Saint Ran

Project:WSDS101

I'm working on several illustrations right now as part of project: Whoring for Studio Doggebi Startup Capital (WSDS101). I'll share some of those with you as they relate to the creation of  The Legendary Sisters of the Laughing Doggebi indirectly but at the moment I want to focus on the latter.

Table Building

Before I started doing homework on the Creator Owned Comics industry I hatched a scheme of how I thought I could blitzkrieg the market. That now abandoned strategy went something like this:

• Take my first comic to a con
• ???
• Profit

Ok, it was a little more involved than that but not much. My initial plan was to hit SDCC2012 as a guest with a backpack full of ashcan printings of my book to hand out. The idea being that I'd drive traffic to the web comic with these little freebies. It hadn't occurred to me at this point to actually talk to people who go to cons regularly so I'm grateful that Wally Ostlie chimed in on my DA page suggesting that a free comic is a discarded comic and that even if I were to take a loss charging something, anything at all would give the book value psychologically and hopefully fewer would end up as landfill.

This made sense. But as a guest and not a contributor I'd have a tough time selling a book. Thankfully SDCC sold out before I managed to actually looking into buying my pass. I wasn't grateful at the time mind you. My poorly thought out vision was in jeopardy! How could I brilliantly dash onto the comic scene if I couldn't go to the biggest comic con of the year!!!

Then I stumbled onto the notion of going to Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle. From everything I was hearing and reading it was the new artist con of choice thanks to SDCC's non comic bloat. What's more I could afford a table there. I checked the website... tables generally were available in past cons up until October. All looked good. I was going to do this. I started raising my table/hotel/airfair money via WSDS101.

Fortunately my house started falling apart. Yes. I said fortunately. I'll explain in a minute. Ejector pump failed, a bathroom floor needed replacing, a kitchen ceiling started to leak like something out of Poltergeist. In short it took me longer to raise the money than I expected and come August when I was ready to finally book my table... I found out ECCC2012 sold out of artist alley tables in record time. Another door closed.

So I wallowed in self pity for a while. I was too discouraged to draw Sisters. I did a lot of WSDS101 commissions and not much else. Then I was sharing my frustrations with writer Scott R. Schmidt and he came up with a pretty damn effective plan: he commissioned me to draw 5 comic pages for an anthology he was working on. What's more he made me aware of an upcoming con in Saint Louis where he'd be hocking the book.

So suddenly I got wide eyed again. I could DRIVE to Saint Louis from Chicago! I'd need no airfair. The con was really affordable. I could book a table... I'd have the deadline to light a fire under my arse on Sisters again... fortunately... Wally Ostlie slapped some reality into me. He showed me a picture of his convention table.

I took one look at his awesome table and realized that even if I had no full time I.T. job, my wife and kids went to visit in-laws in Korea for 6 months, and an angel investor dropped out of the sky to fund me doing nothing but printing books, prints, posters, banners and letterhead there wasn't a chance I'd have a convention table ready in time for St. Louis.

The Slow Burn

Not terribly long ago I had an epiphany. It came from realizing that my week was punctuated by the days my favorite web comics release. Free Mars, Dealers, Oglaf (warning absolutely NSFW). What these had in common was a weekly micro update schedule. And then it hit me: web comics don't explode onto the scene. They burn into it slowly.

This theory has been pretty strongly confirmed for me via the Making Comics podcast which I highly recommend to any aspiring comickers. My new strategy was born:
 

• Fund Project: Get My Freaking Table Ready (GMFTR102) by WSDS101 commissions one table component at a time.
• In the meantime micro publish The Legendary Sisters of the Laughing Doggebi so that fans can trickle in we'll call this Project: Publish the Damn Thing Already (PDTA100)
• When the table is finally ready and a fan base has started to form around Sisters... start going to cons.

 PDTA100

And now we finally get to the title of today's blog entry. Saint Ran. Ran is arguably one of the most important characters in The Legendary Sisters of the Laughing Doggebi I say arguably because when your book is about an ensemble of 5 warrior women it's somewhat dismissive of the rest of the crew to suggest that one is more imporant than the others.  But let's be fair: she's called The Saint because it is her epiphany that put the lot on the road to atonement. She is for better or worse the linchpin that holds the team together.

So I've decided that one thing my table needs is 5 flashy full color banners, one of each sister. And I'm starting with Ran. This means locking in the render on her by coming up with a final reference sheet. And that means: Stealing Faces.

Stealing Faces is what I call the process by which I refine my characters. I start by asking myself: if I had to cast the movie and was choosing the actor to play this character whom would I pick. Then I spend a few weeks googling images of that person and drawing them over and over and over. When I feel like I've got an intimate knowledge of that persons face I put the drawings away. Open to a fresh sketchbook page and start drawing. What happens next is something that looks nothing like the photo reference but still has a vague (for lack of a better expression) spiritual inference of that actor's persona.

And that's what I'm doing these days. I've picked Ran's actor and I've been googling and drawing like a mad man in preparation for doing her reference sheet. I won't tell you whose face I'm using (actually it might be fun to hear people's theories over time, who knows... maybe I'll make a contest of it some day.)