Sam goes crazy and starts pushing not only the limits of his newfound ability, but of his own taboos; from going through a wall, to semi-naked on a crowded street during the day. I was tempted to have him flying over the city, but I decided to use more quirky images to show different levels of freedom. I can’t just wrap my head around an image of a fat guy in his underwear flying over London. Quirky? Sure, but the flying part somehow didn’t sit well with me. It’s like in “the Matrix,” I understand what the filmmakers are trying to say by having Neo zooming through the sky, but to this day I still feel it went too far… and I love the Matrix. So I’ll settle for our would-be-vampire sitting on one of Big Ben’s hands overlooking the city. Originally it was set to be Tower Bridge, but the idea of the white background silhouetting our boy in the distance was too compelling to miss.
This is the last page of the year. I’m off for a few weeks, but fear not, we’re far from done with this little tale of supernatural intrigue. So wherever you are, whatever you celebrate (and even if you don’t), have a great holiday and a wonderful new year. I know I will. I can’t ever thank you enough for your readership, your patience, and kind emails. Peace to all. I’ll see you in the page.
It can be said that focus defines our reality. The only difference between page 71 and 72 is the fact that, in page 71 our friend is lost, but in page 72 he has a purpose. It’s still his living room and he’s still a recluse, but the situation has changed due to his newfound motivation.
I’m always amazed at the things that come out of our subconscious when we express ourselves through art. In page 71 Sam’s life is in chaos and the payout of the page reflects that. By page 72 he finds a horizon and the layout reflects that as well. I wish I could claim that it was all planned, but the truth is that it’s the product of another “happy accident.” This makes me wonder if somehow we get tuned in to some sort of collective consciousness in which these ideas flow from the ether into our world, who knows? It’s a nice idea anyway.
I want to get one more page up before I’m gone for the holidays. I’ll see you in the page.
With this page, I really pushed the level of abstraction in order to convey the passage of time. The interesting thing is that in the main panel (the big one) I had done all this detail about Sam’s apartment, but after I was done with the “overexposure” treatment, a lot of it was lost. I had to remind myself the Metasearch maxim, “it’s all about the mood.” After all, that’s why I chose to do this book in such an unorthodox way. In a way, conveying a feeling to a reader is more important to me than the hope that someone notices the magazines Sam reads, or a trail of cigarettes that leads to a pile on his table.
I’ve always admired the ability some artists have to convey something that is actually not obvious. We all remember a movie for being to bloody, or too terrifying, or too graphic when in fact, if we see them again, all of it was suggested rather than shown. So I rather the reader feel Sam’s depression and despair and create their own image of the details of his life, than go through the process of spoon-feeding them. The details might be lost on some, but the mood of the scene is harder to dismiss. Suggestion always beats presentation, at least in my book. I’ll see you in the page.
I can’t help but to smile every time I hit a tenth page. You can call it the “decimal joy,” but since Metasearch is delivered in pages, every tenth one is a little landmark to me. Back from abroad, at least for a little while, I made a commitment to produce as many pages as I can before I’m off again until next year.
When I wrote “Reverie” I decided to so in an unorthodox manner. For example, even though the project’s name is “Metasearch,” it doesn’t really focus on the team of psychics. We barely get to know them, as there is no “origin story.” It is implied that this is not their first case, and their development is more professional than character driven. This bothers some readers because they want to know more. This, of course, was done by design and not some relapse in plot development. Another interesting choice is that the story is told by a secondary character, and a victim as discussed before on this blog. Lastly, since I don’t want to dissect the whole plot, it is intended that we don’t get to know anything about the antagonist until later in the book. I thought it would be interesting to go back to the genesis of the case at a later stage of the story. Enjoy the new page. More to come.
For the flashback on this sequence, I wanted a different approach from the one in pages 51, 52. The reason is because I wanted the latter to be more of a memory, something more subjective (see blog post “The Memory Remains” for more). I wanted the new scene to be a pure flashback. I wanted to take the readers back to this moment, experience it, and draw their own conclusions from it rather than me guiding them. I knew I needed some consistency in style to avoid confusion, i.e. black and white as the main visual representation, but I was looking for a way to give it its own feel. While working on panel 1, page 65 I noticed a mistake on one of my layers. It was a black and white overexposed image that I didn’t know I created. After quickly realizing what had happened, I decided to use the style for this part of the story. I love “happy mistakes.”
I also decided to play it clean, no textures. This gave the panels a very serious tone that the sequence requires. The flashback panels are done in a very different way than the rest of the book. I have to admit that after 68 pages it was refreshing to go into a different artistic approach. As an added challenge, I went and tried to use motion as a graphic element, which is a losing proposition in a static medium, but I couldn’t resist the idea of the foot shaking as a plot “accent.” This is another one of those out-on-a-limb experiments of mine that I hope actually works for the readers.
On the lettering front, I keep getting complaints about readability, and I keep trying to solve them without compromising the look of the book. I made the letters thicker on this page to see if it helps with the problem. I guess time (and the readers) will tell.
I’m glad I got to make another page in November. I have some traveling in my immediate future, but I’ll try to do as many pages as I can. I have to thank alejkhan for the nice Metasearch review at “By Nigh.” You can check it out at: http://www.bynightcomics.com/home/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=43&func=view&catid=4&id=967#967 I’ll see you in the page.
OK, so page 68… I know it has been a while. I started to work on this page at some time during late October, but never got around to finishing it until now. I even fantasized about finishing it for Halloween, but no dice.
As Sam takes us deeper into his world, we continue the deconstruction of the dreadful vampire’s image. I wanted to achieve a number of things on this page. The first one was to have our antagonist interact with the world around him to keep us informed of his psyche. On the art front I wanted to create a transition with the lighting that I haven’t tried before: To mix two different light concepts into one scene. I really like this green hue. Granted I had used green the first time we go to Acantha’s loft. She’s a witch, we are in her home, green doesn’t seem too farfetched. This time around I was looking for that wonderfully sickening neon light green, which casts this hopeless, ill feeling; “Joe vs. the Volcano” anyone? I also wanted to compose the panels with Sam being off center. This is a concept I liked about the movie “Subway,” where director Luc Besson framed his characters off center. I wanted to use this technique in this page to help accentuate Sam’s insignificance. The little scene with the girls looking at our vampire--and he in turn looking back at them smiling and thinking they are checking him out, only to discover they just thought he was some funny looking guy--came from a real life anecdote from a guy I used to know a long time ago. By his late teens he started to think of himself as a self-styled “ladies man” – one look at him and you would understand how far off the mark this poor guy was; a similar event occurred to him while waiting for a subway. I guess the story was filed away somewhere in my brain.
On an interesting note, during Halloween week I spent a lot of time watching all sorts of paranormal shows and horror flicks in lieu of the festivities. One particular show caught my attention. The show was called “Celebrity Ghost Stories.” Gina Gershon’s was creepy, Sammy Hagar’s was shocking, but the one that really caught my attention was ex-Go-Go’s singer Belinda Carlisle. In short, she describes a classic psychic vampire attack that occurred to her while staying at a seedy motel. There it was, in all its cheesy CGI glory: A dark human-like shadow feeding off her. I feel the need to point out that the choice of making Reverie’s vampire red was purely aesthetic. It’s symbolic more than factual… or as factual any of these things can be.
Lots to talk about since I’ve been quiet all this time. The holidays are coming and traveling looms in the horizon. That means more hibernation for Metasearch, but as things are calming down in the work front, I will try to produce as many pages as I can before the mid-December hiatus. For those of you who honor me with your patience for new pages, thank you so much from the very core of my heart. You haven’t forgotten my three little psychics, and I have certainly not forgotten you. I’ll see you in the page.
In the movie “Fight Club,” they play out the concept of service workers flexing their muscle against the white collar establishment. “We serve your food, we park your cars…” or so goes a line from the film. We all hear about millionaires screwing the little guy; just checkout the news. But if you look at it, cleaning people, valets, waitresses, nannies, etc. can be rather sinister. They bring us food and drink, they roam our house and work spaces, they get inside our cars, spend time alone with your children. These are people who dwell in our personal lives even for a brief moment. So the idea of one of these people using their access for ill is quite frightening. After all, one of the classic rackets of the mob was to cancel trash collection. We might not think about it, but try not getting your trash collected for a week, and you’ll start seeing the problem very quickly. Plus, there are no easy answers to it, are you going to load you car with load after load of trash and drive to a landfill? I think you get the picture.
As a society we have been taught, almost by osmosis, to look down on these types of jobs. Yet, it only takes one viewing of TV shows like “The Worst Jobs in History,” or “Dirty Jobs,” to gain a very different perspective. That’s why I wanted to make Sam a janitor. It plays not only to our socio-economic idiosyncrasies, but because it shows the potential to do evil from an unassuming position. I’ll see you in the page.
