Monday, April 20, 2009

The Ghost of Comic Future



Simon has been busy pencilling Straitjacket Ninja scripts, and has sketched out the first five, and fully inked the first two. The pencilled pages, in all their un-inked glory, are ghostly grey apparitions of comics to come.

For me the pencils are great. They show you that it will all work out in a little while. They tell you that everything will fit in the pages, just like you hoped. Pencils are comic book appetizers . They prime you for the main course of inking.

I have very little artistic talent of my own. A few years ago I went with Simon and his friend Michelle to give some young school-kids a short talk about comics. They asked questions, we burbled on a bit, showed them some censored highlights of what we had produced, and then the teachers got everyone to draw a comic strip of their own. Mine was judged to be the worst in class. It deserved the award.

So I'm always amazed by anyone who can take an idea and turn it into art, and I'm always a little awed and overwhelmed when someone takes my words and creates a comic using them as a starting place. It's nice to be able to write something as vague as ... "Straitjacket Ninja leaps at them from above" ... and see something as real as this frame as the result. And that's only the phantom pencils. When it gets inked it will only get more real.

Art copyright Simon Morse

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