Thursday 4 July 2019

A horror story.

Page 1 if I recall correctly, a mysterious window -- ooh er Mrs. I wonder what could this portent foretell...
Page 2 ...well nothing good that's for sure.
Page 3 The plot thickens--then evaporates in to thin air.

What do we have here then--well it a few pages from an aborted comic strip that I found recently while digging through some old work. I only found the photocopies I'm afraid because the artwork was handed over to someone else around the time I left the project. The story concerns a vampire, the woman or old bag you see in the panels but her misdeeds and malfeasance are not the horror story I'm refereeing to by naming this post, a horror story. No the horror story referrers to the tribulations concerning the generation of this artwork together with a few other pages and some character sketches.

You see, it's not my creation, rather it was a collaboration with an author. This guy was/is pretty literate and intelligent, the trouble was he couldn't get his head round the idea that something had to happen on the page for an illustrated narrative to work. Instead he would provide a script that consisted of a page of foolscap that translated to around sixteen illustrated pages. You see the second page of this sample of artwork, where there is no dialogue, well the version presented here very much represents a précis from the original. Needless to say there was a lot of too and froing, arguing the toss and such, none of which I won and since I didn't care for idea of slogging out all the pages need to accommodate a disproportionately concise script, I exited the endeavour.

Only that's not the last of it, you see these reproduction might be of the original artwork or they might be from the redrawn artwork that I created when the originals were accidentally destroyed. I admit that I somewhat foolishly decided to use Higgins ink instead of the normal Windsor and Newton waterproof Indian ink and wouldn't you know, the artwork got wet...

...ugh.

Oh yeah and just don't ask about the spelling for the speech bubbles...