The Lying Game

Why the internal workings of Shakra's mind function as a pseudo-manga style is anyone's guess. Look at the magnificent eyebrows on Doctor house, though. And Cameron didn't come out of it too badly: she doesn't have cans like that in real life.
(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you should be watching 'House', a medical drama starring Hugh Laurie. It's on Fox in the US, Channel Five in England, and DVD everywhere else. Buy it now, or if you're Australian, steal it!)

You'll notice after the recent pencilled/colour tone art style I've been trying, I've gone back to my more tried-and-tested stomping grounds, good ol' pencil and ink. Slight variation on the earlier ones of this year, probably only visible if you notice how crisp the details are: earlier ones were done on a single sheet of letter paper, whereas this one was drawn 200% that size. It occurred to me if I turned my drawing grid sideways, I could use it as representational of half a page, since it's divided up fractionally into halves, thirds, quarters and fifths. So every third of this page has its own sheet of paper on the originals. The larger you draw, the better it looks when you reduce it down: and though I did like working on a single sheet so I knew how it was all going to hang together, it was a bugger to ink any fine details, which meant they eaither ended up looking like shit when I scanned, coloured and reduced; or else I had to spend ages cleaning everything up on PotatoShop.

I'm most happy with the way that Jess turned out on this strip: Jess has a very specific look to her that I don't think I really nailed until this time. It's partly the change in hairstyle, but mostly the adjustment to her jawline. I think it's dropped a few years off her and given her a more feminine appearance.
And that's the important thing, I think, with this comic: that my art (and Mary's writing. Excellent script this time, sweetie) develops over time, so that I know I'm learning something from this whole online comic thingy. (Because god knows we're not bringing in any money on this thing.) It's by no means perfect, our update schedule sucks balls compared to pretty much everyone else out there, and occasionally the art or the script (or both) look like the amateurish scribblings of a pre-schooler. As long as we can look back over our work so far, though, and acknowledge that there's a marked improvement from point A to point M to point Z, then we can be happy.
We're both learning how to make comics, and the best way is to try everything and make lots of mistakes along the way. We're just glad some of you get a kick out of reading our experiments and hope you'll stick around for the future, because it's only going to get better from here.

Cameron sucks.