Isaac & Lee
The Digital Edition
Isaac & Lee
The Digital Edition
Clyde’s Coffee Emporium is an amalgamation of every coffee shop we’ve ever been to, as well as the barista. Their comment on him depicts the beginnings of their friendship. It’s a small but important scene. As you can see in the background I may have an addiction to bookcases and have gone into withdrawal from not drawing them that I had to put an arbitrary one in there somewhere.
Hooray! We finally leave the bookstore so I can finally stop drawing bookcases! I look at these panels now and I think about how minimalist they were. One of many things I’d change if I had the chance. I still can’t get over the way I used to draw comics compared to the way I do now.
This is the part of the story where we get a little history on the characters and where they differ greatly from the real life Isaac and Lee. I didn’t want to make my Isaac and Lee identical to them so I started by giving them very different histories. Other than that, not a lot of the story changed. I also remember me and my then editor deciding that we needed to make the balloons come out of the panels in order to make the page look more interesting. Later on, this format would change as I went for a more traditional layout.
The conversation continues and I think I actually have the sad Mario on the bookcase asking me why I punished myself by setting the story in a book store. It’s a theory really. I hadn’t settled into a groove of drawing the characters yet, which led to radical changes from panel to panel. (Which is now more than a little embarrassing to look back on now)I also remember wanting to get to some action, but quickly realising that it simply wasn’t going to be that kind of story. I learned early on that Isaac and Lee were in control of the story and calling all of the shots, with me as a mere observer taking notes.