March 2007

In the multitude of posts leading up to this one, I put up the individual panels for the first of three pages of my art for Mark McKenna’s Bananatail short comic “Hide and Seek”. Cut-paper being what it is, It was a whole lot easier tackling the panels as individual illustrations. Certainly better than laying out the whole page and wishing upon a star that everything would magically fit together.

I was very, very curious how everything would look jigsawed together and with text and titles slapped on. Turns out it looks pretty darn good. Click the image above for a bigger, more legible, more monkey-licious version.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

…The first egg was named “Thought”. Tathagata Buddha, the Father Buddha, said, “With our thoughts, we make the World”. Elemental forces caused the egg to hatch. From it came a stone monkey. The Nature of Monkey was irrepressible!

Panel four of my art for Mark McKenna’s Bananatail short comic “Hide and Seek” (and another monkey quote) finish out the first page. Next post, I’ll show how everything fits together into the comic with text and titles. Of course, there are two more pages to the story as well.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

猿も木から落ちる (saru mo ki kara ochiru) translates as something along the lines of “Even monkeys fall out of trees”. It’s a proverb which I’ve always been fond of. It also happens to be the motto of my friend Taro’s Mad-Monkey School of Mixed Judo. There’s a longer version, but I’ll save that for panel four.

Which must mean that this is panel three of my art for Mark McKenna’s Bananatail short comic.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

That’s one swingin’ monkey (Ba-dum-BUM)! Panel 2 of my art for Mark McKenna’s Bananatail short comic. The story now officially has a name: “Hide N’ Seek”, which should help a bit if you’re trying to come up with dialogue or just figure out the action.

Part 1
Part 2

Ah, monkeys. There’s nothing quite like them. Particularly those with tails the same color as bananas.

But how does one go about building the better monkey? Well, it helps to start out with a good story. That comes care of Mark McKenna, creator and surrogate dad to Banana-Tail. Comic book art is a whole world of storytelling unto itself, where every panel needs to lead the eye to the next panel and come together to make a whole that is a thousand times stronger than the parts. Having never dabbled in this field before, I relied on the esteemed talents of Kevin West to guide me. You can see his layout for the first page to the right.

I divided each panel into separate illustrations, then worked out my drawings, trying to inject my own style while keeping faithful to Mark’s creation. I do most of my final sketches on tracing paper these days, just to speed up the process. Then I dive into my collection of papers and try and find colors and textures that come together and help tell the story. For me, the trick is to let the paper do as much work as possible and imply the detail. After that, it’s all cutting and glueing.

The final sketch is below, and the finished panel is above. Feel free to add your own words.

Part 1