What've You Got Planned?

Looks like Eric has a bit of a tactical disadvantage to over come here! He really should have planned...a-head (BWAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA)

Anyway, this is it, Meat-Heads!

So after all this time, all this blabbing, what's the endgame here? What are my plans for this magnum opus known as Dead Meat? Well, after a long time and lots of consideration, I decided that I could spend the rest of my life waiting around for this thing to get picked up by a publisher, or whatever, and I'd be doing just that: waiting. I decided it was time to tackle this baby on my own. However, in this day and age it's not as simple as printing up a bunch of copies and going to your local store and begging for them to put your hard work on their shelf. Actually, as far as print goes--it's practically impossible.

ENTER: THE INTERNET!

Nowadays, anyone can publish their own original content, and become a succes over night! Case in point:

However, it's not quite as easy as that. You still need to network, market, get the word out, and most importantly, you have to come to terms with the fact that, for the most part, people don't like paying for stuff. So that's why I decided to post Dead Meat on the world wide web, absolutely free!

"Surely you can't be serious!"

Well I am surely...and don't call me serious. Wait...scratch that...reverse it.

"But how are you supposed to make any money?"

Truthfully, very slowly. The idea here is to present the product for free, but then to make your money on peripheral things such as merchandise, convention appearances, original art, and then eventually selling hard-copy collections of your book packed with all sorts of extras that will entice your audience to want to revisit your book that they fell in love with all those years ago!

What it comes down to is patience. It's a lot of work, and the reward is slow, and honestly, you really have to love it to be able to stick with it. I said at the beginning of this blog that this was a lot like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, and I still believe that. This is going to be a learning process for me, and hopefully as I stick with it, it's just going to get better and better, and to be completely honest, I can't wait to start it. I can't wait to finally take this story I've been cradling for the better part of 10 years and COMPLETE it. I can't wait to see where my characters go, and I really hope that the characters and the stories are good enough that people are just as excited as I am to see where they go, and ultimately where they end up.

This blog will continue as the official Dead Meat blog, but this will be the last post here until January 1st, when I officially launch my comic at www.EatDeadMeat.com As of of 12:01, January 1st, 2011, www.EatDeadMeat.com will be your window into the chaos and excitement that is the world of Dead Meat.

I invite you all to check it out, and comment, and make suggestions, and hopefully enjoy the product as much as I've enjoyed the process.

Until Next Time....

EAT DEAD MEAT!

(Punny Title About Character)

I'm back from the dead, Meat-Heads! Sorry for the radio silence over the past week or so!

Let's take a trip back to the subject of characters. So when I was coming up with my core characters for Dead Meat, I took a look at some of the things I didn't like about the way a lot of other undead-related media out there, and obviously tried to do something different. Many of them were heavily realistic (well I mean as realistic as one can really be in this genre), and I kind of felt like sometimes characters visually all ran together. Maybe that was some sort of metaphorical comment on linking the characters to the undead, but maybe the artist or designer just really likes drawing people in t-shirts. Who's to say, really? Anyway, it was about this time that I remembered my mantra: "It's a comic book!" and made it a point to inject some individuality and excitement into my characters, and one major influence I drew on was G.I. Joe. I mean say what you want about G.I. Joe, the one thing they were great at was making very distinct looking characters with very distinct attributes:


Each one had a unique look, voice, and personality. It was with this in mind that I started crafting the basis for the concept (I used to describe it as G.I. Joe meets Dawn of the Dead), and as I've stated before, it was a lot lighter and more carefree, not unlike G.I. Joe, but as I got into the meat (BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA) of the characters, another pet peeve of mine really started to stick out.

Characters in these post-apocalyptic stories are mostly either people who are dealing with the situation as it unfolds (Dawn of the Dead, The Road), or people who are firmly entrenched in the crappy world that now exists (A Boy and His Dog, Road Warrior), and are usually either really young or over 30. Anyone in between is usually a background character, and not paid a lot of attention to. Now, again, Dead Meat was conceived as a silly story about a group of late teens/early twenty-somethings running amok in the undead wasteland. Well as I thought more about that concept I started to take it pretty seriously, and it really started to appeal to me. I started to become fascinated with the idea of focusing on a group of guys old enough to remember the world before the apocalypse, but young enough to have spent their most character-forming years surviving and adapting to a world-wide 180 degree shift of lifestyle toward violence and death and truly incredible circumstances. They're really stuck in the middle in this weird place, and I thought that really lent itself to exploring some interesting character traits.

Now doesn't that mean that I have to change all my character designs to guys in matching black body suits? Huh? Doesn't it? I thought that was how you portrayed those kinds of changes! Like this:

Nope, that isn't what that means at all! Add as much Dennis-Quaid-Face as you want, but taking a character seriously is not about changing the color of its costume and adding a permanent scowl, it's about taking the CHARACTER seriously! It's more like this:

When Frank Miller revamped Batman, he stripped away all the goofiness that had come to be associated with the character, and explored its dark, brutal core all without having to change him out of his classic costume, pointy ears and all. So what am I getting at? Well I guess what I'm trying to say is have faith in the characters you design, inside and out. Or maybe I'm saying that Bat-Ape was a bad direction to take the character in. Or maybe that wrapping a character in black leather doesn't make it more "real." Or maybe that Dennis Quaid's face only makes one expression. Regardless, just remember that you can take a character (or characters) seriously without sacrificing any of the fun that makes the characters exciting in the process--I mean this is all supposed to be fun isn't it? Right?

Until next time,

Eat Dead Meat!

GUNS!

Uh oh...looks like someone's fed up with Eric's shenanigans!

So I want to kind of do a follow up on the last post about violence. I'd like to talk specifically about guns, and their use in drama. This was sort of fueled by a discussion I had with a friend of mine about this past sunday's episode of a certain horror-based television show.

So let's get right to the point: GUNS DO NOT EQUAL DRAMA. There is nothing I hate (HATE) more than when, in a dramatic scene or work, someone tries to ratchet up the tension and the suspense by having a character (or characters) pull out a gun. Now, I can understand why a writer would think this is a good idea, and that is best summed up by renowned screen writer of the Agent: Michael Scarn series:

I get it. Guns are dangerous, guns are volatile, guns have repercussions, and could go off at any time: what a perfect metaphor for a tense, dramatic scene (Why do Western duels work so well? Because we KNOW that someone is going to DIE)! Yeah, well, it's also a very lazy writing crutch beloved by lazy and/or bad writers. I was going to put up a clip from Tommy Wiseau's The Room, which is a tour de force of epically bad writing/execution (or is it an epically executed comedy? Who's to say?), but I thought that would be too easy. So Then I thought about R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet, but that's waaaaaaaay too long to post here, but then I remembered this South Park clip that hits the nail on the head:

Trapped in the Closet
Tags: SOUTH
PARKmore...

It's a shame I can't post the entirety of Trapped in the Closet, as it totally encapsulates trying to manufacture drama through tricks and cliches.

Anyway, so if one guy having a gun is lame, how lame is multiple guys having guns? Really lame, unless you're Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino makes it work because he recognizes what pulling a gun on someone means, and has no qualms about executing everyone in the room in order to display that. Those scenes are never toothless arguments that end in someone caving in order to move the scene along, they almost exclusively end with everything falling into chaos. Assuming you're not Tarantino, drawing a gun on a guy who has a gun, in a room full of guys who have guns is completely redundant, because if the gun symbolizes power, then there is no upper hand because everyone in the room has the equal amount of power! Not to mention, this whole cliche usually happens at a point in the script where you KNOW no one is going to get killed, or even shot, so 9 times out of 10 the audience isn't buying it anyway! If the audience knows it's just lame posturing, then why on earth would the character with the gun in his face feel any different?

As I said previously, guns are now forever linked with the undead, on a count of them being the most visceral, visually explosive way to dispatch them. This is fine, but I think when one is trying to tell a story about character conflict and interactions, guns shouldn't be part of the equation unless your characters are legitimately going to use them. If you've got an hour and a half to kill, do yourself a favor and re-watch Night of the Living Dead. It's a great character study about a group of people with volatile states of mind dealing with the tension of the situation they're in, AND THERE ARE NO GUNS! Ok, maybe there's like ONE gun, but even so, by the time it's taken out and used to threaten someone, it's already very clear that someone might seriously get shot.

In summation, GUNS DO NOT EQUAL DRAMA, and if you don't agree with me I swear to God I will shoot you.

Until next time,

Eat Dead Meat!

Oh what the hell:

RAAAAAAAARRRRRGHVIOLEEEEEEEENCEEEEEE!!!!!!

Hey, Meat-Heads! While Eric really puts his mind to improving his swing, we're going to talk about...

VIOLENCE!!! RAAAAAAARRRRRGHHH!!!!!

RAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!! (It's amazing how many appropriate clips this movie provides!)

So, violence. Violence, more specifically ultra-violence, has been associated with the the living impaired ever since George Romero fired off the (head)shot heard round the world:

(Warning, not really suitable for work or kids)

This was essentially the beginning of the modern marriage of the undead monster and large caliber firearms, which have lived happily ever since. Along the way, the happy couple gave birth to buckets and buckets of gore glowing in all shades of red to the delight of audiences around the world. The Italians upped the ante with eyeball punctures and brain squishing, a bearded, hobbit-like man from New Zealand showed us the best use for a chest mounted lawn mower, and most recently, the Norwegians painted the mountains red with a snowmobile-mounted WWII-era machine gun. I can assure you all that Dead Meat follows right along in that fine tradition.

However, violence is tricky. I don't think I really need to state that I hate violence, which I do, but at the same time, artistically I do find it effective and actually quite aesthetically pleasing and cathartic in some cases. I think my perception and respect for violence has changed a lot in the past 10 years or so, and as that has changed, so has my approach to how I deal with it in the story. Make no mistake, Dead Meat is violent. It's very violent. It deals with violent people doing violent things to other people and undead alike. Initially, in the first drafts of the story, the violence was a lot lighter in tone, a little more carefree, but as it evolved, I realized that it needed a much harder edge. To tell the story I wanted to tell, I needed it to be clear that a. the world is a DANGEROUS one, and b. my main group of characters are just as dangerous and just as hard as the world they live in. I actually realized that my main group of characters' point of view toward the violence they commit IS actually pretty light and carefree--they kill people who get in the way of their goals as quickly as you'd kill a fly--and I realized that was a very important character trait.

Violence can be scary, violence can be funny, violence can be inappropriate, violence can be cathartic. As you go through your own stories, if they include violence, don't be afraid to really think about what purpose violence serves, and the approach with which you depict it.

With that in mind:

Until next time,

Eat Dead Meat!

p.s. This is another multi-faceted topic, so I encourage discussion in the comments section!

The Written Word!

Hello again, Meat-Heads!

It seems Eric here is writing me a nasty letter because it's been so long since I've posted, and I can't say I blame him!

So at this point in the chronicling of how Dead Meat has been shaping up, I've talked about over-thinking lots of things, lots of elements, and how this can get in your way when trying to get things on paper. Well, when it came to actually getting things on paper, i.e. writing my story, I didn't so much over-think it as much as have a ton of false starts. I've talked previously about how story elements changed, plots changed, characters changed, tone changed, etc, and I think it was this state of flux that prevented me from writing anything substantial up until the most recent incarnation of the story. To date, I think I've actually written and re-written what would become the first issue.....maybe 5 or 6 times over the past 10 years. Now I don't think that this is a bad thing, as if it wasn't for all those previous drafts I had done, I wouldn't have gotten to the stage I am now. I think, much like the evolution of art style, all the hacking away I did showed me what worked, what didn't, what I liked, and what needed to go.

I knew from the get go that I didn't want to do an outbreak story. As I said before, the very first incarnation of the story featured my characters as an extermination-type group, much like Ghostbusters. While this idea was sort of fun, I didn't get very far, and I felt like it wasn't very relatable. The next version was completely different, and focused on a young girl named Ashley and her brother Georgie, and was set up like a Wizard of Oz-type story where Ashley and Georgie were thrust into this horror-filled world after Ashley woke up from a coma. The idea here was to have the girl and her brother stand in for the reader who is thrust into a crazy, incredible situation. This concept felt a lot better, because I really liked the idea of having this group of extra-ordinary characters who are just larger than life compared to Ashley and Georgie who interact with them. However, I wrote myself into a corner because I realized that I had so much fun writing writing my characters that I kept trying to find a way to get rid of or ignore Ashley and Georgie, so I could focus on my guys.

This, along with the sheer number of characters I wanted to play with, led me to structure it in a new way, which is how it currently exists. Instead of dumping Ashley and Georgie, I broke the structure into multiple stories that would then criss-cross at certain points. This allowed me to introduce a lot of characters, and in the future would allow me to jump around with who I focus on without feeling like I'm flat out neglecting others.

I think this change in structure and approach has been really beneficial to the project as a whole, because once I determined a structure that felt good and somewhat natural, it really allowed the stories I wanted to tell to start flowing out easier. So at the end of the day, it's one thing to be over-obsessive about perfection, but it's another thing to know when something's not working, and to find a new way to approach. I think being able to recognize when something's not working, and being open to re-working it, is a really important attribute to develop as you develop your writing.

Until next time,

Eat Dead Meat!

Decisions, Decisions

Welcome back, Meat-Heads--Looks like Eric has quite the decision to make before he starts his day!

Ugh. Sometimes you just suck. I had a drawing day like that yesterday, and it was INCREDIBLY frustrating. I was going to do a woe-is-me, everybody has bad days post yesterday while I wallowed in my distaste with my work, but I thought HEY! When I get over the block, why not talk about it here! So that's what I'm gonna do.

So I was working on this page from Dead Meat #2, and I got to the last panel, and it just was NOT coming together. After slamming my head against the board all day like so:

I realized that the reason it wasn't coming together was because I hadn't taken the time to think out the panel. I mean seriously, look at the breakdown I did for it:

There's a general idea of what's going on, but no thought was given to any of the background, any light sources--nothing other than rough composition and loose stick figures. I shot a couple reference photos, but not many, and tried to hack it together with what I had. This is where I was when I gave up:

It's.....ok? It's pretty boring, and it wasn't really getting across what I wanted. So, I went back to the drawing board the next day literally (BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA...ugh...), and worked out a new breakdown for the panel, which looked like this:

See here, the emphasis is a lot more on lighting and mood, and played to more of my strengths, which the other composition did not. I felt that this change was a much welcomed improvement, and I completed the panel and I think the end result is much stronger than the other would have been:

So what did I learn? Well, I didn't so much learn something, as much as have something I already knew reinforced. I always used to brush off doing my breakdowns as something I could do super quick and get to the work. HOWEVER, what might not be the obvious thing is that the breakdowns ARE the work. That's where all your thinking needs to be done, where you plan out what you're going to do. The breakdowns are baking the cake, and the actual drawing is the frosting. Or the breakdowns are the foundation, and the drawing is the...roof... Or...The breakdowns are the...body snatching...and the drawings are the lightning storm that brings your horrible creation to life? Hell, I don't know, you get the idea, leave me alone.

Until next time,

Eat Dead Meat!

You got STYLE, kid!

Howdy, Meat-Heads!

Eric just got a brand-new suit, and doesn't he look sharp! With this in mind I want to talk a bit about style. I've been having style issues lately, in terms of how I do things, how I want to do things, and how it seems things should be done. Style can get pretty tricky. We all have an idea in our heads of how we want our work to look, and sometimes after a while you find that your tastes have changed. This can really wreak havoc on how you approach certain things.

As I said a while back, one of my main hangups when it came to actually starting Dead Meat was feeling that I wasn't up to snuff in drawing ability, and in a similar vein I felt stylistically I wasn't at a point where my work felt real. That might be a weird way to describe it, but I think you know what I'm talking about: some times your work just doesn't feel like it's real--like it's a cohesive, competent work--and then sometimes it does. It wasn't until the past couple years that I really got a handle on the way I draw, and the way I like my comics to look. Strangely enough, my current style is sort of an amalgam of a bunch of different avenues I tried out separately. Here's a guide of the visual evolution of the character of Foley from Dead Meat:

Figure 1: the earliest depiction of the character, obviously. Now, some people might actually like that style, but to me, it wasn't what I was looking for. It didn't feel real. It was unrefined, the anatomy is garbage, and the level of skill just wasn't up to my own demands.

Figure 2: This is the first evolution of my style. Up until then I never inked my own stuff, and I think you can see that here--the inking is pretty scratchy and not very intelligent. However, in terms of acting and body language, I think this is a huuuuge jump from Figure 1. I still didn't feel like it was what I wanted though.

Figure 3: This is where everything changed. Figure 3 is when I felt like I broke through the wall. I'm much more confident in my inking, and my discovery of all the ways you can use a white-out pen really rocketed my work forward. This is how I wanted my work to look. This is the first time it felt "real."

Figure 4: This is how it looks today, 10 years after I first started drawing the character. I've refined what I started in Figure 3, and I've also added some ink wash for effect that I think adds a cool look to everything. By the same token, I find myself drifting away from the white-out pen. I still use it a lot, but I'm a little more confident with it now, and don't feel the need to cover the entire page with white-out scratches.

Similarly, even though I'm happy with my current style, I find that it's still changing. The problem now is, I'm not totally sure where it's going, and I'm not sure if I like that. Working on this book has caused me to have to change the way I work a little, to increase my speed, and I get worried that the way my style changes from here on out will be because of time restrictions, and not because of me getting better, but at the same time I do feel that the more I do the better I get, so it's really tough to say.

I'll touch on some of the ways I've specifically changed my process in a future post, but for now, I'd love to hear all of your thoughts on style and change in your own style, regardless of your creative field, so feel free to discuss in the comment section!

Until next time,

Eat Dead Meat!