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December 19, 2007
TOO LATE Week One!
Here it begins, the first installment of my new book, 'Too Late'! Finally!
I hope everyone enjoys reading it as much as I enjoyed making it!
Go ahead and read it, then come back here and below I'll have some commentary for you about what went into making this installment!
I shot most of the reference for this around 7:30 at night in early spring in the Kansas City River Market area. I've always loved the feeling this district evokes, and the architecture always looked to be fun to draw. Turns out that it was.
I ended up not having quite enough reference for the script I had, so I went back to get a few more shots. I was riding with my girlfriend and her friend who lives in the district, and as we pulled in there was writer Dennis Hopeless walking his dog. I hung out the window, yelled obscenities at him, flipped him off, then jumped out to shoot the shit with him. My girlfriend and her friend went on their way, and Dennis and I walked around as I got my shots and talked comics. It was a really cool thing, here I am doing a comic about Kansas City, and I run into another Kansas City comics creator.
The script for the dialogue was originally a radio drama script I had written up but never got produced. I liked a lot about it, especially the bits between Mann and Nguyen (I totally just typed that as 'Wang') and didn't want to see it go to waste.
What I thought made it work as a radio drama was what led me to only use shots with no people in them for its current comics incarnation. See, the characters that still work so well for radio are the ones that work to the medium's limitations, like The Shadow. Guy turns invisible. That's PERFECT for a radio drama. War of the Worlds: First done as a news cast, the second half is someone reading from their journal. So what I came up with was a blind detective.
Then I thought, well how do I make a blind detective story work in a visual medium? I ended up going with disembodied voices, and as revealed on the page following this sequence, it's what Eddie's seeing as he walks around the area, reflecting back on those events.
I hope you dug the first installment, and I look forward to sharing the next one with you in a week!
Posted by Schamberger at December 19, 2007 08:37 AM