You are a barbarian!

I'm definitely on a roll now. Well, either that or doing a sequence that took place entirely in mid-air makes the backgrounds easy. Either way, here's page eighteen. I'm officially 75% done now. Not counting the alternate cover I have to do yet, of course.

As I mentioned in my last post, here's where my Iron Man analog, Steel Worker, makes his appearance. Essentially it's the joke that I did on the cover with a little more texture. For a concept I came up with in three hours or so, it's actually pretty slick, I think.

I gave Steel Worker a jet pack that, although we never see it do so, folds in to the backpack part of the armor. Just warning you in case we ever see him again.

Yeah, it may be cheap to do the Iron Man joke, but it helps tie the book into the movie and, more importantly, Free Comic Book Day. Cross-promotion and synergy, baby, that's what it's all about.

She seems to have such nicely rounded diphthongs!

Seven pages to go. I love doing Love and Capes, but there's also a part of me that loves getting it done. Seven left is a good number.

On this page, I pull a page out of my Sorkin Handbook and do a walk-and-talk with Abby and Charlotte. I've had a bunch of bookstore scenes right in a row, and I needed something to keep it visually interesting. Deco City looks at it's most Chicagoish, as they walk over the Michigan Avenue bridge. (Well, in Deco City it's probably the Jefferson Bridge, since all its streets are named after presidents.) It's a lot like those drop-in scenes they do on ER.

With this, Charlotte's arc in this issue is pretty well over. In the next page, Mark gets in costume and we actually have some superhero stuff happening, including an appearance by my Iron Man-type character.

Hey, the book's coming out for Free Comic Book Day. I'd be a fool not to tie it into the Iron Man movie.

If you don't want to tell me exactly what you're doing, when I'm asked, I don't have to lie

With this, I'm two thirds through issue #7.

I think I did an issue, maybe #3, where I never showed anyone in Abby's bookstore. After that, I've tried to make sure she has a customer or two, just so we know that her store is relatively solvent. Plus, it gives me the opportunity to draw new/background characters, and they're pretty fun to design.

After the extended Christmas scenes, I'm really putting myself through my paces with the ladies' clothes, too. I know what guys wear. I can just go through my closet and imagine the stuff without all the Jack Skellington and Superman images on it. Women are different, so I troll all sorts of websites and notice ladies' outfits whenever I'm out. Complicating my process is that Abby and Charlotte dress differently… at least if I'm doing my job right. Charlotte's clothes are a little younger and a little more flirty than Abby's.

So, I've done a bunch of scenes that take place over a series of days, and I have to keep coming up with new outfits. And, the story is taking place in winter mostly in the bookstore, so you're essentially pulling the same type of outfits.

Okay, enough complaining. This page has one of my favorite jokes in it. Sorry to taunt you so, since I won't post it, but it's not like you have to buy this one, right? Just go to your local comic shop on May 3rd.

This is your last chance... free us or die.

My brain's been stuck in second gear all day, and I'm not sure why. I think I got enough sleep and all. But it's affected Love and Capes, as for the second time, I've had to redraw a panel to make it funnier. I'm sure you can see why I changed this panel...

...to this one...

Okay, probably not.

What makes it funnier, to me, is the distance. When Mark returns to the store, it's funnier to the big joke (that you can't see, but trust me, it is HI-larious) that he travelled some distance, rather than just outside the store. So I redrew it.

Fortunately, having a library of images I can reuse made it easy. We see Mark and Abby at the El Train tracks, which is a stock background I have. And the crowd are some cut-outs that you may remember from issue #6. Waste not, want not.

I'm now officially on the back nine of the pages. For a book that I was on a tighter deadline on than normal, and one I wasn't mentally prepared to start, it seems to be moving along nicely.

Who wants to go down the creepy tunnel inside the tomb first?

If you're like me, you're breathlessly anticipating the Steve Jobs keynote from MacWorld today. Is the AirBook as rumored? Anything new for the iPhone? Will backlit keys become standard now that I've bought a laptop?

So, to help distract you from such obsessive thoughts, I present page fourteen of Love and Capes. I've only got ten pages left, seven of which are pretty well planned out, so I'm in decent shape. And, speaking of obsessive thoughts, I'm almost at that stage on the new book, too. It gets in the way of other work, but it does help get the beast done.

Here we get a Crusader/Darkblade scene, which we haven't seen since the first couple of pages. It's also the closest I've gotten to an actual action scene (not pictured here, obviously). I keep trying to shake up the traditional prowl-and-talk that I've done, and show them actually being heroes without violating the self-imposed rules of my world.

My money's on a new AirBook, the release of the iPhone SDK kit and there'll be one more thing. What, I don't know, but something cool, I hope.

Ah, But You Have Heard of Me

And with this, the Christmas part of the story is over. Yay! I think it's been okay, but it's also been plot and set-up heavy. Things should get a little easier for me with the next page, which also finally has heroes in costume again, too.

I think this may be the toughest issue yet to write. I've got about a month to finish the next eleven pages, though, so I'm in decent shape on the old schedule.

You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God.

After this, we're walking out of the woods.

Here's page twelve, halfway to the big finish. There's one more Christmas scene, and then onto other, non-holiday, matters. Yay!

This page is also one of the few that I've done that I redrew and rewrote a joke. I didn't like the ending gag and actually drew a new panel with a new closing joke. Of course, I'm not posting it here, since I don't post the punchlines. It's just that for as tightly plotted and worked out as Love and Capes often is, every once in a while I go off the rails.

Oh, and since I'm in the 50% range, Tomorrow, I'm going to post the sources of all the movie quotes I've been using as titles for these posts.

Amazonia Rules!

Trevor bought a sketch from me at WizardWorld Dallas last year, and he was nice enough to send me a scan of it so I could color and post it.

Amazonia is one of my favorite characters in Love and Capes. She's tough to write, since she has to work on multiple levels. And, all that said, she probably won't be in issue #7. (I'm still working that out.) She's tough and smart and probably still hung up on Mark, but you can't blame her too much for that.

I have to admit I didn't remember too much of the sketch until I saw it again, but now that I see it, I really do dig it. She's got that defiant "Yeah, what you gonna do about it?" pose and attitude that I think the character has in spades.

We Need To Schedule More Events Where Somebody Gives Me a Really Big Fish

I've complained recently about a lot of the pages being hard. This one, blissfully, wasn't.

I'm finally hitting the stride of pages where I know exactly what's going to happen, and the meat of the story. Well, I say "exactly" but then I realized that I had to add a page after the next one to resolve a dangling plot thread from ten pages before. Damn my tight plotting!

I'm posting panel five, which is my favorite of the sequence. The cadence of these panels is different, as neither ends with a joke so much as a "What?" beat, so I like being able to slide jokes into the body of the strip, like this one.

Incidentally, I had to design a new kitchen set for this scene. I think it turned out really well. Given the well-off-ness of Abby's parents, I tried to design a nicer, more upscale kitchen than the Spencer family kitchen. I did my online research (man, I love me teh internets) and put it some nicer brushed metal applicances among other things.

Almost halfway done now!

I Have No Responsibilities Here Whatsoever

I didn't intend to get this one done already. I finished it last night around 1:30am, an hour or so after THE Ohio State University lost another BCS Championship. I'm not a huge college football fan, but I do support the home team and I think Jim Tressel's a good coach. And football is always good to work to.

So yesterday, I had no jokes for page ten. I knew I wanted to do a bit with Quincy, Abby's brother. I've described him elsewhere as the Lucy to Mark's Charlie Brown, if Charlie Brown really could kick the football but wasn't allowed to. He's a great foil for Mark, and puts a little conflict in the Tennyson family. But he's sometimes hard to get a handle on, or figure some new way he could torment Mark, so I was in the tall grass.

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to take more walks. I like taking walks, listening to the iPod, walking around the village. Weather doesn't bother me too much, but yesterday it was in the low sixties, and you have to take advantage of a gift like that. Besides, Stephen King takes walks to solve his writing problems. It's also how he got hit by that car, but that's another story.

I walked and thought of many things. The impending OSU game and Quincy mixed in my brain soup and I came up with an idea. Quincy's always competitive with Mark, due in no small part that Quincy always wanted a brother, and the concept of their respective colleges playing in a bowl game lent itself to a few punchlines.

When I got back to the house, I started working on the strip. It was late afternoon, and I didn't think I'd finish it. I started coloring it around nine and just couldn't stop. I know when I get like that, it's better to ride the wave and just finish it. Besides, it'd leave me clear for the work that must get done today. And, with the warmer weather and all, it was almost like those summer nights I stayed up until 2:00 or later trying to finish a page. I know it's bizarre to say that staying up late to finish a page is fun, but it kinda is.

Oh, and on a completely different note, yesterday was the first convertible day of the year. A little early, but I don't look gift horses in the mouth.