You may have noticed that our dispatches are being issued increasingly infrequently. For this you have our sincere apologies. The onset of convention season for Mr. Wiegle and the arrival of fatherhood for myself have made it difficult for us to maintain our weekly schedule. You will be seeing the resolution of Destructor’s encounter with the mysterious Lady, just not quite as quickly as we’d hoped.
That said, perhaps I may still be of some use to you while we await the next page. Do you have a question about Destructor the comic, Destructor the man, his world, or his humble chroniclers? Post it in the comments and I will answer it here on the blog, if it is within my power to do so. I look forward to speaking with you!
Question: What aspect of Destructor would you say most comes from each of his “daddies”? (from Ben Morse)
on May 19th, 2011Posted In: Blog
His personality, his goals, and his motives come from me, I would say, along with his basic design and color scheme. But it was Matt’s innovation to give him that deadpan look, to lengthen his limbs versus his torso, to deploy his powers in slightly more subtle ways than I might have done myself — all things that strengthen our portrayal of this lone man. It’s a happy marriage.
Do you have a question? Leave it in the comments and we will answer it!
Good morning, everyone–while I’m working to get the next page up, I thought I’d show you a little bit more of the sausage factory. Here’s the pencils for page two of “Destructor and the Lady:”
…I generally build Destructor pages around three-tier racks of panels, because I find that structure is helpful for breaking down Sean’s script into a sequence of actions and shifts-in-perspective, which I think is key to making a Destructor story work. The dialogue is spare, and the characters are mostly either masked or nonhuman, so I have to be able to make it clear visually what a characters sees, knows, and is doing from moment to moment.
This bottom row, for example, I’d originally planned as two panels. After I got the first panel pencilled, though, I decided that I needed an additional “beat” where we see Destructor’s pursuers cresting the mountain, as a catalyst for him grabbing the shield on the following page. I cropped the panel at left down to size (and really lucked out that I didn’t lose any vital info in the crop and therefore didn’t have to re-pencil that panel at all *(EDIT: Actually, I guess I slid that rock on the left over a bit so it would still bracket the left side of the panel, but still: not too much extra labor)), and added the third panel.
After pencilling, I scan my pages in and “ink” them on a Wacom Cintiq monitor/tablet. I’d been doing most of my pre-Cintiq inking with Pigma Microns or Staedtlers, both of which produce pretty dead lines, so my inking comes out pretty much the same on the Cintiq as it would on paper. If I’d been using nibs or brushes, both of which have more “action” in them and are more dependent on tactile feedback, then Cintiq inking might have needed more adjustment on my part, but I wasn’t so, uh, it didn’t.
Anyway, I’ll usually color-shift the pencils and “ink” on a separate layer above them, and it looks like this:
Next time on the factory tour: more coloring stuff.
Did Destructor acquire his armor all in a single piece, or gradually over time? If he acquired it all at once, did it have a previous owner, or what it designed for him? Who made it?
He did acquire his armor all at once. As for how, and when, and from whom, that is a tale for another time.
Do you have a question about Destructor? Ask in the comments and we’ll answer it! (Cryptically, perhaps, but answer it we will.)
What’s the collaboration like in terms of character and environment design? I’m thinking specifically about Island Prison and The Lady. Are there design sketches done by Matt (that he could post)?
Matt: Thanks for asking! Sean has pretty detailed environment and character notes in his script, and I generally do some sketching to figure out how things are going to look and (especially) how they’ll be staged, which I’ll send along to him if I have questions and want to make sure of something.
I’ve got some stuff sitting around from Lady which I’ll put up in a later post; Not sure about Prison, since I drew that a while back, but I’ll put those up too if I can find the sketchbook(s) I was working in at the time.
Sean: Matt’s right that I tend to have a clear idea of what people and places should look like — people in particular, since in many cases I’ve been drawing them myself since I was a child. When characters appear for the first time, Matt tends to send me his drawings up front just to make sure everything’s kosher. I rarely need to suggest any changes, but I do occasionally. My favorite was asking him to make General Grunt look less like a warthog and more like a bulldog, because there’s already a warthog-based character we’ll meet later on down the line. On a less ridiculous note, we had a fairly productive back and forth on the final look of the Lady recently.
AWESOME. I want a dead face so much right now.
YES!! It’s about time we had some dead faces around here. 😉 Love it!
this is so awesome.
Haha, just as I happen to hear Grateful Dead playing on the radio…
What a long, strange trip it’s been…