Sails of Blood

CamaZotz is out. Ian made a good point about him being distracting. After re-reading the script, I agree with him. Now I have to figure out if I should get rid of the Royal Marines as well.
The ending and the macguffin are going to be the most problematic.
133 pages!

Ian got back to me with some really good comments on the first draft. I'm going to start re-writing this week and will definitely work on some of the areas that he saw were weak.

with the first draft.

I've sent it out for critiques and will start reading it and rewriting it this evening. It'll be the first time that I've read it in its entirity. I'm interested in seeing if the pacing works. And I think that I've got at least one continuity error. But that's what Bat Demons are good for. Cleaning continuity errors.

Woo Woo!

Notice the Mayan glyphs on page 4! I think they look pretty cool. The downside is that I'm gonna have to do even more research to make them even remotely sensical. However, on the up side, I did run across the hieroglyph for scarred penis. Gonna have to work that into the script, fer shure. The two in the word ballon are decapitate/spill blood and blood. Sails of Blood: The educational vampire pirate comic book!

The first two pages that Ian did don't have any text, so I'm not including them. These are pages 3 and 4.



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And it was a good writing week. Advanced the plot a bit, figured out why van Ritter doesn't use the Tablet to heal Marielle. The end is getting closer and closer.

one of the things i like about writing, one of the things that makes me look forward to writing is that i get to find out what happens. usually the story goes in directions that i didn't expect. i like that.

from a recent writing session: "this is no dainty bloodletting. chunks of meat fly through the air."

If anyone's interested, I got some photos of Comic Con in a small post on enblog. Check it out if you wish.

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Well, I'll start out by posting some images for you.


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Now some recap on what I learned:

Although it really sucked that Jason couldn't make it out, that might have been for the best, seeing as writers don't really get too much exposure at conventions from what I've learned. It's just tough to see a single page of script and tell right away if the guy has his chops or not. Imagine getting literally thousands of submissions, and you can figure out why writing submissions aren't too well recieved over a single weekend.

Artists don't necessarily have any easier a time getting discovered though. A lot of it is presentation, and I found myself very inadequately prepared to show my stuff to editors after I attended a panel on networking. But that's all for the best - next time I'll come back looking like a seasoned pro (or something), with fully inked and finished pages and plenty of business cards and sample packets.

I was lucky enough to come across one of the artists I really admire, Angel Medina, who did an amazing job with Sam and Twitch, and currently works on Spawn. He gave me a very honest critique that I think left me pretty satisfied with what I need to do next comic wise. Pretty much what he told me was that I have the technical skills down, it's just a matter of further defining a personal style and making it look sharp.

I was still getting a lot of my friends telling me to talk to other people and get even more opinions, but between seeing what else was being shown and talking to Angel, I felt that it was better for me to just enjoy the rest of the con without waiting in lines to hear that I'm not ready yet.

So that's the fate of Sails of Blood so far - "to be continued". Not the worst fate, but at least we're even closer to getting this graphic novel done.

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Well, Marielle got the shit kicked out of her last night. Brutal fight sequence. Good thing that she's a zombie, or she probably wouldn't have survived.

Hey Y'all,

I had a very tiring weekend, but I do plan to give an update for you guys. Look for it soon.

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Good writing session last night. A couple of pages of fight sequence. Characters are starting to die. Ok so far for a first pass, but I am a little concerned that it might be going to fast, possibly too anti-climatic. I'll see once I get the entire thing done.

Had a good IM conversation with Ian last night. He's really going to town on the ship references that I sent him and he wanted some clarification on the opening scene. I had to do fancy footwork to figure out what I meant to happen vs. how sailing ships actually work. With the level of detail that Ian's bringing to the art, this graphic novel is going to rock so hard, it's going to be ridiculous.

Here's a bit I wrote last week, trying to figure out what happens next. Basically a glimpse into my stream of consciousness.
What’s Marielle’s motivation here? Does she have a feeling of difference between her (and by extension, van Ritter) and people who are living? Does she see a predator/prey relationship? Kinda. But only kinda. She’s been down too long as a slave to take any sort of pleasure in opressing people. But at the same time she glories in her zombie abilities. And she sees nothing wrong in her hunger and satisfying it. And she saw the Mayans as deserting. And that was a blow to her/van Ritter’s authority. And that’s what put her over the edge. And that’s not something she’ll apologize for either. She takes her authority very seriously. That’s a point of friction between her and van Ritter. She sometimes feels that he’s too soft. That’s probably something she subconsciously picked up as a slave, that a firm hand and immediate obedience are needed for success.