Oh, Perspective, How's I Eyes Ya

The advantage to re-drawing about half of the Factor of 01 to be consistent in print format means I get to completely rework things I have not been entirely happy with. Originally the first panel, while it worked, wasn't entirely what I wanted. This is closer, and while I don't think I've got the handle on 3 point perspective that it demands, I think it's good enough to serve the purpose.

I also won't be replacing this on the web site until the next strip is redrawn. I've completely changed the beat of the action. That's the worst part of the original artwork. I really do not like staging fight scenes in my comics, so I do it badly. In the first Jet-Pack Jenny comic, there's actually two strips that were all black as a cop-out, albeit done on a dare. That second panel is also the second part of my lesson in how harsh a mistress perspective can be. Never ever say you can fix perspective in Photoshop, it will still not look 100% right.

Redrawing Jet-Pack Jenny

I have a gallery show coming up in January (not April as I once mistakenly wrote elsewhere) up in my old stomping grounds of Lenoir, NC and I wanted some strips that were better suited to the gallery environment. Eventually, I am gonna re-draw an earlier Jet-Pack Jenny story that I’m not happy with, and decided that this shot needed to be expanded to full strip length. It’s Jet-Pack Jenny tossing Bad Bette over her in a judo-type flip.

I look forward to redrawing this fight. I feel I'm a much better artist than when I first did this story years ago, but don't look forward to it anytime right away. I have three or four strips left in Factor of 01, then I'm going to concentrate on a story that we're tenatively calling Hanamori's Circus. Any time spent away from that will be collecting Factor of 01.

And The Streak Falls at Nine Weeks

No new strip this Monday. It's been a busy week, and the weekend is even busier. It's not that I've been letting myself get distracted, I've just gotten too many balls up in the air creatively. You wanna know something, though? I'm happy with having the past two months having new content every week. However, I am going to make you a deal. I will post a redrawing of an older strip, and in exchange, you forgive me. Deal?

I said do we have a deal?

Okay, for Easter Monday, I'll post a new strip AND a redrawn one, as well. Now be happy, that's all you're getting.

What's That? Re-Drawing Virginia Dare?

In last week's strip I casually mentioned that I would eventually be re-drawing Flight of the Virginia Dare. I've planned to re-draw it for some time, if for no reason than I just don't like a majority of the artwork that I did 8-9 years ago. I also don't like the way the romance between Jenny and Officer Duett just kind of happens. In the revision, we'll get a tour of the Virginia Dare and a real sense of why a conventional bomb in the ballroom will damage the ship past the point where it would be space worthy, since it's a BIG ship.

There's also a bit of science that needs to be cleared up. The effort with Jet-Pack Jenny, despite the absurd name she goes by, is that the science fiction is supposed to be scientifically accurate. It's just something that really irks me when science fiction gets science wrong. Of course, it's one thing if the science fiction is from an era and the science that's wrong simply wasn't known, yet. Getting the atmosphere of Venus as habitable is fine if you're writing a story in 1952. but it's bad science if you're writing it in 2002. Ignorance doesn't count, either. That's why I'm redrawing the story.

Work In Progress

Thursday and Friday saw my drawing time go into a redraw of a previous strip.  There's no lettering in the original strip, and I'm really thinking that adding captions would be counter-productive. I'll research a little about captions, especially in the context of sci-fi comics, but right now, the impulse is to leave the strip captionless. The Science Fiction comics of the 50s, especially the really great EC comics made heavy use of captions, but they were building upon the prose science fiction of pulp novels. So far, I've not used captions in this story, aside from the "elsewhere" blurbs, and I really feel like captions in this setting would be useless and be telling things that I can show.

Also, I'm aware that some may be using larger monitor settings to view the Internet, so if you're having trouble reading the lettering, here's a tip, if you're using Windows XP. While pressing "Ctrl", slowly roll the scroll wheel on your mouse away from you. This'll enlarge the page and rolling it back will return it to the larger resolution.

02/19/2006

Redrawn strip, which loses the split panel and necessitates a new strip be inserted before this to make up for missing dialog, so I'm sorry if it's a little confusing for a few weeks. There are cameos here, still. See if you can spot the Next Men and one of the Doctors.

01/29/2006

This is the latest, and hopefully, the last redraw. Ione looks much better in the second panel. I wasn't entirely happy with Jenny in the first panel, so I redrew it and did a little Photoshop pasting. Look for this strip to be colored soon. That's right, I've decided to go with color.

In the second panel, "new girlfriend" is not meant to imply (or is it infer?) that Jenny was Ione's husband's old girlfriend. However, I do reserve the right to revisit that and make it part of the backstory.

01/22/2006

You wouldn't believe the number of times I've redrawn a version of this strip. Once I redrew it in a very naturalistic, rendered and shaded style. Once I redrew it twice as tall, with an extra intro to show some of the city.

UPDATE (01/28/2012): I redrew this one more time, but a lot of it was tracing as it's proportions were wrong for eventually collecting the story into print format. The lettering in this strip is now consistent as well.