Freak City

The Concept

Freak City is A comic concept that i have been working on for a very long time, and is now finally beginning production. The central idea of the comic is that a single event sets every main character on an adventure. The twist is, this event is not known to the audience or the characters even tho it has already happened. I tend to bolster my concepts and writing on the backs of misdirection and misinformation; my main goal as a writer is to make the reader believe something that is completely false so i can make them go "whaaaaatt?!" later on in the story.

The Characters

I really enjoy making characters that people seem to be a little confused by. Some of my characters don't even make sense to me at first. I enjoy the puzzle of trying to make sense of my own crazy ideas. Early on in the comic I knew I wanted a real creepy character, something real unsettling but somehow appealing. I started to draw out the original concept for "The BPG"(bottom left panel), a character who is made up of random stolen body parts from around the Freak City, held together with nothing but sheer force of will and stubbornness. Making that concept make sense eventually led to the creation of some of the core concept of the comic world. A lot of my ideas work like that, nonsense compounding with more insane nonsense to create awesome.

The Idea

Like most awesome things, this concept came to me by accident while wasting my youth doodling on placemats at a diner with a friend. I did a quick doodle of the main character Thorton Norton and immediately loved the concept. While driving home i turned to my friend and said, yeah he's cool but what if he had a wooden arm, my friend looked at me in confusion, and thus my favorite character was born.

Once I was set on that one character, I decided to make him some friends, then started to shape the world they live in, and finally decided on what they would do in that environment. After all of that i agonized about the fine details and character designs for about 3 years and then started drawing.

Production Method and Process

I use A pretty standard comic production method with this comic. When i first started I used a traditional style, using pens and ink brushes on illustration board. As this concept and my personal skill set evolved, I started using Adobe photoshop for this project because it's more flexible, less permanent and faster than doing traditional pen and ink. I start every page in a very rough thumbnail form. In this stage I decide on panel layout, rough character positions, and staging. Once i'm satisfied that everything is where it should be i move to a tight pencil stage. In this step, I form the finer detailed features of the characters. This stage is where the figures turn from rough gestures to characters.

The next step is to move into inking. I like to use my inking stage the make the last revisions to my line instead of just “tracing” my pencil work. I have found that this one extra layer of polish in this stage helps to improve the overall quality of the page. After everything is inked, I add in the background tones as well as the character tones. The image is then exported as a high quality JPG and put into a program called comic life, where the bubbles and dialogue is added. After all these steps the page is finally done and i move on to concepting the next page.