Isaac & Lee
The Digital Edition
Isaac & Lee
The Digital Edition
Welcome to Throw Back Thursday on the Isaac & Lee website!
Having created this comic for over ten years it can be confusing for those just being introduced to the comic. So every Thursday I’ll be posting a link (click on the comic) to comics of years past. For those of you who have been there from the beginning, think of this as review!
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My goal with Isaac & Lee was to simply make a comic book, working on developing the production and printing process, unfortunately art and story were the afterthought and I tried to keep the initial story fairly simple because I wanted my main focus to be on creating the physical book. I consciously modelled my art style after Bil Keene with a bit of Hergé because I wanted an art style that I could easily create. Again, this was me focusing on the process of creating a physical book rather than the art and story behind it.
My process back then was to do thumbnails and then to pencil and ink each panel on a separate page. Then, as you can see below, I would paste them on to a page manually in order to create the layout. Keep in mind, this was my first comic and I hadn’t learned the process yet. In fact, I wouldn’t break out of this part of the for several books.
Well, here you have it. The first thumbnails of Isaac & Lee #1:
Isaac & Lee was the first mini comic that I self-published. I had no idea what the process was for creating a comic, not really. The only knowledge I had was from books that I read when I was a kid and from my training in pre-press and press operations. When I started there was no such thing as Ka-Blam, Print-on-Demand services and webcomics were in their infancy. So my friend was Kinkos and my home printer.
Hello everyone!
Sorry I’m late, this was a complete mess up with my scheduling app. But I should be back on track! Next week I’m going to start posting old roughs of Isaac & Lee, starting at the beginning! I’ll also include a new sketch so if nothing else you can see how much the art style has changed over the years. I’ll go over how it all started, so stay tuned!
The very top cover is the original cover for issue #3 but over the years, I decided to give the books a bit of a facelift.
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.
Lee says goodnight and we’re left with Isaac who sits for a bit. We see a little bit more character development as he whips out a notepad and begins making notes. What is he writing? I don’t know if we ever get to find out really.
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.
Not much to say here that hasn’t already been mentioned. Wrapping up the conversation basically.
I understand director’s commentary tracks so much more now. Sometimes you just don’t have a lot to say about a scene.