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.