DOING THE WORK
by Harris O'Malley

April 18, 2004
In Order to Save The Comic, We Had to Burn The Comic

There’s a saying at Caer O’Malley: “When the going gets tough, somebody hold my rodent.”

Wait. Wrong saying.

The saying is “Shut up and get the back to work.”

After the wailing and gnashing of teeth of last time, there was little more to do than just shut the hell up and get back to work. Books aren’t going to get any more finished if I just sit there and whine about getting pages done.

At least part of my intimidation, and this is something that I’ve heard from a number of artists is the sheer volume of pages. Berserker: The Wild Hunt is 100 pages, plus supplemental material, and that’s a fairly sizable chunk of work to have staring back at you. Now my previous book, Between The Cracks: All Miracles Have A Price is 144 pages; by all rights, Berserker’s page count should seem like less of a massive undertaking. The difference is that Between The Cracks was done in 32 page chunks, with a couple months taken off between the first and second issues for my father’s health problems.

So, rather than sit around and treat my editor with 3000 words of “God, I suck as an artist”, I just split the book into artificial chapters, 25 pages each; a four-act story. Admittedly, this does nothing to change the pacing of the book; it’s just a cheap technique to get past artist’s block.

Surprisingly, there have been some good parts to this crisis.

Artists, in my experience, are very often their own worst enemies. I would guess that just about all of us, in every form of art you care to think of, have heard that little voice in the back of one’s head that goes on about all the flaws and faults in the work or the performance. I, for one, frequently can’t look back over my own work; I just see the mistakes I’ve made leaping out of the page and can’t possibly imagine how anyone else can miss them. On the plus side, this makes it easier to learn from my mistakes, but it does quite the number on one’s ego.

It’s not all that often that you get to go back and correct those mistakes.

Over at my site, I had previews of the first pages of Berserker: The Wild Hunt available for public consumption. These were drawn two years ago, and are the only remaining images from the pages I lost last month. Let’s take a look and see how some of these compare with the new pages I’ve been working on.

I collaborated with Jens Altmann over these, starting with a relatively loose script and tightening things up as we went along, fixing a lot of mistakes along the way.

The book starts out with a lone businessman being chased down the empty streets of the city, pursued by eldritch beasts. The man finds himself cornered in front of the city park as the hounds are moving in closer.

In the original (here seen on the left), I was trying to be tricky. I used speed-lines, not only to imply the sudden motion but also to try to obscure the fact that I really wussed out on drawing the background. I also played at being clever, trying to imply a sense of mystery by having an extreme close-up of the hound’s eye (and oh-so-original reflection of it’s prey) and having our poor businessman being chased by a flying POV camera, in true B-Movie fashion.

Screw that.

As you can see, I decided to change things up. Instead of using speed-lines, I tilted the camera angle to emphasize the unnaturalness of the situation and add visual interest. The running pose is a little less extreme than in the original, but conveys the sense of motion much better. I also decided to drop the dogs in, rather than trying to tease with hiding the creature, since I was going to reveal them on the next page anyway. It also didn’t hurt that I had gotten much better at drawing different breeds of dogs and wanted to show off a little.

In the next page, the man scrambles over the fence and into the city park, trips and falls flat on his face.



Yowch. This is, in retrospect, probably one of the pages I’m least proud of having drawn. Setting the camera dead-on as he scales the fence robs the scene of drama and the park is… well it just sucked. And don’t get me started on the dogs. I wasn’t able to find decent reference photos for mastiffs or Presa Canarios and went with wolves instead. This didn’t work nearly as well, and having them “flying” here the way I do is too ludicrous. And again, the camera positioned side-on robs the scene of any real energy. It also didn’t help that all the black with the white hatching confuses the eye and draws attention away from the central figures. Not a good thing.

My first change was combining the top two panels and playing around with the camera angles again. I went with a tilted worm’s eye view for more visual interest and also to suggest just how close the hounds were. The second panel, running through the park, is much cleaner and more dramatic. A better mix of black and white so that the reader’s eye isn’t overloaded, the man remains the central figure and the emotion and energy of the scene is carried through. Other than cleaning up the backgrounds and collapsing the “falling” panels into one, I didn’t make too many changes to the bottom. There’re really only so many ways you can show someone tripping over something, after all.

Next page is the splash page. Our businessman falls at the feet of Honest Eckart, a mysterious old man who, ultimately, initiates the whole story.



Where to start. In the original page, Eckart is standing at an angle that has no real correlation to how the ground lays or the victim’s position. There were also more problems with drawing the background. An interesting note: the coat Eckart is wearing started life as Dekker’s coat in Blade Runner.

I moved the camera behind the man’s shoulder in the revision and drastically fixed the backgrounds. Thank God I eventually learned how to draw trees. Eckart also received a massive tweaking in his basic design, making him more impressive visually, as well as able to stand at proper angles relative to the ground. The Berserker logo also underwent some minor, but effective changes. It’s interesting how much difference playing with the font size and kerning can make.

One more for good measure.

Eckart offers advice to the man cowering at his feet. The poor victim, scared out of his mind, choses not to listen to the creepy old man and makes a break for it and is run down by the hounds. Meanwhile, the mysterious Huntsman appears on the scene, taunting Eckart with this apparent failure to save this latest victim of the Wild Hunt.



These pages, to my mind, best illustrate how much I actually learned about storytelling in the intervening years between when I drew them.

On the original page, Eckart seems to be staring at his shoes and saws at the air like a cut-rate Hamlet at a dinner theater. Once again, I was trying to be clever by having the camera set in the same position for the man’s flying start and the dogs chasing after him; too bad that it ended up looking more like a Bug’s Bunny cartoon. You almost expect one of the wolves to stop and ask Eckart “Which way did he go, which way did he go?” The take-down is probably the strongest panel (which is not saying much, really) on the page, since it leaves more of the savaging up to the mind of the reader. It’s really too bad that it’s undercut by the panel below it, since the dogs seem to have become some sort of hideous mutants with wolf heads and enormous horse legs for a body.

For the new page, I went for a more cinematic effect. The man’s pose suggests trying to scramble to his feet; once again, why use two panels when one will do, especially if that second panel makes the man look like he’s doing his best imitation of a grey heron? I moved the Huntsman’s appearance up the page for more impact; showing the muzzle of the horse makes the animal more identifiable and hinting at the Huntsman’s appearance added visual interest. Having the dogs charge the camera was much more dynamic than having them run from left to right, as was showing the take-down from behind, rather than showing an over-shaded head snapping at a tie. Splitting the dialogue from one panel to three also provided an element of timing, which the first version could’ve used.

It’s almost funny; during the panic and rending of clothing that went on when my hard drive imploded, all I could think of was that I had just lost over a month’s worth of work, never mind the paintings and my artwork from across the ages. It never really occurred to me at the time that maybe, just maybe, some of it just wasn’t worth saving.

But if it’s all the same, I’d rather not have to lose another month’s work just for another art lesson, mmkay?

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Another week, another plug. As before, if the tale above has intrigued you and you want to know more, drop us a line at berserker2004@web.de with your snail-mail address and Jens and I will be happy to fix you up with a copy of the Berserker ashcan. Be sure to e-mail me and let me know what you think when you get yours.

Meanwhile, I have, for reasons quite unknown to myself, volunteered to take part in 24-Hour Comic Day. I’ll be stationed at Austin Books, with fellow members of the Austin Sketch Group and other talented artists, so come by and cheer me on. I’ll also have copies of the ashcan available as well as copies of Between The Cracks: The Bride and Between The Cracks: All Miracles Have A Price, and you’ll be able to take outrageous advantage of my sleep-deprived state to get copies on the cheap.

Stop on by and say hello, won’t you?

 

Harris O'Malley is a writer/artist/publisher of BETWEEN THE CRACKS and artist of the upcoming OGN Berserker: The Wild Hunt. Find out more at http://www.studiounderhill.com


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