Before I go any farther let me thank you all for the really spirited and in-depth discussion last week. I can’t tell you all how much I enjoy the feedback you give me on 6-Commando. It’s a hallmark of this comic, I think, that the readership is so willing to engage with me and with each other in a really sophisticated and intelligent way, and I am really grateful for it!
Okay, now, on to the news. This week, there was a lot, a LOT of really cool stuff going on. And here it is.
First up, this page. It completes the spread, which you can now see, for the low low price of nothing, if you will only take but a few moments of your valuable time to vote for 6-Commando over at topwebcomics.com.
Second, I received my copy of Joost Haakman’s Semmie The Forest Gnome this week, and let me tell you, it is just beautiful! For a mere $20(US) you, too, can have a hardcover copy of this book, and I really hope you will all get one. I mean, guys, really, it’s a terrific book and that’s like the cost of a pizza – small price to pay for a piece of first-rate comic art, I say, and your kids will adore it! Hell, you’ll adore it, too! Please, take my word on this one, and get a copy right away.
I have also received my copy of Jason Brubaker’s reMIND, and although he is currently enjoying a well-deserved run as a comic art it-boy on the convention circuit and therefore hardly needs me to say it, reMIND, too, is a fantastic book which I am really proud to own! Getting a copy of that for yourself may be trickier, as I understand that Jason is saving the remainder of his stock for convention sales at this point. However, if you go to a con and see him, tell him Mr. Average sent you, and then buy a copy! Again, guys, this is top-notch work, in the purest sense of the word, and you will not regret owning a copy.
Now, third, I bet you thought I forgot, but I didn’t: I am, this very week, in the midst of filing paperwork with the State to found my own company: Vicious Print. I spent a long time looking into all the intricacies of it and now I’m pulling the trigger and wading into the state bureaucracy to see what needs to be done and when and who needs to know about it, and how much of it. But I have sent off my formal inquiry to the state Department of Licensing, and they are supposedly going to provide me with proper guidance on how to proceed. This is like filing taxes in reverse, since you’re always afraid to say the wrong thing or ask the wrong question, but there’s nothing to do but try to tackle the nonsense and deal with it. This is why most people ignore this process and just do things under the radar. Unfortunately, since I have a professional license to worry about (my architectural license) I have to make sure everything I do is above board, or it could really come back to bite me in the ass later on when the IRS comes a-callin’. Now, of course, there’s still some lead time and all, but I hope to wrap this up soon. But this chapter of 6-Commando will be done by New Year’s, I believe, and shortly thereafter I want to put the first volume in print. I also have some neat-o stuff you may want to get your hands on, and having a business license will let me get all of this to you with the minimum of hassle from the Department of Revenue. So I will keep you updated.
AND, finally, on that topic, I have (in the words of Edward Gorey), with a pen, ink, paper, scissors, paste, a decanter of sherry and a vast reluctance, begun to revise the first chapter of 6-Commando, with the intention of producing, for print, the digitally-remastered Director’s Cut. What does that mean, you might ask? Well, let me preface this by saying that in doing this, I am going against what the majority of my comrades in the Comics Universe have advised me to do, which is to forget it and just move ahead. It also raises the question, inevitably, of why I didn’t just “do it that way the FIRST time?!” However, I have come to realize, or rather, to admit to myself, that I am not a comic artist, I am an architect. And when architects draw, the first draft is always terrible. Frankly, the first five or six drafts are usually terrible. It’s just the way we are. Now, the first draft of 6-Commando is not terrible – I always aim to make the best comic I can each week. But I am an introspective, and retrospective type, and as I have moved on with the story, I have found that I want to improve a whole lot of things that I didn’t see or think of at the time I first drew them. Now, I’m limiting myself: the story will remain the same, as will the layout and events and such, but there are places where the perspective is wrong, the colors are overblown, the scene needs re-pacing – all the accumulated mess of working to a weekly schedule. And of course there will be extras to induce you all to buy a copy (I hope) – never-before-seen footage which will only appear in the Director’s Cut. And, yes, I will be finishing those awful, half-assed black-and-whites from when my old computer crashed. So, yes, it’s all part of the process. It will be the same story you already know (and love, I hope!) but it will just be… well, better. I’ve already begun the process, but this week I finally completed all the planning and put pen to paper (or, rather, stylus to tablet) and began the act of physically revising the artwork for page 1, per my notes and plans. So far I am extraordinarily pleased with the result, and I think you will be to. I’ll be posting some sneak previews soon, and I hope that they’ll help build a little excitement as 6-Commando moves towards the big leap from screen to page, as it were, early next year.
And so! There we are, for another week. Cool stuff, huh? You know it occurs to me that I ought to run another contest soon. Hmm. I’ll have to think about that…
Until then, be well, and I’ll see you next week!
>>> Before I go any farther let me thank you all for the really spirited and in-depth discussion last week. I can’t tell you all how much I enjoy the feedback you give me on 6-Commando. It’s a hallmark of this comic, I think, that the readership is so willing to engage with me and with each other in a really sophisticated and intelligent way, and I am really grateful for it!
The exchange of ideas with you is one of the many good reasons I read 6-Commando [in addition to the obvious, like excellent art and a good story]. I really appreciate the time you put into this and I’m thrilled for more.
This last excerpt from your last post…
>>> Scenarios in which survival alone is of paramount importance really reduce humans to a kind of animal, and ignore the fact that we incur on ourselves the responsibility to be better than that, and to overcome difficult, even horrifying situations by force of intellect and will. In that sense, it is not so much a sense of whether mankind could retain social order, but whether he would.
… is what makes 6-Commando so intriguing to me. First I thought it was “just another SciFi-military story”, but started to notice that it probably will take a different direction. The observation of human behavior and reaction to crisis or conflict is a very interesting and absorbing. I don’t know about you, but exactly this was made e.g. the re-imangined >Battlestar Galactica< so great.
BTW, Tom really looks horribly f****-up. Especially in the last panel. It's such a natural pose and describes how he probably feels right now very well.
Thanks, on all counts! And the last panel, I’m not ashamed to say, I based on Rodin’s “The Thinker.” Although I twisted him up a little more to make it a more morose and melancholy pose for Rucker.
Like I say, when in doubt, go to the masters.
–M
Oh, and thank you for directing me to reMIND. It looks nice and I’ll be sure to take a closer look next time I’m bored at work. 🙂
It amazes me that he expects her to have come out of this unscratched. I mean she had an air burst nuke dropped nearly right on top of her – and she survived. Then she was stuffed into M1K for several days, maybe even a week untreated and that means no pain medication for the second nuke. The guys who found M1K were saying it was too hot out for them in the mobile radiation suits.
In fact, I’m surprised that the Decon crew even recognized her other than a piece of meat. stuffed into the chassis. Her Uniform would have been gone, her face and a lot of the skin on the rest of her body is gone to radiation burns. Flaying alive is a middle ages torture method that usually killed the victim. She must not feel pain anymore or she has passed out from it constantly. In our world she would have medical problems for the rest of her short life. In so many ways it is a curse for her to have survived. I guess it drives the plot forward so it has happened here, she will wake up and talk to people. I await seeing what she will say, put part of me wishes she didn’t survive.
It reminds me of a wack-job movie that I saw and cant remember the name of where a guy who works at the post office has this crazy experience mixed with war flashbacks in a world that isn’t quite our world .As her tries to meet up with people from his past they are killed off in strange ways. That description doesn’t even give away the end of the movie.
That last line should be “As HE tries to meet…”
Jacob’s Ladder. Really excellent and very scary movie. As for Rucker, well… I’ll just say that it’s one thing to be reasonable, and to know a thing in the front of your mind, but quite another to be confronted with it in reality, no matter how hardened you may think you are.
–M
Hell, I thought see was dust. I can’t imagine Rucker thought he would see her again and considering everything else that has just happen, this was probably the worst thing for him to see knowing there is nothing he can do.
Yeah I often wonder whether the advice I once got, that I should allow bad things to happen to my characters, might be going too far in 6-Commando. But then I think twice, and I run with it. Tom is, if you get my reference, my Miles O’Brien. That is, he’s my Science Fiction Everyman, who therefore is made to suffer for the sake of the story. He isn’t the ONLY one, mind you – Sarah’s had a rough time so far, and Milo, well… let’s not dwell on such things. But I think you get my drift.
–M
>>> Tom is, if you get my reference, my Miles O’Brien.
Has he hurt is shoulder yet? ’bout time!
Not yet. But it’s a dangerous world out there…
–M
I just have a terrible feeling that Major Rucker is going to do something crazy thats going to end in a whole pile of bodies… well, a bigger pile of bodies on top of the scorched and blackened mountains of charred skeletons left by the appocolypse.
😉
Trying to coax a sneak preview out of me? Probably not. But still, I can neither confirm nor deny anything that Rucker is likely to next.
–M