22: No Crime Is Too Small

Well here we are. I have successfully completed an entire chapter of comic goodness. By complete, I mean posted on schedule the entire time as well, without skipping a beat. It also means that the entire second chapter has been drawn, scanned, and laid out for you and only awaits my trickle-speed delivery into your memory nodes.

And so, I begin work on chapter three, while you feast on a completed chapter two.

You may or may not notice some of this differences in technique I'm using this time around. For shading, I forgo the grayscale Prismacolor markers. It seems that the bristol board seriously thirsts for their ink. A marker would typically last me about five episodes before drying out. That gets expensive faster than you would think. I've instead replaced them with good old fashioned india ink wash, applied with a bamboo sumi brush. It's actually a lot faster and easier than the markers, it turns out. A small well of ink has already lasted me 23 issues, and counting. Far more economical and I like the uneven brushed effect a lot better as well.

Also this time around, instead of doing all 20 or so at the same time, I attacked this chapter five episodes at a time. I finished a batch of five once a month, and that allowed me to have a week off each time.

Still, I found myself in eight to nine hour stretches of drawing once a month. It is truly an endurance builder. It would relieve me of the stress of the rest of the week as it completely consumed me for a day here and there. It would also leave me babbling incoherently at the end of the day. I would be left feeling as if I had crammed for some sort of final exam, once every few weeks.

So I hope you enjoy this next storyline, I think I induced severe brain damage while creating it.