Throw Back Thursday – Part #1

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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Isaac & Lee: The Beginning : Part 5

This is my Cat note book:

It was the second note book where I jotted down thumbnails and story ideas for Isaac and Lee. It has a nice velvety cover (which also decided to double as a lint brush apparently, as per all of the cat and human hairs and lint that it’s collected)

 It occurs to me that I lost this notebook for a while so I had to recreate pages while I was trying to finish the second story. as I look through this book now, I’m pretty sure that there are alternate pages that never made it into the second issue.

Isaac & Lee: The Beginning : Part 4

When I was just starting out, I had no confidence in my artwork….I don’t know how much that’s changed really. Well, that’s not true. Back in the day, I threw this out as an idea for a cover but immediately shot it down because I thought that I couldn’t draw it at a decent level. Now? If I were to have this rough draft for a cover? I would  be able to create a cover from this, no problem!

Isaac & Lee: The Beginning : Part 3

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.

Isaac & Lee: The Beginning : Part 2

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.

Isaac & Lee: The Beginning

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.