I prioritized my graphic novel with Barry Lyga for Houghton Mifflin over my Vertigo GN with Derek McCulloch – Gone to Amerikay – for months now, but as I wind up the Lyga GN, it’s time to get back in the saddle with Amerikay.
Only a few pages of pencils on Amerikay left with roughly half the inks in the can. I had forgotten how much harder this book is than anything I have ever drawn in my life. As I struggle over the last few, I remember why I let these pencils sit and rest for awhile: virtually nothing on them could be drawn without a stack of specific location reference. Very specific location reference.
Some of which does not appear to exist.
I spent over 3 hours yesterday in a fruitless search for a shot to use in one panel. Today, more than six hours sunk trying to get specific shots of specific time periods in a specific block of a specific city.
I had already found some of it, but that was months ago and I could not remember where I stored it. I had used some of it for earlier shots, and could not find the files in the more than 1000 images I gathered for this book. I finally had to re-research the scene. Tears of frustration were shed. I lost an entire day’s work just trying to get the shots correct, and didn’t draw a damned thing.
I didn’t use a computer to gather and file reference until some months after I started working on this book. I haven’t quite got the hang of the process. My lateral files of clippings gather dust now, and I scan a lot or download to my computer – photos don’t even get printed anymore. I filed all the images by category as I once did with hard copy images. This was a mistake. Now I file ref under the page number of the script. I make aliases of images and duplicate them where they need to be reused on other pages.
On the Lyga book, I dropped images directly into the script document, including thumbnails and reference. That was great for the first 20 pages or so. Not so great as the document got longer and longer and harder to control. Might be the sort of thing to do for short stories and individual comics, but over an entire GN? Forget it.
To make matters worse, after I spent hours creating the Lyga document, my editor could not open the images. Cripes.
We will finish Gone to Amerikay in March, and alas, we will do that without our fearless leader, our muse, our adult, wild cat herder, our beloved editor Joan Hilty, who has been laid off from DC Comics/Vertigo. Her last day will be in December. I can’t adequately express how inspiring, valuable, and disciplined she has been on this gig.
Not only do I think Amerikay is the best work I have ever done, much of that is due to her excellent direction. Getting a decent page rate and a protracted deadline has been a huge help: there is no way I could draw work like this on a monthly schedule.
So yes, I weep hot tears of frustration as I try to wrangle these newfangled ways of handling information. But I am devastated we will finish this major project, of which I am immensely proud, after Joan has left DC. I’m doing the best work of my life, thanks to an inspiring script from Derek, and sensitive, wise guidance from Joan.
And yeah, I know this is sentimental and all, but dang, that’s the way it is.
I’m sitting here sketching page 140 of this book, and it’s hard to draw when you’re weepy.
