To those who care, this comic contains nudity.
Click on the cover and start swiping to read!
The long-awaited sequel! For me, at least. I’ve had the idea for a while, but I had thought I had a better approach partway through making it, and I ended up leaving it behind. I was looking through old material and came across the draft, and I decided to revise and draw it. As you can tell from the full color, there’s some changes in how I made this, and I really like how it turned out. This time, I did all the linework traditional, with pencils and then pen and marker over a lightboard. I found a workflow for scanning the pages in and editing it directly from there, which helped a lot. I like my pens and working with my markers, and I don’t like struggling with a stylus on a computer screen at 200% zoom. I still had to do some of that because my scanner isn’t the best, so there are areas of uneven focus, and I had to touch it up. But overall, faster and better and I’m happier to have done it this way. I did full color because I’ve been getting more confident about it and I wanted to see it that way; I may still have to redo the digital colors for a black and white print job, but since this is eight pages, it’s not a huge time loss for me. I also figured I might as well have a color copy for online.
The story is as straightforward a premise as it seems: I wanted to tell Dom’s side of the relationship. After the first one, their relationship clearly looks like it’s filled with contradictions, as if Gabriel simply doesn’t see what she actually has. So it makes sense that Dom sees it that way, too, and yet she maintains this dynamic. I liked putting together that perspective and figuring out the right way to present it. Because of the nature of the piece, it isn’t as dynamic in terms of movement and such as I want to be working on, but that presented a different sort of challenge; it’s good to figure out how to make two four-page conversations look interesting. I still fit in a few cool angles in the mix, too. I kinda want to tell more stories with them, more narrative than character study, now that I’ve jumped back into this. Who knows. I just really like what the two of them have going on.
Life in the Gutters 