Return to Home                                                                      Click on a year to review that archive

This is a weblog of one person's multi-year quest to write, draw, and publish a graphic novel. This is my story: my trials, tribulations, successes and failures. -- Robert Stradley, Weekend Artist

January 2015.

Happy New Year everyone. I learned a valuable lesson this Christmas season. When doing holiday comics, one should make sure that they are done ahead of time to properly schedule them. I waited until December to draw them and load them, so they drooped over into January. To prevent this from happening again, I started Valentines Day comics immediately after Christmas. I intend to have at least one each for Easter, 4th of July, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, before heading into Xmas 2016. I now begin to understand the comments from book editors who would write things like: "I am sitting here sunning by the pool, sipping a Mint Julip, and writing my Xmas book greetings to You the Readers."

I also made some new Index pages to indicate when we were diverging from the storyline to celebrate a holiday, and made a new section [300's] to house them.

I am beginning to build up enough of a library of standard drawings of Priscilla, Magniloquence, Aimée, and Ampére so that I can make electronic modifications rather than re-draw, re-ink, scan, and color them each time. Simply changing expressions, arm positions, or head positions is a real time saver. [Editor's note - see June below for clarification.]

February

Restarted drawing main storyline pp 51-56, completing Sleazy's bar sequence and the Husbands R Us Club. I have now completed drawing and coloring Volume 1 Number 2.

Drew and colored Easter Parade. As I was drawing the backgrounds, I realized that I still hadn't done a map of the downtown, yet I had drawn many backgrounds. So now, at least on paper, I have a list of all the downtown stores I have talked about or shown, and their approximate locations. I now know where OSFA [One Size Fits All} School is and where Gazebo Park is. After I draw it up, I will scan and share the map of Wonder Falls.

Changed the Last button to jump to the Last page of Volume 1 rather than the last page of each individual comic.

March

Started drawing and coloring Volume 1 Number 3 wherein Magniloquence experiences the 13 Dates from Heck. It is slow going, but I am having the most amazing amount of fun generating new and unusual supers for the sole purpose of torturing Magniloquence. Until now, I never really understood the comment from another writer in her forward when she would say "I enjoyed torturing my heroine, I hope you will too." But as we all know, "true love conquers most" so be assured that Magniloquence will meet her future husband by the end of this issue.

April

Easter came and went, so according to the schedule, I had to work on the next holiday -- July 4th. This holiday will be the swimsuit issue, filled with 50's style pinups. Why 1950's? The 50's were the last time strong curvy women were in vogue. In the 60's Carnaby Street and Twiggy started the underfed waif look that still dominates today. Now strong and curvy women are called Plus Size and marginalized in fashion. Also, although we have Internet and Ipods, the look and feel of many small Texas towns is still 1950's -- the architecture, the entertainment, the attitudes, the churches, and the schools.

Continued working with the 13 Dates from Heck, completing the Pricilla's Pearls of Common Courtesy panels intermingled among the dates. Some were re-written to better fit the storyline. Then I had to re-order the 13 Dates and tune some dialog. All of which is part of that Editing Mode Thang -- important to the end product, but frustrating for the artistic side of me who wants to "just get on with drawing it.".

May

The 13 Dates from Heck are eating my lunch. The quality of the artwork is varying all over the place from comic normal [3 x 3 inch with simple lines and colors] to poster detailed [11 x 17 and complex shades and coloring]. I needed some poster stuff anyway, but after all that work, when it gets shrunk down to 3 x 3 most of the detail gets lost. I seem to be mired in an internal war between "do the best you can" fighting against the "Are you crazy? This is a cartoon. Get on with it!" I imagine my style will settle down sometime after I get done with all these new peripheral characters.

I just drew my first romantic scenes, a kissing scene with Magniloquence on a Date from Heck and another kissing scene with Aimée and Six Shooter. When I sat back and looked at them, they were almost the same -- similar angles and positions. Sigh, I guess I need to take out some time to work on my romantic scenes. There is always something new to be learned.

June

I rescind my comment from January on electronic editing. For me, it only works if simple expression changes are needed. It actually takes me longer to make an electronic edit of shape or action than to print out and re-draw, ink, and color a different picture. If they ever make a light table with a built-in digital pad then I would be set. For the nonce, I do it the old fashioned way.

July

Finished the 13 Dates from Heck and I am now working on the final panels of Number 3 wherein Priscilla meets her future husband, Janusc. For reasons unknown to me at this time, I seem to be adding extra detail to Priscilla and Jan's expressions; they are not quite as cartoony as they were originally.

My wonderful wife Lee helped me make a Facebook Page for Magniloquence the Superheroine. It will be a twice per week format until we have caught up to this website.

August

Spent most of the month working on how to draw romantic scenes. I now have a lot of nice sketches [and a few naughty ones] but only a few versions with our heroines. It is a good thing that I got so far ahead in my storyline.

September

Finished the Halloween panel. It has a few pinup style naughty bits that, quite frankly, I am quite proud of. Took forever, though, due to the new material that had to be learned. I am rapidly dropping backward into not having much of a backlog. Not really drawing block -- just more interested in learning something new. I probably ought to share some of these sketches on-line.

October

On vacation most of the month. I loaded 4 weeks of Magniloquence, and we took off for a family reunion. We had an accident, and we ended back at home nursing each other. Got virtually nothing done except a few sketches this month.

November

Had a request for TEM [Tall Enough Man] to get a girlfriend, so JRM [Just Right Ms.] was born. Another interesting sidelight for Wonder Falls.

Drew the Thanksgiving panel, and 4 Christmas panels. Priscilla's cracked carols continue.

Updated spoiler information in the New Reader section for bios of the the main characters.

Colored the Chrismas panels and took a vacation.

Return to Top to click on other years            Previous      Next