And The Crowd Goes Wild

My computer is back home and running quite smoothly. Big thanks to the Apple Store for getting it done on Sunday so that I would have it to start my week.

In fact, I got it back in time to finish page fifteen, which is the hardest page I've drawn so far. My stupid writer decided to set a scene at a baseball game. This means drawing crowds and rows of seats, and so on. For this page, I actually designed a series of heads and bodies of people to use in sitting crowd scenes. I'm sure I'll have to draw another crowd of people sitting in rows sometime in the run of the book, so I've got them on file. I also had to design logos for the Deco City Architects and the Chronopolis Dragons, as well as a logo for the stadium itself.

Well, for that, I took another logo I designed for RAP Promotions, the promoting arm of friend Roger Price, purveyor of my favorite convention on the whole darn planet, Mid-Ohio-Con, and used that as the corporate sponsor of the park. Hey, it's no more awkward than "Quicken Loans Arena."

This page also features two rather unique jokes. The first is one of the few times I borrowed something so obviously from my own life. My experiences shape the book, obviously, but there's never been a point where Abby acted exactly like some girl I dated. But, Joanne Spencer is loosely templated on my mother, who's a Steelers fan, so you might be able to guess what happens.

The second joke required a lot of clever staging (at least, I thought it was clever) and a little bit of trust, too. I could have spoon-fed the reader the joke, but I'm hoping that they'll make the connection. And it was a hard connection to draw.

All right, I'll be heading to NYC for the Licensing Show next week, so I have a lot to do and not a lot of time. Back to my now much-cleaner studio and to work…!