a skyline with the superhero HQ towering above it. I ran a similar image in last year's comic, but it was from below. That allowed me to limit the skyline and tower to one corner of the panel and use negative space for the rest of it. It was a lazy cheat I justified by saying it was an arty camera placement. This time, I needed to establish the city and the tower's prominence. Also, I wanted heroes flying about on their daily patrols. And it happened thusly:

This sketch is about four inches wide. In the bottom left will be an editor's note revealing the theme song of the radio show that bookends the story.

This is the pencil version. I laid down a perspective grid and sketched the structures and figures atop it. Who are these heroes? I don't know. Doesn't matter. I needed flying bodies.

Here's the inks. I randomly delineated building structures, but I think I got across the idea of a metropolis. But, of course, not THE Metropolis.

The convention organizers are promoting the revelation of this year's special guest. They'll spill tomorrow. I can't get too excited as I probably won't get a chance to see whoever it is.

I may have tried another perspective angle after watching the recently released police helicopter footage from 9/11. I saw it yesterday, and it conveys the incredible size of the buildings. As a lifelong country mouse, I can barely fathom structures that large and tall. The footage gets me dizzy, and I wonder if it somehow trips my brain's depth perception in a way little else does. It's possible I'm not afraid of heights after all, but those instances of vertigo are the lone times my brain actually computes depth.