More WORK STAGES from a (semi-)recent short story! (Patreon)

As I desperately flail around for Patreon content after completely expending my post buffer last week, I recalled that I've only shown Work Stages for pages 1, 3 and 6 from that Harley Quinn #29 back-up story I wrote and drew for DC earlier in the year. (Ackshully, I finished it last year, but whatevs.) So, take a gander at my process for pages 2 and 4 from "Hyena Anxiety," a surreal and/or nightmarish lil'l episode featuring of ol' Harl confronted by a series of upsetting variations of her pet hyenas Bud and Lou. Story and line art by me, colors by Alejandro Sanchez.

Overall, a fairly enjoyable experience, but sweet Jesus was this story ever time-consuming to grind my way through. Then again, I was reverting to my old, old workflow of roughs/tight pencils/tighter inks on full-size comics artboard, a wildly inefficient process I abandoned way back in 2000 after struggling through the miniseries Dirty Pair: Run from the Future (as discussed in a recent text post).

Not much time for commentary, but...

...cancellation by bad-mouthing hyenas? Lordy loo!

Since the story featured a different scenario on (almost) every page, skipping ahead to page 4 shouldn't be very hard to follow:

Yeahp, seemed like an obvious joke to call back to the real Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.

Alas, couldn't access the PDFs for the lettering without investing more time in Photoshoppery than I cared to spend, so you'll have to check out the final, published version to get the complete narrative experience. On the lettering tip, note that I was playing around with a truly "manga-style" approach, in that I drew the word balloons directly on the art; the results weren't perfect (IIRC), but the technique was well worth testing out.

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?