Book Progress and Schedule Update

by Major Tom on April 2, 2012 at 1:00 am
Posted In: Blog

Although there is no strip today, I wanted to update you on the upcoming schedule and the book. First, the schedule. I am working on Zed’s “Fairy Tale” which is going to be something a little different. I have been hashing it out so the story is just right. I will be working on it this week, and while I hope to be able to post it end of week, I can make no promises. We’ll see. The plan is to post all the pages at once, something like 5 pages.

Book Progress – 1/3 Done with Phase 1!

Work is going well on the archive. Steve Ogden warned me that opening the archive was “the road to hell” and he was pretty much right! It’s been a LOT more work than I planned. BUT – I am very satisfied with the results so far. It’s very hard to not simply redraw every single strip! But that wouldn’t make sense. But the updates are looking great, to me. Steve has seen a few and likes them, too. I keep thinking it will get easier as I go along, then I look ahead and groan!

Also, the “making of” book is shaping up nicely. I now have 20 pages, and it’s all caught up to where I am in my progress so now I can just document as I go along. For those of you interested in “behind the scenes” stuff, it will be real nice piece.

To give you an idea of just how much work has gone into this so far, and to give you a little peek into what has been done, I’ve put together this big thumbnail image. Every single one of these strips has been fully recolored. Some have been fully redrawn, and every single strip has some art updates. There are plenty of story fixes and 4 completely new strips. I probably won’t continue to do this all the way through (we’ll see) but it’s a fun way to have a look. Below that is a thumbnail of one of the Making Of pages.

I believe the book will simply be called “Marooned – A Space Opera in the Wrong Key!” Enjoy.

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Panel Peeks 24 – Before and After

by Major Tom on March 31, 2012 at 1:00 am
Posted In: Blog

One of the tricky things about the book project is figuring out how much work to do on a strip. In my mind, ideally I would redraw every strip until somewhere around 300! But that’s hardly possible. I need to be careful about redrawing too many things, or I will never finish in time – or ever! It’s almost certain every strip in the first 50 will be completely recolored – probably further than that, in fact.

Artwise, I have to decide what to fix. As I said before, there are certain strips I cannot live with. #24 is one of those strips. However, I want the art to “fit” the time period as much as possible. In this one, there were just too many things to try and rework, it was easier to redraw – faster even. But not from scratch. What I did was dupe the art, size it down, and use it as a base to redraw. This basically eliminates steps 1 and 2 I would normally do, making things much faster.

Often I am just fixing things like hands, odd positions, etc. In this case, I needed to move Asimov to center stage, to make the joke work better and to make the compositions work better. I reworked the table they are sitting at to work a little better. If I were drawing this from scratch, I wouldn’t do it this way today. But it’s a vast improvement over the original, and of course the colors and the uniform all fit in. Here’s a before and after of the first two panels.

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