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Email the author at
qwanderer7+lgc@gmail.com
The Elves of LleuGarnock is Copyright
Irene Pitcairn<2008-2009. The Elves of
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February 12, '09
NYCC was pretty awesome. I learned a few things, but I was also encouraged by the fact that I already knew a lot of the things the experts had to say, and some of my beliefs were confirmed. Successful webcomic artists agree that the best thing you can do to promote your comic is make your comic better and longer.
Opinions are mixed on how much effort one should put into networking with other webcomic artists. My stance is it seems to be working for me, but I'm only doing it because it's also fun. It's recreation time rather than business time, so it doesn't hurt the actual comic work. At the con I met a guy who draws comics and works in advertising, and he was emphatic about publicity and selling yourself. It was interesting talking to him, since he's familiar with the mainstream comics business, but I think I had a better idea of where to put your effort to get the most effect when you're working on the web.
One of the cool things people do with their comics online is let people watch them drawing on Ustream.com. I think that's pretty great. I wish I could do that. But in my situation it is impossible. I have a webcam, and a microphone, and pretty good DSL, the problem is the content. Watching someone draw their comic in realtime is fine, if it's going up in a few hours. But three months? It just doesn't make sense.
So back to Comic Con. Jim Shooter's talk was my favorite, just beating out Scott Kurtz and Robert Khoo's talk about the business of webcomics. It's great to hear successful comic artists talk about their work, but for someone as scattered as I can be, charisma makes all the difference. These were the panels I found the most useful because the speakers had something to say and they knew how to say it so I'd listen.
Jim Shooter was also the only person that had concrete advice about drawing, writing and organizing comics. He didn't have to insist on any restrictive rules to do this, either. For example, I really liked what he said about panels shot from tricky angles, and other artsy or gimmicky techniques. He said you can do anything you want to, just make sure that it's absolutely clear what's happening. Before you put in the trick shot, put that second panel on the page so everyone knows where everything is. Set it up properly and its effect will be that much stronger.
A lot of the other panels were interesting, and I usually got at least something out of them, but they seemed kind of scattered and general. I get a feeling that a lot of these comic artists just do what they do, and they don't have much idea of why it works and what elements make it work. I like to be told the specific effects of elements so I can use them, and I can imagine someone else getting a lot more out of these panels than I did. I just don't know what.
I've been wondering lately why things in the comic are the way they are. Why a brother and sister? I didn't grow up with brothers. I have no idea what that's like. They say to write what you know. I guess you could say I don't know real life very well. What I do know is fantasy. Hence the fantasy setting. But why these unknown elements? Why is the characters' father preachy, talkative and nosy? I honestly don't know anyone at all like Aiken. Wait, maybe I do. I might keep her in mind when I have Aiken troubles.
I suppose it's because they are things I'm curious about, but there are other reasons that occur to me. In a lot of ways it's easier for me to write fiction from an outside perspective. Also, it seems like most webcomic artists use the comic form to explore things out of the realm of their experience, even if their comic is based on their own lives - for example, the ubiquitous talking animal. At least I'm safe there. You have my personal guarantee that Mr. Cat will never speak in any language but cat.
So William came by recently. We decided that we're going to continue writing our novel, but in comic form. This is big news, and it might have some impact on LleuGarnock. The novel is the project that I have actually wanted to be working on since we started it in college, so of course I leapt at the opportunity to be involved in it again.
This is the status of my role and commitment: I will be the artist and co-author. We will create and distribute the comic on a regular basis, probably one page a week, possibly on an issue-type schedule.
These are my thoughts on coordinating both comics: I'll need a couple of months before we start, to build up my LleuGarnock buffer again, refamiliarize myself with the story , and to create some character models and 3-D room models. I've been wanting to use Sketch-Up for LleuGarnock, but it hasn't worked out. I'm excited to build some of the sets from the novel where a lot of action takes place. I've had these rooms in my head for years and building them is going to be much easier than building a forest, and much more useful than building a cabin interior used in two scenes.
This project is going to be artistically intensive. I'm going to be working in a more realistic, contrast-rich Noirish style, and because of how much I care about the quality, I'm going to be spending a lot of time on each page to make sure I'm doing the best I can. The good news is, it's going to be so different from LleuGarnock that I'll be able to take a break from one by working on the other. The bad news - I can't work on comics 24-7 and remain sane. So here's what I'm thinking:
I'll try three pages a week, one with dragons and two with elves. Depending on how I feel about that, I might reduce the LleuGarnock schedule back to once a week. I really don't want to do that, and also there is the possibility that I'll want more than a week to mull over each dragony page, so I'm also open to reducing that schedule instead. I guess I'll just figure it out when I get to that point. But whatever happens, LleuGarnock will still update at least once a week.
OK, the latest news is that this new comic will almost definitely be called Dragon's Fall. A name for the project has been a problem for so long that I'm almost afraid to formalize it in any way, but Dragon's Fall seems to be working well for both of us. We're falling back into a lot of our old problems otherwise, like calling each other's work and ideas dumb and getting offended. We're still hopeful that the comic form will allow us to get around some of our other problems, specifically the reason I haven't been allowed to work on it recently, which is that I work in spirals, which disrupts William's linear working style. LleuGarnock is my proof that I can do linear, so we're trying this thing out.