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Weekly Edition 007

I need to start off with a disclaimer: I’m working on a werewolf story and as to be expected the story gets a bit gory. That being said, I don’t find it gratuitously gory. It’s more cartoony. In the vain of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies, or Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, people are basically bags of blood. And lots of blood. Plus the story is called Super Blood, so going in to it you should expect at least a little bit of blood. If you can watch an Itchy and Scratch cartoon, then the following will a cake walk. A blood filled cake walk….mmmm, cake.

So, I’ve really been dragging my feet with getting this thumbnails completed. I think maybe I’m being a bit too precious with the artwork. So this past week I thought less of the art and just tried to get the panel layouts down on the page.

I also had to do some rewriting with this section of the story because I didn’t have any sort of transformation scene and wanted to expand upon that. The story calls for a very fast transitioning between human and werewolf so in the first two drafts of the script our hero was just suddenly a werewolf or just suddenly a human.

I asked a trusted friend of mine if he thought that worked. He loved the idea of a fast transformation and thought I should double down on it as it was different from more traditional werewolf stories. He even suggested that I should push it as far as I could and have the werewolf explode out from inside the guy.

I loved the idea as I don’t believe that’s ever been down before and it really pushed the story more over the top which is exactly what I’m going for. Again Evil Dead and Dead Alive are huge influences of mine. If Sam Raimi ever made a werewolf movie the werewolf would 100% explode from inside of the person.

With no further ado, here’s the thumbnails that I completed this past week with a few notes. I also included the previous two pages from last week as a refresher. If you want to read the story from the beginning check out last week’s edition here.

Here’s last week’s final page. The fourth baddie shouldn’t be in the 2nd panel of page 13 as he comes up from the slope after the other baddies beat our poor hero to a pulp.

This is where the rewrites began to take place. In the original script the 5th panel of page 14 the shadow was the shadow of the werewolf and baddie #2 was a little less smart aleck-y. Also panel 1 of page 14 is where baddie #4 comes up from the slope. In the final version he will be carrying a gun. Oh, and the yellow eyes are 100% inspired by “Thriller”.

This two page spread will probably be the hardest two pages to draw and get right. I spent some time trying to find references of something exploding out from inside something else and come up void. I think this is a good start though. If you have any references you think I could use for this please let me know in the comments.

Okay this is pretty silly. Gross and silly. It occurred to me that if our hero explodes a werewolf out from inside of himself then these baddies are going to get a little bit of human explosion on themselves. I spent a good portion of this week working through these two pages trying to get the beats right. Originally the guy who got slimed was the guy to also get his face slashed, but it didn’t work because the slashes got lost in the already present gore. So our poor baddie #3 got the facelift instead. Oh one other thing, if you notice there’s an evolution of the baddies getting their own unique appearances.

Here’s where we end up at the end of this week. Two baddies down, two to go.

I’m still not set on a style. I sorta like the cartooniness of these last few pages. I’ve been playing with this idea where my comic art can flow between slightly more realistic to a little more cartoony as things ramp up or decrease. I did it a tiny bit in my webcomic here to the point when my character drops the axe the color registry goes out of alinement.

Okay! That does it for this week. My goal for this upcoming week is to have the completed thumbnails finished and therefore a finished version of the comic for you to read.

If you don’t mind, please like and share this post with someone you think might be interested in it. It’s a huge help in making this comic a reality.

Thanks for the support and hope you have a great one,

Nick