Directions

Truck

Here's another peek at my retail project, all about the strange pleasures of working the stockroom.


Again, this project is nearly complete. Keep your eyes peeled for news about it!

Inscrutable

For more context, you can relive the original "Sexy Pictures" in all its glory.
My retail tales are winding to an end! Only a few more to go and then soon enough you will be able to hold all of them, including some epic stories not published on the blog, in your hands, burned across the pulped remains of a dead tree!

Inhale to the Chief

I felt the same way about cheeseburgers and Bill Clinton, but he had to go and ruin that with all this vegan nonsense. Have the unhealthy no heroes left??

Ain't Got 30 Cents

Another sneak peek at my retail project! Happy holidays to you and yours.

One Hour Photo

Here's another big sample of what I've been working on for my collection of retail tales!

A Constant Struggle to Preserve One's Human Dignity

Shoplifter

If nothing else, shoplifters always add a little variety to the day.

9 AM Paddleball

Regulars

There were more but these ones stuck with me the most...

Lube 2

The thrilling sequel to the original smash hit.

Lube

When this happened I very seriously questioned if I was being pranked.

No One's Making You Buy 'Em

Have you been through an awkward situation that was only made bearable by the notion in the back of your head that the situation would make a good story later?

Balloon Time

Does... he think Chinese people have tiny fingers? Or was he implying that outsourcing to China would involve child workers? How does one outsource the act of inflating balloons? So many questions left unasked in the name of customer service...

Pennies

This guy had some serious disdain for pennies:

Haggle

Today's joyful retail story involves everyone's favorite customer, the pushy cheapskate:

Original sketch:

Paper Jam

The latest from retail tales- some days the machines are as fickle as the customers.

Here's the original sketch; this one was pretty fully realized, though I did change the last line to be a little less obtuse.

"Poo Poo" & "Clearance"

Two more tales from retail, one strange and one quiet and cathartic!

The original sketches:

Pills

More fun with customer service:

And here's the very rough sketch straight from the sketchbook:

Sexy Pictures

So I'm working on a project right now making a lot of comics I wrote about a year ago, all about my time in customer service. Anyone who's worked retail knows you always walk away with some strange stories to tell- once I'm done, I'll have a whole comic's worth.

Here's the newest strip for it, "Sexy Pictures." It may be important at this point to reiterate these stories will all be real-life.

"Sexy Pictures" as a concept would return many times during my stint in that photo lab... be on the lookout for more comics about it.

I thought it would be interesting to show my process for this, so if you're curious how I frankenstein together things into a finished page of comics, this is for you!
First, the original sketch:

When I originally sketched these stories out, I was mostly concerned with getting the story and timing down, and wasn't thinking about format at all. This one had the perfect amount of panels to be refit, so that was no real challenge. The actual layout of the panels though was pretty rudimentary, and needed reworked- a lot. A lot of pencil lead and eraser was burnt through before ending up with these pencils:

I pencil best at a smallish size; the page above is about 7"x9.25". When it comes to inking though, I have to ink larger, or I just can't get the line quality I want. I am a pretty ham-handed individual, so I like to scan my pencils in and then ink on vellum over a blown-up print out of the pencils. Here's a peek at the raw inks (without frames) on vellum, complete with lots of ugly, uncorrected mistakes:

After that, I recompile the inks in Photoshop and adjust thresholds to get things crisp for coloring/printing; at that point we've got this:

Since this is intended for a self-published mini, I have to stick with black and white. I planned on using a very limited, two-limit value palette to get things feeling more solid, so I just popped open a layer and start playing around with the two values I want to use, trying to figure out where I want them to go. Here's what I had when that was done:

Satisfied with that color sketch, at that point it's just a matter of going back in and making the actual fields of flat color the way I want them, and then you've got the final piece at the top of the post.