The Making of Black Dawn:
ComicMonsters.com! Yeah!! I was totally stoked to get an email from Rob Caprilozzi asking me to do a behind the scenes of Black Dawn.
For this article, I'll briefly talk about the history of the story and then I'll take you through the creative process between the writer and myself.
The history of Black Dawn actually dates back to over a decade ago when John O'Connor had written the story as a screenplay. One thing led to the next and he eventually met up with editor Bruce Levine from Scare Tactix Graphix. Towards the end of 2007 they posted a need for an artist on craigslist. That's where I found them and I LUCKILY checked my junk mail folder where their response was hiding. Met with them, read the screenplay, fell in love with the story, and away we went.
The beginning of the creative process consisted of designing the characters and the environment. John knew exactly how he wanted each character to look and he even had a great idea of how the scenery would look and where it would take place. With most of the first book set in the middle of Arizona and centering mainly around a semi truck, things went fairly quickly with the overall research for Book 1. But I still did character designs, which I then ran past John.
When it came to designing the two knuckleheads Lee and Carl, I searched around google for jail inmate images and above is the end result. All of my character sketches were very fast and to the point…I was ready to get the story rockin' and rollin'. I unfortunately never really got to draw Carl's tattoo. You can make it out just barely on one of the pages. I approached these two as not being the smartest tools in the shed, so my notes on them are kind of dumbed down as well. Such as my notes saying "some dumb bracelets" on Carl and "three dumb tattoos" around Lee's arm.
I'll use page 18 as our example of how things went from start to finish. Above is the page John handed me to work from. He also provided me with the full screenplay for more intricate details. He spent about six solid months translating the screenplay into a workable graphic novel format. So he omitted a few things and added a few more. A screenplay and a script for a graphic novel are truly two different beasts. (This particular page was originally listed as page 14, but became page 18 after we added a few pages.)
On some of the pages, I changed around camera angles, number of panels, etc., and then ran it by John. As you can see from this page, I stayed pretty close to what John had originally drawn. For much of the book I made a point to keep close to the way he set the pages up. As a writer John has a very good sense of story telling with sequential art. But it was also fun trying to stick with what he originally had. This was the technique I used for Book 1, but for the following books I'll be shuffling and moving the panels around a bit more.
I approached the pencils knowing that I would be inking and coloring my own work. So my pencils at times stay a bit raw. I usually leave a lot of the drawing left to the inking stage. (This page so happens to have a tighter set of pencils.) I'm using a 2B pencil lead. I've played around with many different lead types, but despite the smudging from 2B lead, I like the softer feel it has on the page.
I would say this is my favorite part of the entire process. I feel the inks really bring a page together. I can always hear in my head Frank Miller and Will Eisner referring to inking as "sexy". Because it's very true, especially with a brush. Most of the work in this book is inked with a brush and then followed up with a crow quill for smaller detail/rendering. Some of the pages also get treatment with Micron pens, white out, dipping a sponge in ink, using a paper towel dipped in ink, etc. There are all sorts of cool textures that can be found when utilizing different imaginative tools.
For the coloring process we went through quite a few decisions on how we would do this. We thought of doing black and white, but eventually concluded color would be better considering much of the story weighs heavily on a night and day theme. Originally my idea was to do the book in just two colors; a violet for night and a yellow for day scenes. But as I was doing some test pages in this style, I realized it would be just as time consuming to do full color. And printing cost would be the same as well. So we went the full color route.
What I've done for this book gives it a nice feel for nighttime. I Basically overlay the entire page with the violet color you see around the borders. (I cover it in a yellow for daytime). I then create all of the colors on the page from this violet color. So the skin, clothing, etc., was all this violet color, but I just tweaked it to the colors you see here. It gives the page a nice overall feel as one unity, with each color having the violet similarity to the color next to it. For those of you who don't know the coloring process for comics, Adobe Photoshop is the program most people use.
Not too much to say about the lettering. Used Adobe Illustrator and went to town. I used the "DC Guide to Coloring and Lettering" and "Lettering the Comic Craft Way" as my guides. I hand lettered about 20,000 letters in my graphic novel "Obsession", so it was quite the relief to use the computer for lettering on this book.
And that's a bit of behind the scenes for Black Dawn. We are currently working on the rest of the story at the moment. We're expecting to get the following books out in June 2009, December 2009, and June 2010. It's taking about 6 months each book due to the one-man art show on my end.
This first book was a lot of fun and a great introduction to the story! For Book 2, the story begins to pick up speed, many more characters and conflicts are introduced, and things really start to rock and roll. And for any of you out there that would like to appear in the book, you have the chance to do so. The info is in the back of Book 1. So keep your eyes open for the following books. You can contact me through my website for updates, ordering the books, and whatever else may be happening. Website is www.jeffclemens.com. You can also reach John through www.blackdawnweb.com.
Take care and thanks again to Rob for asking me to post this. Keep rockin with comicmonsters.com!!
Jeff Clemens
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