Old, old Comics

 

 ...or rather a walk through my journey of drawing them. Oh, it was not a pretty stroll in the beginning, I can tell you that.

 I didn't have any kind of plan, plot or purpose for most of the comics, I just drew a page whenever I felt like it, letting the story lead me where it wanted to. Usually, that was nowhere, and very often the comics were abandoned before any kind of ending was reached. At least I never got sucked into the eternal vortex of redrawing pages, instead I just started a whole new comic. Err, not exactly a better way to handle things...

But hey, let's start from the beginning, from my very first comic back from when I was about 14 years old:

 

 

Oh, how I wish I had understood the importance of making backup-files back then, because these pages did have speech bubbles, and I have a vague memory of drawing a couple of the pages digitally. All I was able to find in my quest for old, old stuff were these traditional media originals, about 30 of them. So there's no way to ever find out what was going on in my mind storytelling-vise, I can't even remember if I had some kind of plot worked out or not. (The plot-meter is leaning very stronly towards "not".)

Virtually no time was spent planning the characters, so they had no background stories or specific personalities at this point. Which probably was for the best, at that age I would surely had com up with something embarrassingly naive and clichéd, now I was instead able to develop the characters rather freely later on, which I did.

 

 

The last page i bothered to draw for this comic, judging from the unfinished coloring. But all the feedback I got really gave me a thirst for drawing webcomics, so this is where it all started. Hah, I can't belive it's only been about 7 years since this, feels like an eternity. Oh well, at least I've developed very visibly since.

Oh, and my dear characters are apparently all present in that last panel: Eo, Penta, Kheriav, Rate, Niku and Essi.

 

Then, in 2005, it was time for a very different kind of comic with the same characters. With the first comic I had actually spent some time working on each page and the whole thing took me roughly a whole year to draw, plus I kept the story somewhat serious. Okay, not even serious, but at least "non-ridiculous". This time, ridiculous was the only way to describe the story that unfolded:  

 

And "fast", that is another good word to describe this comic. I drew every page as fast as I could, the pacing of the story was that of a horse that has been stung by a bee and the characters spent most of their time running around in a hurry. In 19 pages there were secret agent attacks, sewer-adventures and alien acductions, and I had the whole comic drawn and published within a few weeks. (Yeah, my handwriting looks like something a trained chimp could do. Sadly, it isn't any more readable these days either.)

 

 

During those few weeks my characters developed some kind of disctinct characteristics, and they now formed your typical mis-matched rag-tag team, but still had no background stories, so they were easy to throw into pretty much any kind of story.

In 2006  I took my forst steps into digitally coloring my comics. No photoshop here, the program I used was called PaintShopPro 8. It was a pretty decent, cheap alternative to Photoshop, it's just my skills that vere non-existent back then.

 

 

This comic became about 25 pages long and did actually reach an ending, but it wasn't an honorable one. Basically the ending was five pages of wrapping up the story as fast as possible.

 

 

Plus, those five pages weren't even colored. At the age of 16 I had the attention span of a potato, so spending more than a couple of hours per page seemed like an impossible task back then.During this comic I became exhausted with the whole drawing webcomics-concept for a while. But, oh, look! I finally stopped texting the pages by hand!

 

When about a year had passed I had recovered from my imaginary exhaustion, and it was time for another comic, with a completely new set of characters for the first time ever. I can't believe I still didn't make any kind of script or even think of a plot for the story before I started drawing the first page. Granted, the comic was supposed to be something I would work on whenever I had no inspiration left for drawing something else, so a plot seemed pretty useless anyways. The comic never even got a name, because with no idea of what the story is about it's pretty difficult to come up with one.

 

 

At less than one page per month the comic reached only 24 pages, even if it ran from late 2007 to 2009. Each page was drawn with black markers on cheap A3 watercolor paper(yes, at least I did the right thing and drew the linearts in a much larger format than the final result)  and then colored them in either PaintShopPro9 or, later on, Photoshop CS3. Or was it CS2? Nah, can't remember which version, but it doesn't really matter.  The comic is still readable over at my Deviantart account, for those who are in the mood for some self-torturing.

 

It wasn't actually the only comic I worked on during 2008: it was my last year at upper secondary school (aka eleventh grade) and everyone had to make some kind of graduation project, so I decided to draw, surprise surprise: another comic!

 

 

It had been a couple of years since I last had drawn my dear rag-tag team, it was time to give them a second round of life. As this was a school project the comic would of course be evaluated, so this time I did everything by the book. For the first time ever I made a script, sketches and even a whole bunch of practice-pages before I started working on this project.

 

One year, 24 pages, all drawn by hand, colored with watercolors and lettered digitally. It became another ridiculous story without a hint of seriousness, which was exactly what I liked back then. And still do, mind you.

Hmm, I might actually translate and upload this comic one day, as I'm rather fond of it. It is, after all, the first comic I've managed to bring to an honorable end without any shortcuts.

 

And that was the end of me drawing comics for a long while, instead I focused solely on developing my illustating-skills for a couple of years. It wasn't until I was accepted into TAIK (that's the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, aka Taideteollinen Korkeakoulu) that the thought "hmm, maybe I should try to draw some kind of really long, well planned out graphic novel while I'm here. I bet it would help me develop a lot! And maybe get some kind of credit, too, heheh..."

Starting that "well planned out" graphic novel turned out to be really, really difficult. It took me over eight excruciating months to start drawing "a Redtails Dream", which means it was already 2011 and my first year as a bachelor student was almost over. Before that I had scrapped two non-inspiring comic ideas and one idea that I liked so darn much that I just couldn't scrifice it as a practice comic.

 

The two ideas that I scrapped were both well past the stage of being mere "ideas" by the time I flushed them down the toilet. They were already well though out stories, with thumbnail-scrips, tons of sketches and practice pages done, which is way more work than what I did for "a Redtail's dream".

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first one (in a way second, since my first idea is the one I'm still in love with and am saving for later.) was supposed to be a humorous, steampunkish anthro-animal story of about 80 pages, set on an offshore energy-plant slash research facility. The main cast: a slow-witted maintenace crew suddenly facing an unexpected mutant-rat infestation. So lots of mishap and action was to be expected, with a few slices of adorable comradeship.

 

 And guess what, it's barely been a year and I've already misplaced almost all of my sketches and practice pages! All I've been able to find in my...hrrm...archives is the character sketch to the right and what seems to be a very early (and severely smudged) sketch of a page spread. Eh, maybe the rest will turn up one day when I organize my stuff. I'm almost certain I haven't thrown anything away.

 

...except I kind of have a memory of me ripping small pieces of paper from the sheets I drew the other character sketches on. It was an emergency-note taking  situation, and I had no other paper at hands!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This time I spent over half a year planning; on top of character and environment-sketches I made a thumbnail script for all 130 pages (yup, I was getting more and more ambitious as the year progressed) and detailed prectice-sketches of the first 38 pages, with dialogue included.

 

 

 

This is what the thumbnail script looks like. The images are impossible to decipher, hence the notes on the sides. Which are also impossible to decipher, go me! But hey, the point was to get myself some kind of overview of the story structure, the practice page sketches would clear up the rest:

 

 

 

Half a year of this, and I was ready to start drawing page number uno. Except I was also ready to dump the whole story, as I was completely fed up with cyborg seals and felt absolutely nothing for the characters. It was pretty clear that there was no way to get through 130 pages with a attitude like that, so with great remorse I let go of this project too. Bummer, it was a pretty decent story and would had made a terrific practice-comic.

 

 So, the greater part of my first year studying at TAIK was over, and I was right back at square one. Pretty disheartening, I've got to say, and I started to seriously doubt my ability to ever get a full-length comic done.

And then one week, from absolutely nowhere, I got the idea for "a Redtail's dream". Spent less than a month working on the plot, made barely any character sketches and got straight to work.

 

 

Once again I threw together a thumbnail script, but smaller, messier and without any  notes this time (I do spot some "helpful" symbols here and there.) As one could expect, the script has turned out to be completely inaccurate. It predicted the whole story to be about 110 pages long, and my latest calculations say at least 250 pages.

I recall a fear that if I were to plan this comic too clearly, I'll eventually lose interest in both the caracters and the story, exactly as with the previous idea. Therefore everything was deliberately done in a hurry, and kind of half-assedly.

 

 

 

That's pretty much all of the characeter study I did. No Puppy-Fox, no secondary characters, just a few small sketches of Hannu and Ville. The concept of having only two main characters was rather alien to me at this point, and in a way it still is. Rag-tag teams have always been the most natural character setup for me.     

 

 

 

But I guess everything still kind of worked out, and with 80+ pages drawn as of now this is by far my longest comic ever, and I am very much intending to finish it.

No spoiler warning needed for the sketch above, as obviously Ville's animal forms have changed a bit since that chart. I spot no squirrel or snake there, and in exchange for those two a couple of animals in the sketch won't be featured in the actual comic. Want to guess which ones?

 

 The first page of chapter one was drawn in March 2011, the prologue was left for later as I had absolutely no idea how to kick the whole thing off. There's a lot of issues with "a Redtaild Dream" that could had been avoided with some more careful planning, but on the other hand, letting the story live and develop as it progresses has its advantages. Especially when it's a practice comic we're dealing with. And to make up for the lacking character studies I instead make some additional sketches before the start of each new chapter.

 

My next graphic novel, however; oh there'll be so much planning done that I could use the sketches as toilet paper for a month and still have too many of them left! There's still several years left until I can (or even want to) start working on the pages, and I've already got more stuff drawn for it than I had for "a Redtail's Dream". But I won't reveal anything, we wouldn't want it jinxed, now would we? Let's just enjoy Hannu and Ville's little mishap adventure with Puppy-Fox for now.