This week’s episode is a bit of a follow-up to last week’s talk about thumbnailing, or plotting. Jerzy and I discuss the procedural nature of how we create comics. By breaking our process into smaller stages, we’re afforded the luxury of putting a lot of focus, consideration, and concern into each stage. We broached this subject originally in episode 09, but we thought we’d revisit it both for the sake of new listeners and to see if anything has changed in our process since then.

For more discussion on our thoughts on process, you can check out our commentary track for our Switch Runners project.

In other news, be sure to check out Jerzy’s interview on Planet Comic Book Radio! Thanks once again to Javier Hernandez for being a great host and interviewer.

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In the latest copy of Comics Buyers Guide, I got a pretty nice write up about Echoes From Asteroid X, the mini comic I released a few months ago. You can check out the article here.

Page 1, Page 2

Sunday September 28, 2008: 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm — Pittsfield Branch: Program Room Ann Arbor.

To anyone in the South Eastern Michigan area, I will lead a discussion and hands-on workshop about the sophisticated array of choices involved in visual storytelling. Participants will be invited to create comics of their own. All supplies will be provided. Free to the public.

For more information go here. Hope to see you there.

While listening to Kevin Cross’ Blogcast with Javier Hernandez, I got inspired by all the Devil Dinosaur love to try my hand at the lovable protector of the Valley of Flame. Devil is not quite as easy as he looks to capture. Kirby’s interpretation of a Tyrannosaurus’ anatomy seems to be more informed by memory than research (which adds to the originality of the character in my opinion), so blocking him out in large blocky shapes seemed to be the best way for me to get a handle on his look.

This week Jerzy and I turn on the mic while we build a character from the ground up. We start with a basic premise for a story and a name for a villain, and we go from there.

The premise? A frustrated thirty-something would-be writer working in a book store. Suddenly he’s confronted by characters from some of his favorite novels, who tell him that an evil creature called “Open Source” is out to do them all great harm.

The character? We set out to design the villain, “Open Source”. We let you listen in while we go through all of the various choices we face when creating our characters.

And here’s where things get really interesting. We’re inviting you to try your take on the character. Hence the name–he’s an “open source” character that we’re throwing into the wild as a creative exercise for you all to try out and share the results. This episode is more or less of a modeling session of what we’re proposing you try–it’s by no means the final word on the character. So let’s see what you’d do!

Here’s the final design we came up with during our conversation.

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It’s the podcast’s 1st anniversary, so Jerzy and I take the opportunity to look back over our careers in cartooning over the last year and analyze what went right and what went wrong. We then take the discussion into what our vectors are for the future 12 months, in terms of the podcast, our comics work, our teaching, and our freelance design/illustration work.

We asked the listeners on the live show what they’d like as a celebration for our anniversary episode, and more than a couple of folks asked for a video tour of our studios. So here it is, in three parts, the first Art & Story video podcast.

The Art & Story Studio Tour, Part 1

You can view parts 1-3 on our YouTube channel.

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Going back in time a bit, we thought it was time to cover one of the titans… Anthrax. With such a huge back catalog, we kind of picked out personal favorite eras.

One of the most important bands in the extreme metal genre, Morbid Angel have no equal. The first first 4 albums of their career remain as some of the most influential testaments to death metal. Bass player and singer David Vincent, brought a sense of control to the chaos that is Trey’s bombastic guitar playing in this era. Ever since Vincent’s departure, they have struggled to retain their place at the table of the death metal elite. But fear not… Vincent has returned to the fold and hopefully this will usher in a new era of supremacy. Join us for the soundtrack of hell, that is Morbid Angel.

Several episodes ago on the Art & Story Alive show, we talked about using CG models as reference for vehicles and environments and weather or not it’s considered “cheating”. Since that episode aired I hadn’t had a chance to mess around with any modeling programs, but then my memory was jogged when I was listening to Mac Break Weekly and they mentioned Google SketchUp. I had time to I downloaded it, so I checked it out… and like most Google products I’ve tried was incredibly easy to use (this was my first 3-D rendering experience). I got right to using it and within a few hours, I came up with a CG model of the ship from Mulligan’s Run, the calypso VII.

Granted the ship design is pretty geometric and simple, but even more contemporary vehicles and buildings would be a breeze with just a few hours of tinkering. But the best part is you can export it as 2-D to Photoshop and use it either as visual reference for challenging shots or lightbox it onto the page.

This week we discuss what seems to be a common idea: audiences prefer happy endings in stories. Is that really the case? Do audiences crave a satisfactory outcome for their heroes or do they need an appropriate outcome? We also briefly try to tackle the idea of working in genre, but we hit a brick wall and wind up ranting a bit.

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You can listen to the episode by clicking this link. Or use the links above to subscribe using iTunes!