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Cloud Town Tuesday part 12 comic book author commentary

Speaker: [00:00:00] () All right, this is Cloudtown Tuesday with special guest Kevin McCloskey, uh, my dad, and creator of the Giggle and Learn, uh, children's book series. He's got a new one out about caterpillars. What will I be when I get to be me? And we're gonna look at, uh, some of this time loss footage. Welcome to Cloudtown Tuesday.

The day where I share a page from my graphic novel, Cloudtown, and, um, tell you about the process of making it. It's like a, um, editor's commentary on a DVD. Here it is. Let's go. Let's do it. Guess I think I'll have to edit his language slightly less than Kurt. We'll see. F. Kurt! Originally, one of the reasons they didn't have groceries in the house is Fawn spent their grocery money on some fancy shoes.

And my editor didn't like, uh, how erratic and unsympathetic that character was being. I kind of believed in her as like a kind of, uh, [00:01:00] Selfish, like in a selfish phase as a teenager, but I changed it so that that character would be a little more sympathetic so I had her kind of feel pressured to Buy some shoes For social status with the plan to return them with a receipt, but then was unable to And so I kept kind of adjusting this scene, but this scene got edited out for space.

So it never appeared in the .... In the final comic at all. It's in a crowded

Speaker 2: cafeteria. She says I have lunch. She says it's not about the food. It's about making the most of our senior privileges.

Speaker: Yeah, so I don't know if this was at your school. It wasn't at my school. But some of my friends at their high school at their senior year they were allowed to leave and have lunch at other places.

And come back.

Speaker 2: At my high school you could go in a particular door and I didn't know that. And I arrived From another school transferred and people were, thought I was really tough because I walked in [00:02:00] the senior door.

Speaker: I also really liked the design of this side character. You don't see her as much until later, but she has really big hands and kind of a nice round face.

And, uh, she just, she's not in the book at all, unfortunately, but I did enjoy that. There's something, um, I was reading a book of like manga artists, like when they get on deadline what is something they wish they spent more time doing and often they wish they had a lot more characters that they designed because it's hard to make a really cool, appealing character off the bat, just off the top of your head.

But one thing that's fun about doing these crowd scenes is sometimes you just happen to doodle something that's kind of fun. And then that character stays in the back of your head as a creator. So they end up being in the story more.

Speaker 2: I like her down here where it's sophisticated. She's looking up, you know, like 90 percent of the time, Everybody draws profiles or full face, but to [00:03:00] have somebody complaining toward the sky, that's kind of sophisticated.

Speaker: Well, I think one thing that makes a good cartoonist is acting through the different characters. Yep. Um, there are kind of faces that I The one eyebrow raise that the character by Fawn's elbow is doing is a little bit semi typical thing. I do maybe a little too much. Oh, and so this is now, this is when I'm totally redesigning the page.

When I'm starting over. This is a scene that is from like an early pitch. Um, that was a double page spread. But because I ran out of space, I took that double page spread and just made it a third of a page. And this coolest kid in school is a prime example of a character that I just doodled and I thought looked funny.

And in the pitch version, it goes like this. The font isn't so detailed. I just kind of quickly doodled coolest kid in school with an arrow as a joke. Yeah, but then I was [00:04:00] like well the character kept coming back And I thought it would be funnier if he was in fact the coolest kid in school And I was also thinking of some of the kids in my school that were really cool It was very rare that it was kind of the stereotypical like Jock in my school some of the kids that were well respected were actually just kind of Pleasant and mature and confident.

So that's, that's where his coolness comes from in this story.

Speaker 2: Yeah, he's cool. He's charming to everybody and he's polite and yeah.

Speaker: And I feel like, uh, again, just the character I doodled randomly ended up like becoming a bigger character, taking over, taking place in the story. And because of that, my editor liked him so much, she really wanted to see Olive go on that date.

That scene didn't even exist in the first several versions of the script. Um, but because, because I found out that would be happening, I did include him in the background a little more. Oh, yeah. And this ant scene I added [00:05:00] because of the climax. If you haven't already, you know, stop. If you haven't read Cloud Town already.

But.

If you're here, you probably have the climax. She's in a giant robot and she's threatening, crushing other kids. But. I found that it was kind of difficult for people to quite understand what the threat really was. So when I went back and in the beginning of the book, had her as a normal sized person crush with her finger an insect, suddenly there was no question in people's mind what was going on during the climax.

So this is page 7, making something more readable on page like 220, you know.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not quite foreshadowing, it's kind of

Speaker: Yeah, it's somewhat foreshadowing. Her, like, working on this little programming stuff, that's something that comes in a little bit later when her and Penn are arguing. She wanted to be, like, an engineer when she grew up before she had to pilot the giant robot.[00:06:00]

But, you know, if there were future stories, in a way, you'd imagine her being able to get into the engineering challenge of piloting a giant robot, because that's something she's interested in.

Speaker 2: This guy is disappearing off the panel on the left. He looks a little bit like one of your self portraits.

Speaker: Just because he has like, like glasses like eyeballs.

Speaker 2: And he's sticking his tongue out. Yeah,

Speaker: I like that character, too. I ended up putting him more places because I just like the way it looked. Sometimes simple characters are funnier than, uh, and more delightful to draw. And sometimes I thought, like, in early versions, this kid with the apple cork getting dropped on his head by a drone.

Yeah. He got, uh, pranked consistently throughout the whole story. So that was, like, a side thing that, , got, again, cut out for space.

Speaker 2: And the, like, Lab monitor or the lunch monitor. Is he like taking attendance or keeping track of things? What's he doing there?

Speaker: I think he's just distracted, but it's hard to [00:07:00] know.

Also, I understood like simple one point and two point perspective, but since then I've read, uh, like a number of books and essays that just have really simple, uh, methods, uh, of eyeballing rough perspective in big crowds of people. And. It has changed the way my drawings look. They're a lot more organized feeling and feel like they have a lot more depth than these pages do.

These pages have, um, really like shooting from the hip perspective, which is common in cartooning and is not a problem. I don't think, um, you're not doing exact portraiture. You're, you're trying to, Make symbols that give people the idea of what's going on, but um But there are some really simple Ways to think about perspective that's helpful.

For example, like If your line of sight slash your horizon line is at someone's head [00:08:00] Shoulder level, then everyone from the foreground to the background, their shoulders will line up. If they're relatively the same height. So, that does not appear in this because I haven't figured that out yet.

Speaker 2: Looks great.

Looks great, huh? And I love the way you always got that S shaped curl coming off of Penn's hair. I think it's on the cover too. Where? And then you have the shot that's S here. Oh, olive, I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. All

Speaker: good. Yeah. Alright, well that's the page so that Well, thanks dad.