The Last Days of Milton Hoight, part two

Gah. Writing a "rant" when I have nothing to say about this strip (Wednesday's strip, on the other hand, will probably lead to the two longest rants on here this year) is not fun, so instead of writing about writing -- which is mostly David complaining that I write too much dialogue and me giggling about what he wrote in that newspaper article -- I'll talk about 24.

24 has been one of the few reasons I look forward to the midseason replacement season of American television -- a bright glimmer in anotherwise dull line-up. Last year was just brilliant, and David and I cheered at the top of our lungs when Jack was about to get killed and Tony burst in to save the day, followed by more and more build up in Jack's terrible life of pain, and the eventual reunion of Tony and Michelle. Oh, and Imohotep was a brilliant villain that just wouldn't. Give. Up. After every episode, I'd sit in anticipation chatting with David about how I just couldn't wait for next week, how I knew *exactly* what was going to happen, only then -- well, I didn't.

This season so far, however, is shaping up to be a big fucking disappointment.

The end of the first episode, the first half of their big fucking premere, and already I knew Walt was the White House leak -- they set that up last season and just played it very obvious. After the Palmer assassination and the murder of Michelle and Tony (well, for the most part), they did NOTHING! I mean, kidnapping and threatening to execute them ala the terrorists in Iraq? Hello, they did that last year, and that was at least tense, had me wringing my hands going "oh shit! Oh shit!" This year, with the hostages being anonymous, random people...who cared?

And now that the premere is over, they've wrapped up most of the interesting plotlines and there's really no reason for me to tune back in. I guess they've made it over the hump, hit the climax, the high-point of the show last season, and now it's all down hill from here.

Expect Sarah from last year to show up, by the way -- she vowed revenge against Bill, Tony, and Michelle, and people like her always come back, like when the lesbian from season one held Tony hostage last season.

And speaking of last season, whatever happened to Berus? He was handed over to Imhotep's terrorist organization, his tracking implant was ripped out, and then his mother was killed and everyone forgot about him. What the fuck?

The awkward thing about this art style I'm currently trying out is that it's hard to get the foreground and the background to mesh together properly. Scanning in greyscale like I had to do for this means that there are no clearly defined black-to-white edges, and you tend to end up with a faint halo around dark lines when colouring. The alternative is, I suppose, to draw the backgrounds onto the same sheet as the foregrounds and colour them all as one layer, but that does away with some of the things I need multiple layers to do, like putting a darker edge around the foreground objects to separate them and make them stand out more clearly.
I haven't decided on what art style to try out after the Milton Hoight story arc is over, or if I'll revert back to the usual one for a while. I have some stylistic fucking about to do on the next strip anyway, for one panel, so that's going to eat some time up while I work that one out.
This style is itself essentially a more evolved version of what I was doing on the 'Midnight's Soliloquy' mini-arc last year, after it occurred to me I could take the cross-hatched, more detailed artwork I was doing on that and tint it different colours using the 'hue' command in PotatoShop. Bypassing inking isn't something that is done often in comic books, which once upon a time was due to the poor quality of the four-colour print process, but now is done largely out of habit. Jay Anacleto is notable for having pencils-to-colours done on at least the first 'Aria' miniseries, and issues 70-72 (if memory serves) of Neil Gaiman's 'Sandman' (reprinted in book ten, 'The Wake') have colours done directly into Michael Zulli's pencils.
Mine could definitely use some work. But I'm almost always colouring to a deadline, and it's hard to be patient after you spent four hours already hand-selecting different bits of an image using the polygonal lasso tool and still keep finding bits of light-coloured pixels hanging on the edge of images.

And yes, I do complain at Mary for writing too much dialogue. When I tell her 'work to around twenty-eight words a panel' I don't expect a panel with seventy words in it. That's not even near the boundaries that 'twenty-eight is a guideline' would cover.