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Cloud Town Tuesday part 13 comic book author commentary

[00:00:00] I was in an elementary school last week and there was a sign that said, No playing inside the freezer. That's a good, that's a good plan. Was it a walk in freezer? No. Oh, geez. 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. This is my big sister Zoe. She has much more formal art training than I do. And as you met last week, this is my dad Kevin. Uh, children's book author and illustration professor. Also more art training than me. He's wearing the same shirt.

He's wearing the same shirt. Can you believe it? This is going to be page. Eight of the actual book. So this is really close to the original pitch. So this is the pitch document page that you're seeing behind. Me just tracing it. So I don't have footage of [00:01:00] me figuring that out, but it ends up being relatively different like this character in the top left character's Corner there is cut out.

She's got a fly print on her. Yeah, that's fly. Thanks Did we didn't we try to use ai to figure out a fly output? Oh, yeah, we were messing around doing fly dresses after, like, uh, was in my head, but of course it just looked like weird and gross because it combined flies and people, but that's the thing, uh, or like fly military people.

Drawing is still, uh, useful, better for me for sure. Some people are, it's a different skill set.. using AI for sure. What's this thing sitting on the apple? A little, like, robotic armature that she's programming. Okay. They still have cords in this, in CloudTown. Well Yeah, you think, you think you'd program armatures with Bluetooth?

I mean, things have to charge. It's not the future. It's an alternate [00:02:00] present, right? Yeah, something like that. It's unclear. I thought this was the armature's tail, but it's the apple's stem. Or is it the mini A? Wow. Or is it the mini B? You put my picture on the side of the apple. I'm flattered. That does look Every time I see an Apple sticker, I'll think, that's my dad.

What happened to her head? And then she like, reappeared. What? I can go back. Like, didn't she change and then all of a sudden reappear? Oh, I just put a picture. Oh, yeah. What happened there? So I know what he was supposed to look like. Oh, gotcha, you gotcha. You just threw a reference image. Yeah, threw a reference image on there.

But yeah, what I was saying before is I didn't have page numbers in any of the book when it was, like, completed. And then they retroactively asked me to put page numbers in, which is a lot. It's a lot of work to [00:03:00] shuffle everything to make page numbers look relatively normal on every page. So, I don't know.

If there's any editors out there Let people know in advance. So did you number them consecutively? Yeah.

Classic cool girls. Yeah, classic cool girl trope. Like, one of the things that was interesting, I was listening to a podcast about becoming a screenwriter today, and like how it teaches you some bad behavior if you're on your path to become a professional screenwriter, because you need to make things That a producer's, not necessarily writers, will believe, have faith that can be a sellable thing, because they are similar to what they've seen before.

And Cloudtown is, in part, that. Like, I, I had a bunch of other stories that just, I was getting feedback from editors that they couldn't see how it would be a whole story, or how it fit. And so, this is the story that's most, like, There's a [00:04:00] giant robot. They get in the robot. There's villain characters. No spoilers!

No spoilers! But there were comparables. There are comparables, yeah. You could see the pieces put together from the beginning and I like to think that there are twists and turns that make it surprising. But, I'm starting at a place If you support him now, maybe someday you'll get to see something really crazy and different that you've never seen before.

But you're watching this, you probably are supporting me. Well, no. Maybe it'll come out later. To the wide public. We don't know who you are. We don't know who you are. What if you're leaking this to YouTube? Yeah, no, he's, he's an amazing guy. He's got a lot of, uh, Bugs, bugs, bugs! Bugs! No bugs! Bugs, bugs, squish bugs.

Ah, the bugs are moving! That's very nice. There's an E? See, and I just redrew this, I wanted it on a donut, instead of, maybe I thought, like, the apple, I put it on a donut box, because she works at a donut [00:05:00] shop. I got cut out. Yeah, and then this character gets, I see, I drew so many pages so many times, but you can kind of see how I grew as an artist as much as I did because instead of drawing one 200 page comic, I drew like probably five to six hundred pages of material.

Yeah. Wow. And Boan was holding her pee the whole time! She was a little baby when I She wasn't even Oh, you weren't part of the equation. She wasn't alive when I started this story, but she was when I was drawing this part. Page 8. You exist. It's interesting trying to figure out how I'm making choices. I also got better at consolidating more plot points per panel in a comfortable way.

Mm hmm. I had so much consolidation. So the people in the background aren't just standing there, they're moving or threatening. Sure, I mean this, this shove I really enjoyed. I kept that from the pitch. Yeah. For some reason I like the way [00:06:00] this character's reaction is. Yeah. I just really enjoyed that. It says shove?

It says shove. In the final? Yeah. I love it. I don't know why. It's funny. That one made the cut. Yeah. I know. I found it delightful. Yeah, it's good. It's funny. And then this is from, I don't know, that's from the page before it, yeah, this reference. So I guess we've kind of been blurring through multiple pages I drew on the same page.

I must have duplicated it and continued. Well, that's why it's good to have numbers on them, because seven is basically eight. No, but we're still, this is still the same scene. It's just the same, it's just the next page. The three main girls arrive. And then the next page, well, the scene will continue. Right.

And the geeky girl. But yeah, this is, you know, much later. Alright, well, let's I don't remember these ants so much. I mean, it's only two pages in the very beginning of the book.

So at the end of the book, when the giant ants come, people won't be surprised, right? Right, yeah, that's why I It's so [00:07:00] subtle. But this is almost exactly the original. Like, this is Oh, yeah. This page, barely anything changed. I had to draw it cleaner because I see Charles Byrne's style in that character there.

Charles Byrne? Her hair, you mean? Yeah, just the black white and the Wow, that's, that's an absurd compliment, but I'll take it. Sorry, Charles. They have really big dishes for their food at this high school. Is it jr high or high school? It's a high school, they're freshmen. And my hope was to, you know, have a sense of like a looming perspective.

I was talking to dad about how my ability to do freehand perspective has increased a great deal.

That's a little anime, that diagonal. Which diagonal? Behind her. Here? Because it goes from frame to frame? Yeah, I mean it's a traditional, [00:08:00] um, Like comics. thing is to, you know, watch your z's, like you want your reading path to go, and then drive your eye back to the next frame, right? But am I supposed to read it?

Oh, okay. Okay.