Progress continues on Delilah Dirk and the Full Length Graphic Novel. I am well-ensconced in the line-art process, where I’m making some dark, clean lines on top of the squiggly blue ones. You can sort of see the the process in action above, as I’ve plucked out the strands of meaning in dark lines while the chaos of the blue roughs swirl underneath. It’s been a preeetty slow process so far, and I’m getting about 2-3 pages done per day. Usually two. Thirteen pages were completed last week, and I’ve got a lot of pages to get through, so as you can imagine, this is probably going to take a while.

Working on paper means I don’t have to turn the computer on each morning, though, which is nice. It also means I’ll update the blog less. In fact, I will post so infrequently that older posts will probably start disappearing. It’s negative posting. ZOOP.

Update. Work continues steadily on Delilah Dirk: I will finish the roughs for the last chapter tomorrow. Then it’s time to print ‘em out and clean up the artwork. I’m going to be trying a method that seems to be working for our friend Kazu. You start with small thumbnails (four pages per 8.5×11″ sheet), scan ‘em in, blow ‘em up, and clean up over that. My thumbs aren’t as clean as Kazu’s, so I’ve been tidying them up in Photoshop so that they’re legible to strangers (to get a better idea early on of how the book will read). I’ll probably do a writeup on the process later on, assuming it doesn’t completely fail for me.

Internet Fiddling. I have a Livejournal account and now a Posterous account. This post should be on Livejournal thanks to Posterous’s autoposting features. Theoretically, I email posterous, it posts the post there and simultaneously posts it to my Livejournal and my Twitter feed. Neat concept – I like the “connected-ness” of Posterous, and the autoposting to Livejournal means I don’t have to abandon one format to embrace another. It’s like if Microsoft had included email forwarding in Hotmail, I wouldn’t have to go back every now and then to make sure no one’s trying to reach me through an address I haven’t used in years since embracing Gmail.

Google is Terrifying. Does anyone else worry about the ubiquity of Google? I just installed Google Analytics on my site. I use Gmail (and so technically, it’s scanning all my communication as it looks for words to base the advertising off). I use a bunch of other Google stuff. They own Youtube. I’m sure there are other, more well-informed explorations of this issue, but what if Google went evil one day? I’m a bit scared.

Flickr. At least the internet’s favorite image host is owned by Yahoo. Sure, Google has Picasa, but it feels like Flickr has more people under its umbrella. Anyway, I filled out an account. You can check it out if you like, there’s some drawings and stuff there. Frustrating that I had to sign up for some stupid Yahoo ID to use it. Since it remembers who I am, I’ll only very rarely have to remember that stupid ID to log in, which means that I’ll forget it every effing time.

I should be wasting less time on the internet, more time making comics.

Perhaps you need some more adventure in your life. Perhaps you’ve been wondering what I’ve been doing for the last few months. While the former is probably more likely, I’m happy to present some news which will satisfy both options.

There will be a Delilah Dirk graphic novel. I’ve been referring to it as “The Oriental Lieutenant”, which is a title that may or may not stick. On the one hand, from a 19th century Western perspective, “The Orient” included Turkey. On the other hand, current popular understanding makes “The Orient” out to be China, Thailand, etc. On the mystical and unexpected third hand, it could stand to be a more exciting title. So, for the time being, it will be Book One until I come up with something better.

“That implies that there will be more than one book, ” I hear you scream through the Inter-Nets. Your screams ring true! I intend to make a few DD graphic novels. Last October, I spent the month writing story treatments for a handful of different projects, two of which were Delilah Dirk stories. Since then I have roughed out the first book, as in the image above. That’s a montage of all the pages of rough roughs for Book One. Yesterday I finished cleaning them up into working roughs, from which I’ll complete the clean artwork.

Maybe you think that seems like a long time to rough out a book. You’d be wrong if you didn’t know that about a third of the book is completed material. Book One will include Delilah Dirk and the Treasure of Constantinople as Chapter One, and Delilah Dirk and the Aqueduct as Chapter Three. Those are respectively the single-issue story I published through Lulu.com and my DD Flight story. There will be a new chapter between them and a new chapter after Aqueduct. If you are mathematically inclined, you will notice the incongruity between adding two chapters to a total of four and having completed one third of the book already. Well, the new chapters are longer!

Next steps! I had roughed out two versions of Chapter 4, and while tightening the first version (which I thought was better), I’ve realized that the second is, in fact, the better one. So I’ll be tightening that. After that, I can move on to linework. Meanwhile, I get to figure out how to get this thing published. Exciting times! More news as it happens!

I’m cleaning up* my rough thumbnails using Photoshop, and I’ve been wondering why the later pages have been taking longer to tighten than the earlier pages. Now I know – I had unintentionally been making things more complex. I guess it’s not a bad thing?

Also, if anyone knows why my greyscale images are about three shades darker when I export them from Photoshop versus when I’m working on them in Photoshop, I’d love to know. Tony dot Cliff at gmail dot com.

*It’s a relative term.

I got a nice email today complaining about the spastic frequency between postings on this blog. So here’s a new one, the first for a few months.

The problem is that the things I seem to end up working on are usually NDAed so I can’t share them until much later, or – like the example above – they spend a long time in a really unpresentable state. Like, I spent October working on four different writing projects. Then, in November, I did both NaNoWriMo and the rough story work for the project above. Not sure how to turn a few hundred pages’ worth of drawing into something worth looking at. Oh wait, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.

Anyway, if you’re up for some rough drawings and comic panels without dialogue, there’s gonna be a lot of those over the next few weeks.