Issue 2 Front cover - "How to" walkthrough.

Hello!

Well its been a good couple of months but, like the writers of Lost, Pat and I are still working on the ending of this story even as we complete Act 2! As much as we began this comic in the spirit of Kirby and Lee, with their Marvel Method, what we have found in actually creating our comic is that stories have to have more depth than they did in the Silver Age. Therefore, what began as a simple adventure which Pat envisaged as 1 issue has become a monster, with supporting characters, inhabiting a storyworld with a rich history, all of which, you dear reader, may not even get to see in this first tale of ours, but which, believe me, has haunted our every waking moment and continues to drive the plot of poor little Leo's life in ways which at the outset we could not envisage! So, while we polish our little tale, and Pat frantically tries to resize and reletter issue 2 (after learning what "bleed" means to a Printer!), as well as rewriting issue 3 for the fifth time, I would like to present a walkthrough of how I painted the front cover for issue 2. In terms of my approach for this, it is similar to how I have worked on all the pages so far, but I have begun to use standard comic paper with guides, which is a little more expensive, but allows you to do all the work on one page without having to blow things up before painting. As for the idea, initially I tried something more abstract on canvas as with the first issue cover, but it wasn't working, so the idea with this cover was to portray the gist of what happens in the comic but to ramp up the tension by making all the dangers seem more immediate.

I started by sketching out the design using col-erase pencil, red for characters, blue for architecture. At this stage I tried a few things out for the composition, and having initially set the gates far back in the frame, I brought them forward to allow the Strange Things outside to be bigger and more defined. But from the very beginning I knew I wanted the image to have Leo looking quite small in the middle:






























Next, I pencilled The definitive lines in...



























...before using Lettraset marker pens to block out base colours, but having never used them directly on pencil before, I never realised that they smudged the graphite, not good, but anyway I could fix that later on...

























Next I used watercolours to add detail, and texture.























Finally, highlights and were added with white acrylic paint, shadows with a second layer of marker, the pencil lines were inked. Then the whole thing was scanned into the computer and the levels tweaked to add a little boldness to the colour, to produce the finished image:




























Which will be sent to Pat for lettering! So now you know.


Laters!

the Return of the Strange

Looking back I can't recall exactly where The Strange Things came from. I have no recollection of making them up. It is as if they came with Leo, attached to him like a shadow or a reflection.

When I drew Leo Fox forth from my imagination, they followed him... unbidden.

They have remained in essence exactly what they were when they arrived in this dimension. They are anti-matter, they are chaos, they are the void dressed up as human beings for reasons of some cruel joke of the universe that we can barely comprehend.

When I first spoke about them to Ben and Paul the transmission of the idea was disturbingly flawless. They instinctively understood what The Strange Things were, even though I could never really describe them. Perhaps they were always there waiting for someone to notice them?

• We knew that the Strange Things came when the reality storms struck and we also knew that they were creatures of the night.
• We knew that they had some power to disrupt reality, reason and the very laws of physics.
• We knew that they did not kill, but they somehow did something worse to any humans they could catch.
• We also knew they couldn't go inside the homes of the citizens. They haunted the streets and the industrial zones and the wastelands, but they had no power in the jungle.

The Evolution of The Strange

The early sketches showed faceless hooded creatures, phantoms in urban sportswear. They seemed to hang on to form by a thin thread, always mutating, moving like nightmares.

During the production of "Leo Fox: Nan's Story" I was physically posessed by the spirit of the Strange Things. I learned to move like them and we filmed these movements. Using a process called 'Rotoscopy' we traced the frames of these videos and translated them into 3D animation.

Later, Ben Lycett remixed these movements from real life to create the hypnotic and elegantly disturbing movements of the Strange Things in the final scene of the film.



Now, several years later the Strange Things have evolved, ready for their iminent reappearance in "Leo Fox, The Sick".

The essence remains the same but now the creatures have faces and numbers. They still represent the indistinct fear of an immoral, inhuman, inner-city youth in ghostly hoodies felt by UK surburbanites. They also represent the deeper, more universal fear of the void, the psychological black hole at the edge of the mind, the thought that maybe 'all of this' means nothing and always has.

However, we couldn't rely on movement to supply the atmospherics in the comic book medium so Paul needed a visual re-think.

"Hey Paddy, had a brainwave today. The strange things. Talking about different universes and all that, and how we tried to portray that in video style, I had a root about for CCTV footage as reference for the strange things in the comic. The pictures I found are rather frightening in themselves...[They] perfectly capture the terror of the strange things. Some of them palpably make the hair stand up on the back of your neck."

Paul found new inspiration for the Strange Things by looking at CCTV footage. He created this mood board...


In the end, they came back to us again and posessed Paul one night. He frantically scribbled out the face that has haunted his dreams and mine ever since. We apologise in advance for showing this to you...



We can only hope that Leo finds a way to thwart them, before they leave his world and invade ours.

Thanks for reading.

Bedroom Revolution Continued

I just added this as a comment but I thought I might upgrade it to a post because its worth saying in addition to what Pat has already said, and additionally, Pat is right. I'm very busy up ladders backstage at the moment, but still patiently waiting for Pat's next wordsplurge, so that I can pick it apart and throw it back in his aquiline face whilst shouting "Write it again Wordmonkey!", but in all honesty I think I see an end to this tale, once I finish getting married, buying a house, learning 12 backstage plots and whatever else life throws my way but, hey, its all as Unfit was meant to be, so read on!
I believe that there are other keys to the aesthetic which were there from the inception. Of course, work commitments and geography are having an effect on our work practice but originally the key constraint was equipment. Working with small computers and simple programs led to the idea of working lossy, Make do and mend, and also, work compact and portable. So that has been carried over into this comic project. I don't have a lot of space, so I work on A4 to draw and blow that up for painting. I use water colours instead of painting digitally to allow texture and accidents to creep in. And I also take chances with the work, sometimes coming close to destroying it and having to repaint over sections. But through this I have been able to come up with more efficient methods of painting, and have been able to play with lighting in the scenes. Mistakes for instance led to using tippex pens directly to add highlights that could then be coloured in the garage scenes. I think that this approach has run throughout the work and has led to trying things out, rewriting and reworking things and ultimately, streamlining the story. Whether this will lead to better work practice in future stories, or will only lead to more ways to rework and utilise happy accidents remains to be seen. But the ultimate philosophy of Unfit means that it doesn't matter. And that is that this is our story, our world, our characters, and our way of producing it, without deadlines and time constraints, simply for our own enjoyment, and this is what I really think Pat means when he talks of a bedroom revolution. So why not create your own story instead of reading one, or in fact watching a badly translated film of one? Its much more challenging,lots of fun, and ultimately more fulfilling!
PW.

The Bedroom Revolution

We are of the generation that believed and continues to believe that a significant power shift is taking place in the way that culture is produced and more specifically, who it is produced by. Digital technology has opened up film, music, writing of all kinds, visual art and of course comic books. UNFIT was a collaboration born of a few key ideas related to this broader sense of the zeitgeist.

We surrendered all hope of commercial success is return for dizzying and total creative of freedom. We rejected outright the logic of tailoring a piece of art / entertainment to suit a mythical target market and in so doing made it unlikely that we would ever be able to quit our day jobs.

And those day jobs? I find myself writing this in a Tennis Academy in Spain. And Paul? He is probably up a ladder backstage of a famous musical in London’s theatre district. So the conditions in which we work as UNFIT Comix are somewhat unorthodox (Or is this becoming the norm?). To me at least (and I hope Paul will comment on this) UNFIT means the following things...

1.) Zero or Extremely Low Budget.
2.) Make It Work.
3.) Do it with what you have.
4.) Risk and Investment = Compelling work
5.) Ignore 'The Industry' but study 'The Masters'

I suppose that above all what is important to me is storytelling and using storytelling as a way have a deeper relationship with Real Life as it is Really Happening, Right Now.

I believe that we are creatures of fiction as much as fact and that therefore fiction is a very powerful tool. It is a tool for re-imagining our relationships with each other and it has for too long been in the hands of culture tzars, 'creative professionals' etc. Comics are an ideally accessible format for bedroom revolutionaries; especially now digital printing has evolved so much so maybe the bedroom revolution is just around the corner after all.

Imagine it! No more mass media. Just masses of media from the masses, liberating the masses. Oops! Wrong meeting...