Red Thunder: Lost in the Realm Below

The title says it all. This is a Secret Heart Attack Special that sits a bit outside of the main narrative but informs it. After the events of issue 1, I wanted to do a standalone story where we get to know Red Thunder a bit better, and this is the tale that emerged:

Cover to Red Thunder: Lost in the Realm Below (not final).

This is pretty close to the final cover (although I can see bits here and there that I might tweak.) I’m looking at all the Underworld stories I can (Inanna, Orpheus, Inferno) and channelling a bit of Gustav Doré and Frank Quitely for this. I’m also resurrecting an old character I created almost 20 years ago, in 2005. Her name is “Yaya Kadabra” and she first appeared in the Project: Hero anthology I co-edited with Elbert Or. So much fun:

Cover for Project: Hero by Marco Dimaano, circa 2005. The anthology included works by Dean Alfar, Vincent Michael Simbulan, Nikki Alfar and more, and was edited by myself and Elbert Or.

“Yaya Kadabra: Magic Caregiver” is an 8-page comic I wrote and drew when I was much younger, and she’s a very Filipino magic character with a “cat of shadows” named Anino. She’s much older now, and serves as a kind of mentorship role in this story, guiding the plot. I think she’s awesome, and it makes me want to include her in the main Secret Heart Attack narrative.

Yaya Kadabra: original character design and new sketches.

The whole thing is scripted and laid out, and I’m halfway through pencils. I’m aiming to have it out by August, but we’ll see. I’m juggling this with a new DC Comics project and another poster thing for Live Nations, plus a bunch of awesome comics-related events for my day job at The Art Students League of New York. It’s a busy time but I’m kind of loving it, as all these different projects are conceptually feeding into each other with quite a bit of harmony.

This is the stuff I had in the back of my head when I set up Secret Heart Attack. I wanted a whole universe to play with, populated by characters I could take anywhere with whatever story excited me. So (as always) there are more stories bubbling in the background. I have a standalone Mother Earth story in the hopper, an Unmaker tale, Gigaboy, and more.

I’m also about halfway through Secret Heart Attack #2, which I’m taking my time with. It’s Act 2 of the story and I want to make sure it’s super excellent before sending it to print. It will be quite a bit longer (at least 30 pages) and I’m taking my time with it. Hopefully Red Thunder tides people over while waiting.

Lastly: I can’t believe this is my first blog post of the year! I’ve lately been more active on Instagram and YouTube, so make sure to follow me over there. Happy spring! Summer is on its way! ☀️

The Fall is Eerily Prophetic

Just finished reading The Fall vol. 1, Image Comics’ reprint of the Swiss apocalyptic adventure series by cartoonist Jared Muralt. Honestly, Muralt’s art is what primarily attracted me to the book—his ligne claire style coupled with these gorgeous digital colors (that balance warms and cools with such confident clarity) are just pure refined sugar for my eyes. Even the graphic design is excellent. Check out the cover:

I mean, how can you resist, right? This, coupled with Image Comics’ larger-than-usual size (it’s like 8.5x11, sort off European size) and a reasonable price point ($16.99 for 152 densely-paneled pages including process-oriented extras) made it an auto-purchase.

I’m familiar with Muralt’s art from his Instagram, as I apparently impulse-followed him years ago without knowing he made comics. His work reminds me of Aedena-era Moebius: very clean and expressive and interested in the solidity of the environment. His recent posts about this Buglands comic present an imaginative world that feels both whimsical and joyful:

The Fall, however, is anything but whimsical and joyful. I actually got quite depressed while reading it. Translated from German and borrowing bitter flavors from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it chronicles a world falling apart from the perspective of a family struggling to hold itself together. A global pandemic coupled with an economic collapse slowly destroys society over the course of the book, leaving its characters scrambling for food, water and shelter as they navigate an increasingly dangerous world. A callous military enforces starvation-inducing quarantines, plague-ridden bodies are piled up along highways, pets are slaughtered for food and what begins as unease builds surely to an almost overwhelming despair by the book’s midpoint.

I should stress, though, that none of this is conveyed in a melodramatic manner. Muralt’s layouts and shot choices create a kind of clinical distance from all the action. We never linger on gore or zoom in on death. Most of it is implied or seen in the distance. The focus remains squarely on our characters as they grapple with their new reality from their limited viewpoint. It’s a very tasteful and sobering way to tell this story. When we finally get close to the action (like in this early scene where the father journeys to the center of the city with his children to find his wife) it feels like we’re being enveloped in chaos.

Honestly, the whole experience is kind of exhausting. The plot pretty much steamrolls the characters into worse and worse situations, doling out just enough hope to keep you reading, only to snatch it away at the last minute. It doesn’t even resolve by the end of the book, promising future volumes (which I’m not sure I’ll even want to pick up.) If it weren’t for the artwork I probably would’ve given up halfway, not for any lack of craft, but because it’s just so thoroughly depressing. Though it wasn’t quite as dire as this comic, having lived through the chaos of the last two years, this isn’t the kind of narrative experience I want to indulge in right now. It’s too close to real life, and too soon.

What’s interesting though:for all of The Fall’s plot similarities to the current global situation, it was apparently created three years before COVID-19. Yet another instance of comics presaging the future!

All that said: I don’t regret picking up this book. Again, Muralt’s art is worth the price of entry alone. There’s also a nice interview in the back plus sketches and process shots, which I always love in a comic book. Just be aware of potentially triggering subject matter, as I know I’m not alone in feeling tired of the pandemic. It was quite fun reading The Walking Dead back in 2003 but in 2021 this kind of story just doesn’t do it for me anymore.

Between Every Rainbow

This is one of my favorite strips from Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac, the middle part of an epic serialized story in 2005 wherein Danders the guinea pig gets lost in the city as he tries to make his way back to his cage in the preschool:

I suspect it’s a micro-parody of Homeward Bound and all those animals-quest-for-home stories.

Speaking of, here’s a panel from WE3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely:

He is indeed a GUD DOG. God, this comic is so good, I tear up every time I think about it. If you get the re-released version, they threw in a few more pages that weren’t the original. The climactic “IS COAT NOT WE” moment gets shown and some other nice bits.

It makes me think about Morrison’s “hyper-compression” technique and how much story he actually leaves out of most of this work. Think of all the little scenes we’re missing when we read or watch anything; what beautiful interstitial moments are often left on the cutting room floor? Think of how cruel you have to be to abandon the inbetween.

I was dog-sitting this past weekend, which is probably why I’m ruminating on animals seeking home. We walked around Hell’s Kitchen several times, enjoying the vibes of the Pride Month, where rainbow flags fly high from the tops of buildings and sparkle from people’s clothes.

New York City lifted its restrictions this month and all the festivities feel like people have forgotten we’re still working through a global pandemic, which is a bit unnerving. I wore a mask the whole time while the dog trotted next to me, happily oblivious to any of these complexities. Little anxieties welled up between our steps, between every rainbow. But the celebratory vibe persisted, and we made it home okay.

The Studio In Your Head

As some of you may have noticed, over the last few months, I’ve been nonstop obsessed about the iPad Pro. I’ve made several videos on this.

“Obsessed” is such a good word for it. So much of my mind space has been dedicated to unpicking all of its advantages and disadvantages in the same way I would, say, a dip pen or walnut ink. I think it’s natural for artists to feel this way, as art tools often feel like superpowers. Except instead of this one giving you super-strength or invisibility or the ability to do useless somersaults, art tools can give you smooth gradients or steady lines or chunky textures, the ability to animate or letter like the pros.

And the iPad Pro has really come super far since its inception a decade ago as a “large iPhone”—now, paired with the Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard, it’s turning into what is, for me, the ideal mobile comics-makings studio.

Anyway, I go into it in more detail in the video below:

Spoilers: after much hullabaloo, I ended up returning the M1 iPad Pro. Why did I do that, after so much excitement? Well, because I can’t afford it. Or, more properly: given my limited financial resources, I don’t think it’s worth the money. And that came down to the way the iPad manages RAM, or rather limits it, so that programs that SHOULD be able to use 16 gigabytes are hampered by the operating system.

After publishing this video review, I thought the story was over, and I would merrily traipse into the sunset with my less-RAMmed but just-as-capable 2018 iPad. But then! Last night! I noticed 9to5mac published this article based on the latest developer beta of iPadOS 15:

“A newly documented entitlement will allow app developers to request privileged access to RAM on iOS and iPadOS,” writes 9to5mac.

What does this mean? Well, no doubt it means that, come the big September update, apps like Procreate and Clip Studio will be updating to take advantage of all that extra RAM and we’ll finally get all those sweet, sweet layers the iPad provides. It also means my video isn’t going to age very well. I’ll probably have to make a follow-up video correcting my assessment if things progress accordingly.

My hope is that when iPadOS updates this September, all the art apps I use follow suit. And THEN maybe I’ll think about buying the latest iPad Pro with 16GB RAM. Times like these, I am reminded of how patience is a virtue I often lack.

Anyway, while waiting for developers to work their magic, I decided to test out Clip Studio on the iPad today. I already own and like it on the PC but the iPad version is subscription-based, which has turned me off until now. My friend Luciano Vecchio does comics for Marvel using this program on the iPad, so I should have been testing it earlier, seeing as he gets such beautiful results out of it. Here’s my first doodle from this morning:

It’s been really promising. I’ve switched on the 3-month free trial and I’ll be putting it through its paces for an upcoming comic I’m working on. I still have to give it a project name. Maybe Project Inside? I dunno.

Wow, this blog post really turned into a bit of a babble today, huh? I’m not sure why I called it “The Studio In Your Head.” I guess it’s something to do with how we want our tools to align with how we envision ourselves using them? Get the real-world studio to match up with the one in your imagination; that kind of thing.

I hope you’re all having a good week. July is almost here, and we’re well into the heart of summer. Talk soon. 💭

NoBoy and the Inside Ocean of Why

The original “Page 1” of this comic, 5.5 x 8.5”, graphite on copy paper.

When making comics, sometimes it pays to just wing it.

I drew this little 5-pager out on cheap copy paper with no plan—just following my nose panel by panel until it got to the end. It’s really hard to articulate the process, because a lot of it was about just going by feel, like wandering through a new city or inventing a new song.

But every beat in this story was informed by the last one, and I let my amusement guide me as I attempted to escalate the ridiculousness of this little tale. Much of it was informed by the pandemic trash fire that was 2020, with every day seemingly crazier than the last. The ending kind of alludes to the cyclical nature of time last year. I still find myself wondering what day of the week it is (the answer was always “Blursday.”)

Once I had the five sketched-out pages, I redrew them in proper print-ready size using Procreate on the iPad, tweaking a few things along the way (like the title, obviously.) Scroll down to read the entire story. I hope you like it!

Sinta the Witchstalker

This eight page comic was improvised over the span of seven days, using three random prompts I sourced from twitter (link). They were “fabulous witch,” ticking clock,” and “glitter.” I really enjoyed making this.

Layouts were done traditionally and the final pages were made using Procreate on the iPad. The whole process was a mad sprint to the finish line in the free spaces of time throughout my week, on the bus between work and school and late at night.

If you’re curious about the backstage madness, I made a vlog documenting the day-by-day creation of this story over on my YouTube channel, Comicbooker.

Needless to say, it was an absolute thrill to make this, and I’d love to do it again. Hope you like it!