I find that when I'm working on my comics I neglect my blog. I know all three of you are saddened beyond belief. Silliness aside I really do try to keep writing something on this thing just to keep up my writing skills at the very least. So what I've decided to do, is make a production blog following the creation of "The Super Cliche Hero Chick #3". That way I'll be motivated to keep moving on the project and keep the Wonderblog active. I plan to update every Friday night, but may post on Saturday if schedule doesn't permit. Next week due to my appearance at the Comickaze Expo (Sept.15-16 at the LA convention center), I'll be posting on Thursday (Sept. 13). However since I decided to do this only when I'm starting on the artwork. I noticed it would skip an important part of the process, the writing. That's the purpose of this prologue.
I decided to do something new that I have never done before with Hero Chick #3. Write a good comic! Actually, it was taking on a co writer, my cousin Ruben. I wanted from the beginning to be open to collaboration on this project, and when I was showing Ruben my stuff while drawing the first issue I noticed he had ideas for the book and not just ideas of the "hey I got an idea" variety that every writer hates to hear, but good ideas that gave me ideas. So at our niece's birthday I asked Ruben if He'd like to be a part of Team Hero Chick*
The idea for the story came from Ruben, to get him going I sent him a copy of the Hero Chick story bible, and out of it he had a few ideas. One of which was, "Did Le Mark have previous experiments? Like for wolverine
the "X" stands for weapon 10. Maybe there's a hulking character who
likes to smash things and gets on the loose."
With that I quickly made a rough outline of the main plot, Alice is meeting her best friends new girlfriend, then when going to lunch the friend of the guy she saves in issue#1 becomes a Hulking monster due to the radiation of a Physics experiment in one of the science buildings. The monster kidnaps Erin and Hero Chick fights the monster while she has Drew get Le Mark to see if he can do anything about it. And emailed it to Ruben.
On the first email exchange, Ruben sent me his take on the plot. Most of the changes where of the "it would be cool is she said" or "instead of this how about this" but in there was one of the most important things, the scene where Drew gets Le Mark became a confrontation. Rubens thinking being, "he knows Le Mark drugged Alice without any idea what would happen, so he would definitely view Le Mark out as a villain" This was a breakthrough not so much in that it gave the story an emotional heart, but it opened up many opportunities for future stories. The ultimate thing of awesome while writing serial fiction.
We exchanged notes on each others outlines and then taking these notes into account, I wrote another draft. Then the waiting began. I had to take a week off to get Issue two ready for the printers after which I wrote the aforementioned draft, Ruben then became swamped at work, so was unavailable for a week. But after that week I got my final notes from Ruben, and began the sketches. We agreed to meet up on Labor Day to go over the sketches and write the dialogue. This was good for me as it kept me on task with the sketches. We went over the sketches refined the dialogue, changed up some pacing and added notes for emphasis on the drawings. And that brings me to where I'm at now.
All in all I like this collaboration business, it may not be right for every project, but it definitely works for my Superhero Sitcom. It was a lot of fun, and most importantly we got more ideas for stories as we where going along. Also I think this script came out much funnier than my previous two (the benefit of writing with an aspiring comedy writer) , I guess that's why comedy tends to be written by teams.
Next time: the first page.
*...of course we had been talking of doing something together for about two years.
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