The nice thing about a psuedo-biographical comic is that every once in a while one of the people in the story will read what you are creating and then add in their two cents worth, which in turn, ends up in the comic. (re: the backdoor joke) This book I like to call “attack of the trench-coats” in the same way the first issue had an excess of bookcases.
Tag: bookstore
Trouble is My Business Part 2 (Page 1)
I’m back to add commentary to the pages. As I drew these almost seven years ago, I have quite a bit to reminisce about. As we begin the second story, the pace picks up a bit. This is where the shirts begin to show up in the story. Each shirt pays a bit of homage to something that each of the real life people were known for at the time of the initial publishing. Oh and yes, more bookcases.
Trouble is My Business (page 14)
We finally come to the end of the first issue and the beginning of the adventure. I remember having such a time with trying to figure out the logistics of turning on car lights effectively. At the time, I was planning on printing everything off on my home printer. This was right before the advent of POD. I hadn’t heard of Ka-Blam or any of those places, so when I was drawing stories, I had to take into account the amount of ink that I’d be using in the printing process of the book. The art suffered accordingly. It’s pages like this that make me want to revise the series.
Trouble is My Business (page 13)
Trouble is My Business (page 12)
Wheee! Did I say that the conversation was wrapped up in the last page? Oh no, not yet. As per Isaac and Lee, they go over the top with everything, including weird philosophical debates. Well, this whole first story was only supposed to introduce the characters and to go for a short walk in their world. Looking back over this, I would definitely reign them in a bit here.
Trouble is My Business (page 11)
Trouble is My Business (page 10)
As one can soon find out with Isaac & Lee, the story isn’t plot driven. It’s character-driven and the characters are chatty. Very chatty. They occasionally like to go off on random topics like this one. In as much as the audience was getting to know the characters, so was I. Another note? At the time, I was unsure as to how to represent a black t-shirt without loosing the line work so I used a weird technique involving inverse colouring. Way overcomplicated now that I look back at it.
Trouble is My Business (page 9)
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.
Trouble is My Business (page 8)
Trouble is My Business (page 7)
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.