SR 1 PAGE SIXTY-SEVEN

I haven’t done enough DANGER SCARY. 

Oh sure, there’s a bunch of upsetting stuff in book two, a freaky moment or two in book three, and ELDRITCH! has some proper horror scenes, but mostly I’ve been bumping along in the spooky cute groove.

That’s fine! My tastes generally wobble in Burton-esque directions. I’m more at home laughing at wild nightmares than cringing in bitter despair. BUT…at least once in my career I’d like to make something that really freeze some hearts.

Not that I have any ideas percolating along those lines. Pretty much every idea in my notes app is somewhere on the spectrum between Beetlejuice and Evil Dead 2. How am I supposed to freeze hearts with a bunch of Fright Nights and Trick ‘r’ Treats? The problem might be that it’s hard for me to write anything that doesn’t have at least a little comedy to it. I’m pretty confident with the “laughter to terror” transition but “laughter to emotional devastation” is a little beyond my artistic skillset. FOR NOW.

Another problem is that, tragically, I almost never feel my own heart freeze when I’m absorbing a story. As an adult, only four horror movies have ever really gotten under my skin. They are…

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME. Felt like going insane. Five stars.

HEREDITARY. The horrifying supernatural parts felt like a nice, soothing break from the even more horrifying non-supernatural parts.

LAKE MUNGO. Not sure why this fake documentary about a ghost(?) hit me so hard, but it did. Maybe because it just feels so matter-of-fact and real?

HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. I hated watching this and don’t ever want to make anything like it.

With books the freezing is even trickier. The diner issue of Sandman definitely did the trick, though. The way Neil Gaiman brought this little group of characters to vivid life just to strip all that life down to base impulses is just harrowing. Wish I could harrow like that.

SR 1 PAGE SIXTY-EIGHT

Some of these issue three pages feel a little odd to me, and I think I figured out why: The contrast is off! I didn’t darken the blacks here as much as in the other issues. If you look right in the center of The Shriek in panel four, it has a little bit of a grey haze to it. No deep black. You can actually see a little texture in some of those Sharpie blacks, too. Normally I would have played with the curves in Photoshop a bit more, but I think I was trying to preserve some of those delicate white pencil textures. Probably should have gone in with the burn tool and plucked out a few darker lines here and there, but eh. Whatcha gonna do?

Almost half of this page is a recap of what happened in the previous two pages of “Welcome to Statickland.” Imagine how annoying it would be to read these all in a row. The crazy staccato rhythm of constant recaps. 

The recap problem is pretty common in daily/weekly comics with a continuing storyline. In webcomics you can just shrug and say, “Sorry, bud! If you’re lost, click to the beginning.” But in the days when newspaper comics ruled the earth, artists didn’t have the luxury of a full archive two clicks away. They either had to use their first two panels recapping the story or give up and start with a block of text.

In the next installment of Statickland, I give up!

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

About seventy pages into penciling SHOCK CITY 2 right now, which is about a third of the book. Long way to go, just me and my Cintiq and my Spotify playlists. Actually, that makes me wonder… Would anyone be interested in hearing these playlists? People making lots of cool stuff out there!

NEXT WEEK: TREES TREES TREES!