The Collected PRINT Edition of the first 60 screens of The Blind Eye will be available for order beginning Nov. 10! We’re hoping to have a pre-order available on the site before then. Keep an eye here! It’s a 64-page collection, complete with bonus art from Morning Glories artist Joe Eisma, a Guttersnipe strip never printed outside of a single store and creator bios! Check out the cover and set aside $9.99 to own YOUR copy!
The Blind Eye: Hindsight Collection Cover
“Finish.” One of the most consistently voiced words of advice I’ve heard from writing and comics professionals, and Amanda and I are SO close to actually FINISHING this inaugural chapter of The Blind Eye. Only fourteen screens to go – it’s hard to believe. Despite the delays in launching this website…despite FINISHING multiple concurrent projects (each of which I’ll update for you below)…despite being absolutely consumed with campaigning for votes for Clown Town in Small Press Idol 2010, Chapter One of The Blind Eye WILL be FINISHED, one fresh screen per week, in mid-November! And we think you’re going to love the high-tension, full-throttle end sequence we’ve got in store. Look for a print collected edition of these 60 screens early in 2011. Believe it. Oh, and let me clue you in on what to expect on the website between chapters – Amy Rachels, our esteemed assistant colorist, is providing full art and colors on a five-screen story featuring Hindsight! This is a true departure from what has gone before, but I’ve seen the completed line art for much of the story…it’s haunting and gorgeous and will give you an entirely different perspective on our resident monster.
Reading With Pictures Anthology Vol. 1
Let me update you on all these projects that have kept us occupied these past months. The news that we’re most excited about right now is the impending release of the Reading With Pictures Anthology Vol. 1 NEXT WEEK! It’ll be distributed to direct market comic shops via Diamond Comics Distributors on August 18, with preorder fulfillment soon after for those who pre-ordered via Kickstarter. To those who preordered this book based on our inclusion, no amount of thanks is sufficient to express our appreciation for your faith in our work at that early stage in our efforts. I’ve seen a pdf copy of the entire book, and let me assure you, this is an impressive overall product, chock full of stories and art suitable for all ages. You’re going to love it. We are extremely proud to be included, and, honestly, both of us keep going through the pdf version, checking to be sure that our work is actually there, just before a story by the mastermind of the project, Josh Elder, and two stories before another by Fred Van Lente, writer of multiple titles at Marvel. Crazy. A dream realized, and the best part is the recognition that what we created belongs amongst those lofty creators. It is good enough.
We’ve taken on a number of other projects, too. I’m co-writing a new web comic, The Apocalypse Boyz, a companion strip to a action-comedy web video series about the zombie apocalypse that will be viewable, hopefully within the next couple of weeks, at: http://www.apocboyz.com! My writing partner is Juan Carlos Millan, a writer on the video series, and the artist is Nathan Smith, a local and a friend who is going to blow you away with his work! I’ll make a formal announcement when it goes live.
Apocalypse Boyz Preview Art by Nathan Smith
Amanda and I were invited to contribute a two-page story for The Gathering Anthology Vol. 2, a collection of stories with themes of hope produced by denizens of the Bendis message boards, and we did – a tale of Great White, easily the most popular character in The Blind Eye. More news on that as we learn more about release dates, etc. Our piece turned out beautifully…we were amazed at how noir-cool Undertown looked in grayscale black and white! Also, Amanda is contributing cover art to a comic companion for a film, Showmen’z Unrest, being produced by some new friends in Michigan.
Lastly, I’m putting together an anthology comic project that I won’t discuss in detail at the moment, other than the general format. This venture will feature loosely interconnected short stories of ten or twelve pages in length to be published IN PRINT, initially in sets of three stories, for what I hope will be quarterly 32-page books with an annual collection of twelve stories in a 128-page trade paperback! There is a definite common thematic thread running through these stories that I think will hit home with genre fans of any age. Amanda is already one-third of the way through the art on the first of these stories, and I’m collaborating with our friend, Vic Moya (inker of Cohort from Small Press Idol 2010) on another. I have offered the third story of the first issue to another artist and will have confirmation in just a few weeks (I hope…). Right now, I’m planning an April 2011 release date. I’ll keep you updated! Very excited about this one! Any aspiring artists looking to collaborate, hit me up with some samples of your sequentials – I have stories that need drawing!
Well, that should bring everyone up to speed on our busy schedule. With the conclusion of Children of Cassiopeia, I’ll be blogging each Thursday, so watch this space! We have lofty goals for the next year, and we’re working hard NOW, in advance, to make sure those goals are met! We’ll be at Baltimore Comic Con on August 28-29 promoting ALL of our various projects, so find us in the program (listed as “The Blind Eye” in Artists’ Alley) and come visit, commission a sketch by Amanda and pick up a copy of the Reading With Pictures Anthology Vol. 1 and some trading cards and stickers from The Blind Eye!
Okay, I know the burning question (at least one of them…) for those you that have been reading The Blind Eye: What’s the deal with eyes? Hindsight eats’em. The Blind Eye dusts’em. Guttersnipe shoots’em. And Amanda draws the hell out of’em! Eyes ARE at the heart of our story; it’s true. To avoid giving away major story elements that I want you to experience organically as our gruesome little tale unfolds, I have to be pretty limited in what I discuss about the role of eyes. However, let me get into the subject to the extent that eyes have impacted the plot thus far.
Hindsight Loves Eyes!
Rest assured that Hindsight does not simply take and consume the eyes of his victims as random organs, nor were eyes chosen as the target of so many by your humble writer just to make you cringe. For the vast majority of us, eyesight is how we primarily experience our world. I venture to guess that, put to a forced choice, almost every one of us would forfeit EACH of our other senses if allowed to just keep our vision. Now that’s value.
Headliner Loses an Eye!
Vision gives us our most poignant memories – good, bad and in-between. It’s these lingering internal images that begin on our retinas and then travel with us throughout the rest of our lives. The blurry lights and reflected surfaces of Christmas morning. That perfect girl on the lunch wave that no doubt looked a lot prettier than she acted. Your blood-streaked Mom trapped beneath a heaving, steaming wreck of a truck. The once-cherished, now-resented beauty of an ex-wife on a teenage wedding day. These emotion-stained photonic data-turned-dendritic structures set the foundation for so much of what we do – or can’t do – and who we are. Most we cherish. Many we just want to erase a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (if you don’t know this movie, SEE IT NOW).
The Blind Eye's Blinding Dust!
It’s the simple importance of the eye in our lives that led me to make the little sensor receptor such a critical device in The Blind Eye. When Hindsight sucks down Garbage Man Johnson’s eyeball like a pickled egg in some dirt road dive, know that it’s more than aqueous humor with a floating lens that he’s ingesting. When Guttersnipe pops a cap into a socket that had a juicy little orb in it a second ago, she was initially aiming to destroy more than just the tissue. And when The Blind Eye casts his blinding dust into the lids of a target, he has a rationale beyond combat advantage (although that’s not a bad reason, either…). Eyes have surplus value. They represent something more. As for Amanda’s motivation for drawing all of the ocular carnage I’ve laid out for her…well…that’s just exposure therapy. My psychology degrees at work…
The characters featured in The Blind Eye were developed based on generic archetypes that coalesced within the structure of the original story idea. Clearly, I needed something more specific, more…integrated… than “noble-but-disillusioned-former-partner-of-The-Blind-Eye-who-now-partners-with-The-Blind-Eye’s-ex.” Because The Blind Eye is a story about masked vigilantes, a certain iconography must be respected. Thus, I had to come up with a costume, a codename and abilities that qualified “disillusioned-former-partner” as a legitimate hero.
Street Saint - Early Headshots
Where to start? Well, I consider the basics for what I need this character to do on a practical level, since I know his role in the overall story. The masks in The Blind Eye are decidedly street level, so no super powers for “disillusioned.” And I figure he copes with his disillusionment by taking it out on the bad guys and with weapons…violently. Now, here’s where that noble part comes into play. Let’s see: weapons + noble = knight. Sword! Lots of those hanging around a flood-devastated urban wasteland, eh? Err…no. I need a congruent analogue. Baseball bat! Oh yeah, and I can solidify the urban knight aesthetic with a shield. Analogue, please? RIOT shield! Lovin’ it.
Street Saint - Working Concept
Okay, so “disillusioned” has his baseball bat and riot shield, and I’m very happy with those accoutrements. They just have to mesh with whatever costume theme I conjure up. Another bastardized idea from the round table? Nah. Let’s go with Knights Templar! Our guy is disillusioned, remember? He’s looking to regain faith in something, and faith, by definition, constitutes belief in some other power. “Disillusioned” wants to become “enlightened.” He’s on a mission from God, the Christian one given Port Typhon’s location deep within the American Bible Belt. How to represent that symbolically on the costume? Priest collar. Massive gold cross to make Mr. T jealous. Rosary beads around the bat handle. Throw in a touch of street style with a black skull cap and wicked shades and just a dash of medieval knight with a tabard, and “disillusioned” stands before me with all but a name.
That one is tougher to explain. It just came to me, and quickly. Street Saint. It covers both sides of his iconography. It’s alliterative. It just works. You’ll meet Street Saint and his partner for the first time in Screen 23. They’re major players in the story of The Blind Eye, and I think they’ll grow on you quickly, just as they have on Amanda and I.
Amanda, Caesar and I are hard at work on Clown Town pages, since the 12-page story is GUARANTEED to see print, having reached Round 2! Right now, it’s the 4-page sequence required for Round 3 that we’re focused on. Hey, prepare for the best case, right? We’re working the votes, exhausting all avenues to make this happen! Unfortunately, there’s not much we can reveal about these (we think) gorgeous pages on which we’re slaving away, so I’m gonna share with you our process for putting together the rough covers that we submitted for Round 1, including the updated version we posted on our Round 1 thread!
After the story concept for Clown Town began congealing in my brain (oh, picture that…), Amanda and I began tossing around ideas for the cover, since it was ALL we needed for Round 1 besides the pitch. We learned about Small Press Idol 2010 somewhat near the opening submission date, so time was a bit of an issue. I was still working out the abilities and gimmicks of each of the clowns to appear in the story, but I already knew there would be one on telescoping stilts. Thus, Stilts was born, and his seminal image was seen from a perspective near the ground peering up at him towering above and clutching a struggling, inverted victim by the leg. In my original vision, Stilts tipped his own hat in a congenial taunt to the reader that was dismissive of his captive’s panic as the latter was apparently being lowered onto the spiked apex of a mini-umbrella wielded by a much smaller clown below.
Over a cool weekend not far from the Gulf of Mexico, we toyed with a few thumbnail sketches but could never get the angles and positioning quite to our satisfaction. So, we did the natural thing: we went for a few rounds of pool at the local bowling alley – our version of “roughing it” – it was like visiting a trailer park without all the danger of a meth lab explosion! After a rousing bout of ::koff::domination::koff:: by yours truly, the fog seemed to lift, and we soon found our way to a corner of the busiest Starbucks in southern Alabama. The image that we submitted as the rough cover was conceived during that hot chocolate and humongoid cinnamon roll indulgence. Oddly, Amanda draws nearly everything of any sort on her Cintiq, but this piece came together so well, and after so many efforts, on paper that I think we were happy just to rely on the scanner. Amanda digitally inked portions of that rough sketch, and we went with it when we submitted for Round 1.
Unfortunately, what we interpreted as “rough” for the cover submission was clearly TOO rough based on the feedback received during Round 1. Fortunately, the SPI Judges saw Amanda’s talent clearly even through the unfinished piece they had to go by (and despite my unwieldy pitch) and dished out unanimous Yes votes to move us on to Round 2! RELIEF! A chance to improve upon an already-evaluated work is truly rare, but we got just that with the opportunity to re-work the rough cover (and the pitch, but that’s another blog…).
Kevin - Modeled Pose for Clown Town Rough Cover
So, the first decision was to preserve what worked and to ditch what didn’t. What didn’t was the small clown and his umbrella. I wanted Stilts’ victim to be in some imminent danger other than just dangling by his leg from the grip of a tall clown (WHACKY!). However, removing the sharp umbrella consequently removed that element of danger. Amanda swiftly – and a little disturbingly – conjured up the notion of having the hat present the needed danger by showing it eager to consume the victim as Stilts waved it before him. A carnivorous hat! Why didn’t I think of that? (pssst…it’s because I’m not off my friggin’ rocker like Amanda…) Thus, the focus of the image tightened to the leering, gesturing clown and his tongue-wagging chapeau contrasted with the flailing, fearful victim who ended up remaining fairly generic because, at the time, the actual character he represents was not fully designed
In the process, the angle at which Stilts and victim were viewed changed, and Amanda asked me to model the pose we’d discussed for Stilts in order to solidify it. An empty wrapping paper tube become the victim’s leg, and my old Colts hat (BOOOOO, Saints!) became the flesh-hungry top hat (if only it were munching on Drew Brees…grrrr….). Amanda spent her fair share of hours locking down the second rough cover with the new parameters, and it is a thing of horrific beauty, at least to us evil clown lovers. Wait’ll you see it with Stitches updated to fully reflect his final design as seen in this thread and the actual victim drawn in, all in full, glorious color beneath our logo! All you have to do is vote us into Round 4! Let’s make it happen!
To vote, visit: http://www.smallpressidol.com/forum/topicview/misc/825.htm
Let’s discuss the setting of The Blind Eye. Amanda and I are both lifelong Alabamians of the Gulf Coast variety, so we’ve been through more than our share of hurricanes…but nothing like Katrina. Sure, we’d been through the uprooted trees and missing shingles and even weeks without electricity. None of that compares to what happened just west of us on August 29, 2005. New Orleans is a 2-hour drive from our homes near Mobile, so it’s a frequent weekend getaway, as is Mississippi’s Casino Coast. To see those familiar areas and their associated landmarks devastated and transformed the way they were by that storm, well, it was unforgettable…life-altering in fact.
Canal Street in New Orleans Post-Katrina
I weathered Katrina alone in my then home west of Mobile and was never in real danger, thankfully. However, the sheer fury of the winds was such that I watched the siding and roofing stripped from my house and those of my neighbors. For those who’ve never been through an actual hurricane, the damnable thing of it is that it lasts for hours and hours as it crawls slowly over land, meaning the winds and rain just keep belting out the damage without relenting. And when it gets dark and the storm is still blasting away, one’s imagination takes over in terms of the impending danger. Most of my nightmares today are still set in that house on that night in that hellish storm. And I didn’t have any storm surge or flooding of any sort to deal with.
As I began to formulate the foundation of the story for The Blind Eye, the autobiographical (yes, it’s true…) nature of the characters’ motivations just naturally led me to see them in an environment devastated by a hurricane – the setting of my own nightmares. Port Typhon is the New Orleans of the weeks just after Katrina, except no pumps or levees were EVER repaired, and the government just ultimately wrote off the entire place. Once I’d committed to this type of environment for the characters, the obvious story elements that the city itself would offer became apparent. It shaped the character designs, especially those of Great White and the Garbage Men that he hunts, and it dictated the abilities they would need to survive in a submerged city….
The Undertown District of Port Typhon in The Blind Eye
It then occurred to me that the submerged portion of the city, when repopulated, would invite wholly different subsets of denizens than those who fled. The death-soaked waters in the streets would effectively become moats hiding monsters and protecting tyrants in their damaged skyscraper castles. All sorts of criminal ilk would be drawn to such a place – foreign drug cartels, terrorists domestic and international, etc. And those few citizens blindly loyal to their homes, they would stay and adapt, but they would need protection from the evil interlopers, protection that would only come from a few bold enough to take on the powers-that-would-be. And that’s where the masked crimefighters of The Blind Eye come in – you’ll meet them all in the coming weeks, so I won’t spoil anything more here.
I hope that Port Typhon and, in particular, Undertown become characters with nearly the feeling of the human players themselves. The submerged and devastated city is an essential part of the cast which simultaneously both expands and limits the choices of its inhabitants because of its distinctiveness. Our heroes and villains can leap from higher windows, can disappear beneath the fluid streets, must contend with gators during a routine patrol. It’s a setting rife with opportunities for danger and heroics and storytelling. Rack up the frequent flyer miles as you visit.
When I made the decision to set The Blind Eye in a flooded urban environment, I knew I wanted an aquatic character to feature in the story – an underwater protagonist to patrol the dark depths of Port Typhon. As I developed the backstory for this character, his persona, both in and out of costume, took on attributes of philanthropy and ambitious optimism. Without giving away story elements that I want you to experience within the context and flow of the comic itself, suffice it to say that the driving motivation for this character became hope – for himself, his allies and loved ones, and for his city. It was a short reach from there to produce the name Great White. Great. White. Hope. Get it?
Good.
So, Great White was born. We had a name. We had a personality and a set of motivations. Hell, by that time, I’d even established his relationships with the other characters (stay tuned for those revelations…). In terms of actual time, we’re talking about May and June of 2009 here. What we didn’t yet have was a look. I knew I wanted him to be sleek, streamlined and aquadynamic. I just fabricated that word…go with it. The process of actually creating that look was not as simple as just telling Amanda what I wanted and having it appear on the page, however. We’d created together long enough by that point that most images could go from my brain to her pencil with some measure of liquidity. Great White, though…he was a special case.
A brainstorming session to throw down concepts for him produced a…ahem….variety of different looks. Basically, we were going for a sleek, almost ninja-style bodysuit adapted for underwater movement, all beneath a shark-themed helmet. There were – obvious – difficulties securing the right shape of the mask/helmet and dealing with the mouth. Even I sketched a potential shape for the mask in an effort to spit out the elusive picture of the character that was doing backstrokes in my brain. It looked like a dolphin in one of those Hitchcock silhouettes! Believe it or not, though, that was one of two things that got us moving in the right direction.
The other factor was the epiphany I had for positioning the teeth. I can’t tell you what gave me the idea, other than that I did not want Great White to have a mouth on the helmet – I decided he should have a solid facemask, again somewhat ninja-like, but we did want to include the teeth in the design. So, I proposed arranging the upper teeth beneath the chin of the mask and placing the lower mandible and its larger teeth on his chest plate. Amanda completely got what I was talking about, and the resulting effect created a menacing look that included the illusion of a mouth in motion with variable positioning and movement of the character’s head in relation to his torso. Beautiful. Wicked. Spot-on. We’re happy with each of our designs, but none has gotten more widespread praise than Great White. Scan through the gallery below – it’s basically a timeline of concepts and finished art for Great White, and the images and associated captions tell the tale, and let us know what you think!
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