Book Three Is Not Set In Krakow

Hey there, deep into Book Three which is the one that surprised me most of all when I chose

to do it way back in May, this needs some explanation.

Homeless G-Men was the comic that I started, it was the first, there were some character concepts in place and two of the stories were kind of thought out in my head, as I worked on the book I was deciding if I wanted to commit all of my time to just doing issues of the HG's or maybe I should do two comics instead and I could bounce back and forth on them

So I wrote a list of six kinds of comic that I was interested in doing (I'll talk about this in another post)   of the six, Battle Rally was the most surprising to me, considering all the drawing that would be involved I could have skipped it - but I had an idea.

If you know me, you know I don't get bored I'm always doing something one of those things is build models out of wooden kits, we have a whole basement full of stuff like this crazy car here.

I decided it was time to put the vehicles into play and needed a concept that 1) I wanted to do more than one issue of and 2) would allow me to use a wide variety of vehicles

and that's how the initial idea for Battle Rally came.

The second part was the most important for me to commit the time to the book, what was it about beyond vehicle racing? I surprised myself at how quickly I got to the answer, the issues in Battle Rally are about corporations interfering in sport (Rollerball) vehicular combat (like Death Race) but it's a character piece first and it's the story of two women who are in competition for the same job.

This interested me, if I hadn't gotten to the two lead characters and what they were about I would have never committed to the commit.

I hate drawing vehicles, every artist does but this book is going to help me get over that and I can't believe just how much I enjoyed working on this one.

This may be the last comic before the end of 2014, I have a few jobs coming up that I'll need to commit my time to, two of them are comic jobs so I'll still be posting here at least twice weekly.

Hang On People of Buffalo!

A.Shay Hahn

madcraftshoppe@live.com

 

Homeless G-Men Drawings and Plotting

Here's an updated shot of what is still available for sale at the Press Club 850 Dundas West, Toronto head on over for a tasty pint and some live music. All drawings are $25.00 each and the proceeds go to the printing of the Homeless G-Men graphic novel.

I've finished plotting the first story, "Jawbonin" in rough and just have a couple of weak story points that I want to clear up before I push ahead with more pages, the story is alot of fun, it's a revenge story filtered through Good Fellas and Deep Blue Sea, I think you'll enjoy.

You can buy direct from the bartenders at the Press Club, drawings are framed and $25.00 each

cheers,

A.Shay Hahn

madcraftshoppe@live.com



Workloads and Wise Decisions

 

Really happy that I chose to go back to the standard comic format, I started blocking in the first Homeless G-Men story "Jawbonin" and have four roughed in pages today that I'm very happy with. I like the concept for the story, the humour and how each page intros the characters in the story. This first one will be the learning curve, there is some improvisation involved with this one as I didn't write a script but I know the story and just need to block it in correctly, the total for the whole thing may only be 16pages, but it will be a fun run full of mobsters, mad scientists and aquatic fisticuffs.

The Homeless G-Men is starting to feel a lot like Eric Powell's series, "the Goon" of which I am a fan but I know the arc of the characters is very different, more on that later.

Ordered some sample books from Print Ninja so I'll be able to get a handle on the size I want for the book, I will admit I'm not great with numbers so getting some of their books will really help me nail down how many stories I want to tell in the first book.

Happy Earth day, do something nice for the planet

A.Shay Hahn

madcraftshoppe@live.com

 



Squirlycorn, the comic

It all began about a week ago some friends and I were talking on fb, a friend said that she had something galloping around in her ceiling, I joked that perhaps she had infestation of Shetland ponies after a few more folks chimed in that maybe the culprit was a unicorn. By the end of the conversation it was deduced that it was probably a squirrel but by then I had already drawn the first image. A squirrel dressed as a unicorn, my friend asked to buy the drawing but I decided to keep it, something about the picture just made sense to me.

I started to think that maybe this cute squirrel needed a comic book created for him, I decided to head to Guerilla Printing and figure out how much it would cost to self publish a comic. It turns out the price wasn't as prohibitive as I thought it would be so on the way home on the TTC I started to write the origin story of a hero that I would call, "Squirlycon".

It's been a couple of days and I can't figure out anything else to call this guy except Squirlycorn, my wife kept asking, "Are you sure you can't come up with a better name?" and try as I might I can't so here for the world to see is my creation, Squirlycorn.

To follow the story of his creation you'll have to head over to the Smudges and Lines blog, see links right side of page.

A.Shay Hahn

madcraftshoppe@live.com

JFK and The Robot With No Eyes

The next two panels are a medium shot of each character, the first cat in the suit reminds me of JFK, the second character I decided would have no eyes - only because of how the figure looks in the first panel.

I'm using Staedtler pigment liners for the black work, 0.5, 0.7, 0.8 and a skinny 005 Prismacolour Premier for the finer lines. The colours are a mix of everything from Copics to Crayolas.

The content of the story isn't important to me, this could be the first page or the tenth page of the story, it doesn't matter, it's just about fitting figures into panels and having them interact.

I will post character sketches and other sketches at this blog but my primary goal is to have things happening inside comic panels, trying different angles and styles until I develop a way of working that I enjoy.

A.Shay Hahn

madcraftshoppe@live.com