Day 12: A good tip if you want to switch up angles, whether you’re the writer or penciller, is to show a character’s effect before showing them. Usually you’ll notice this when the character is supposed to look menacing, your average creator will just throw a shadow over a victim or another person and then focus on that person’s expression in the next panel. The shock, the horror. Blah blah blah. It’s usually pretty boring. But there are other ways to do it too. For example, show a rose, or some kind of small flower growing through a crack in the sidewalk, or stone ground, followed by, say, a woman’s feet, and then an important lovely female character. Or even a melancholy Superman would work. Or hell, Darkseid would do well. You’re creativity is the master, this is just a technique.
Day 13: Don’t take a good inker for granted. The job is not just tracing. And a fair amount of the good inkers gave up on pencilling to fill the need. I know I mentioned this before indirectly, but it needs to be said, just so we’re clear. In the past I went looking for an inker for my “Apocrypha” project, and there really are a lot of amateur inkers out there who think it’s just tracing, and anyone with a pen or a computer can do it. An inker can make or break a work, so you have to be wary of who you trust to finish the pencils. And make sure the inker’s style is appropriate to the penciller’s. Kevin Nowlan and Richard Friend are both ridiculously amazing inkers, I’ve actually bought work just because Friend was the inker, but they also bring a large amount of their own style to it, and can overlap the penciller’s work. It was great with Dustin Nguyen, because he’s such a good storyteller, and then you get a characteristically Friend (or even Charest-esque) style, but it isn’t always a good mix. IMHO, a lot of Joe Sinnott’s work after Jack Kirby was all very bland, and held the industry back from breaking Kirby’s mold. Which, y’know, Kirby’s a legend, but it’s like Alan Moore said with the “Drawing Comics the Marvel Way,” John Buscema is a good artist, but we don’t need a hundred of him. Helped the iconic imagery, but damaged comics as a serious artform.
