WORK STAGES on a semi-recent comic, pt. 1! (Patreon)

So!

In a desperate bid for a recurring feature to fill up M/W/F slots on this here Patreon, here are (most of) the Work Stages on the first two pages of a 10-page story I wrote and drew as a backup feature for a 2016 Deadpool Annual.

Given the opportunity, I decided to mix in the nigh-invulnerable mecha Gothic Lolita from my late, (semi-)lamented 2004 miniseries Livewires, which means that she presumably was repaired after being burnt crispy at the end of the team's introductory story. Yay?

I reverted to old-style layouts to work up the story:

Note that I patched the final panel to add another image of Deadpool:

I'd originally planned to render the artwork entirely in pencil, using the approach I'd previously tried out in a 2010 A+X short story featuring Scarlet Witch and Domino:

...but, after having to ink several (GothLol) parts of the page with PITT Artist Pens, I became disturbed by the patchy line quality of the penciled portions, and switched over to inking almost all of the rest of the comic. (Not a good call, as we'll eventually see.)

Next up, colors by my bud Ryan Kinnaird:

..and a guide for the letterer:

Note that I had already lettered all of the story's sound FX myself (on separate "FX patches" inked on overlays) to avoid leaving that task to the letterer; I didn't know who the hell would be lettering the piece, and hence didn't want to sweat crappy sound FX appearing in the final version.

On the next page, back to the layout stage:

That shot of GothLol in panel 2 looks just fine in the layout, but I had a great deal of trouble with the drawing on the final artwork (which was now fully inked, BTW):

... as those g-d Livewire "robot eyes" proved maddeningly tricky to pull off to my satisfaction. So, I worked up a piece of patch art using a different take:

...which Ryan added on a later version of the colors, along with two more lettering patches I sent him:

As I'll address down the road in future installments, my ill-fated obsession with ink-based line quality wound up making this short story vastly more difficult and time-consuming to produce than was strictly necessary. Whoopsie! (Also, I'll try to dig up the final lettering images, which weren't immediately accessible as I hastily assembled this post Thursday morning.)

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Not sure exactly what content will be appearing on which day, but next week will almost certainly be seeing the month's first dose of Distressed Damsels content along with our first Life Drawing post as that Patreon feature now stumbles into the digital era, covering my first stabs at Procreate and Clip Studio Paint sketch sets from photoreference.