"One bang and the cemetery population doubles"
T he Black Diamond Detective Agency. The colour on Sadie's face needed to be pristine, so I didn't want a lot of sketching on the actual art paper and tended think about her in the roughs more than I would all the other details. I was also worried about crowding in these panels. While I haven't solved the problems in the sketch, I've established what those problems would be and made the top panels a little taller to accommodate all the parts.
In the sketch you can see where I worked out the dialogue in the margin. Having boiled it down to its shortest possible length I'd then shift it into the spaces where it needed to go. As I said in an earlier post, the lettering would always be done first and the pictures made to fit around it.
Labels: black diamond
posted by Eddie Campbell at
01:02
6 Comments:
An excercise in concise writing, I see, otherwise you have no space left for your drawings.
Hmm yes I remember your advice to me waaaaay back to do the words in the comic first to fit it all together. Well, said comic is due for the senior art internal assessment tomorrow 9am and I have only the cover left to Photoshop. Some of the pages have over 70 layers in Photoshop. At some points I can see what the value would have been of taking your advice, but FOOLISH ARE THE YOUNG!
Oh by the way, if you check your email sometime you will see that I sent you one including a few of my comic pages that include a little "From Hell"/Eddie Campbell tribute (taken out of its proper context naturally) for your enjoyment. The comic turned out pretty horrific and disturbing. I've had a few people be unable to actually get through the whole thing.
Haha! SUCCESS!
So now just sitting here, Photoshopping away; me, coffee, and the wailing vocals of the wonderful Gerard Way (I GET TO SEE HIM IN CONCERT! just needed to share that with the blogosphere world....)
Have fun at the Comic Con too! :)
Hey Eddie, I just now (2 minutes ago) finished reading The Black Diamond Detective Agency. I'd picked it up at the comic store several weeks ago, but hadn't wanted to dive into it until I had a chance to read it all the way through (which finally presented itself tonight).
Since I'm mostly a superhero-comic kind of reader, I wouldn't normally have picked up something that was so far out of that genre, but following your blog these past several months actually made all the difference! I don't know if that means anything to you - getting additional sales out of the time you spend in the blogosphere - but on the off chance it does, I'm telling ya!
It's a fascinating story you've spun in this graphic novel (can I call it that?) and it sounds like it's on its way to becoming a motion picture, which is cool. It's a tough one for me to categorize in my own mind, though, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I suppose it reminded me a bit of Crichton's Great Train Robbery and a little, here and there, of the film Unforgiven. Those weak comparisons should tell you just how rarely I spend time with 19th Century tales set in the U.S.!
A few of the pages where you chose not to include any dialogue at all really intrigued me. At first, I questioned just how reasonable it was to expect us to be able to follow the nuances of what was happening with no words to guide us, but as I read on you always managed to pull it off (occasionally relying on dialogue on a subsequent page)! Having said that, I still appreciate the reflections you've been including here on your blog and will certainly be reading them shortly(having skipped them previously so as not to spoil the story for myself).
Page 40 is just amazing, by the way. It pretty nearly took my breath away when I got to it. Was that done from photo reference? And more importantly, are you selling the original pages to Black Diamond or holding onto them?
Anyway, just wanted to share a raw, fresh reaction with you, moments after finishing the book. Congratulations on producing such an excellent composition, even if it didn't have any guys in tights punching the Hell out of each other!
P.S. I forgot to ask.. I know you're going to San Diego this year, but are you going to be at WizardWorld in Chicago next month? That's the only Con in my immediate future, sadly.
Matt
thanks for the good words. they alays count.
I'm off to sd in the morn but no Wiz.
best
eddie
Matt,
p.s.
two pages, 40 and 83, I blew up a detail from old photos in the photocopier to A3 size on sturdy paper, stretched them like regular watercolor paper, and painted over the top of them.
EC
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