malandchad.com

Hey everybody, I just wanted to touch base and tell you what I’ve been up to lately.

These last months I’ve been working hard on the script for the third Mal and Chad book. “Third book?” you might ask. “Where’s the second book?” The second Mal and Chad book, entitled FOOD FIGHT! is coming out this January 19! Isn’t that amazing?

Here’s a little preview of the first page!

Without going into too many details, in this volume, Chad is being troubled by terrible nightmares, so Mal invents a special machine that will allow him to travel into Chad’s dream world so he can help Chad face his deepest fears!

Please pre-order the next volume now if you have a chance! Or, it’ll be waiting for you at your local bookstore when it comes out in January.

Anyways! Back to book 3!

Writing the script for this volume was hard– but I guess all the books so far have been hard to write.

It seems to me that the only way to write one good book is to write two books and then throw the bad one away. And boy did I throw out a lot! I had finished a complete script, sent it to my editor, and been waiting for him to send back his critiques for a week when I started getting the feeling that something wasn’t quite right about the book. So I began working on it again, deleting over half it, and keeping only the choicest parts. My cartoonist friend Michael Regina really helped me during this time with his feedback about the book, helping me keep focused on the parts of the story that were important.

It’s frustrating, but I think you can’t really understand what’s wrong with your story until you write the whole thing. It’s invisible until it’s written, but once it’s on paper it can be cut up and broken down and built up and made right.

But now that I’ve got a story worth drawing, I can say with all confidence that it was worth it! I’ve now started into the thumb-nailing process, which is where I translate the words of my script into the pictures of my comic book. Similar to story boarding in film and animation, thumb-nailing is a series of rough sketches that help me to decide composition and story pacing.

For some reason I like to work on thumbnails standing up– maybe just to get away from the computer. Here’s my setup– basically just a table stack on a dresser. But it works.

While keeping an eye on the script, I will draw rough versions of each page of the book. I like to draw on half pages to keep myself aware of the orientation of the page, (whether it’s to the left or the right). Knowing the orientation is important because I don’t want panels that bleed of the edge of the page to face into the spine of the book. Also, having the extra half page blank lets me have a space to redraw panels or figure out expressions.

In other news, while I was waiting for my editor to get back to me, I started working on a series of comics essays about creativity. You can read them here, on Doodle Alley!

Thanks for stopping by everybody! I’ll try to be in touch!