adamwarren
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LAYOUTS FROM AN OLD SF-ADJACENT PROJECT: Chapter 1, pt. 3!
🕑 Added 2024-01-19 14:00:14 +0000 UTC[Here's a link to our previous installment in this series.]
So, yeahp, the time has come at last: I'm serializing my insanely tight layout pages for the 2005 Marvel miniseries Iron Man: Hypervelocity, the first issue of which I wrote and laid out long before an artist had been chosen; of course, the great Brian Denham wound up tackling the art for the project, but I had already rolled with these time-consuming roughs out of, I dunno, sheer perfectionism and unhinged micro-managing.
Either that, or these layouts represented the sum total of artwork I actually wanted to produce for this project. As I've noted here before, cranking out finished artwork is the bane of my g-d existence as an artist; I like (or even occasionally love) drawing loose, relatively spontaneous comic pages like this, but bog down toute suite upon having to painstakingly render my usual tight and precise completed artwork.
Even though we're coming up on the 20th anniversary of Hypervelocity's creation, I am loath to publicly acknowledge to non-Patrons that I'm serializing these layouts here, hence the "Old SF-Adjacent Project" monicker.
Anyhoo, here's the page we stopped on last time, 11 days ago:
...and now, a new(-to-you) layout page:
Sharpies & pencils ahoy, folks!
Panel 5: Meaningless Cyrillic ahoy (IIRC); meanwhile, Who this???)
In case you'd forgotten, a ballistic missile is inbound targeting the fleeing Iron Man armor.
Panel 3: I rather doubt that use of the term "j*hadi pilot surprise" would fly at Marvel nowadays. 2005 was a different time, to put it mildly.
And we'll close out this post with the following page:
Note that this scene predates the first Iron Man movie by three years; alas, poor, ill-fated Hypervelocity had the misfortune to debut before IM's cinematic renaissance, and was a fairly grisly failure in the ol' sales department. (Didn't sell quite as badly as Livewires, though.)
Note also that this ongoing feature doesn't seem to be all that popular judging by number of Patron likes, but hey, I have plenty of these unseen layouts kicking around on the ol' hard drive, so I'll keep on sporadically serializing this stuff, okay?
Anyhoo, our next update in a few weeks will wrap up serialization of issue #1. Woo hoo!
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?
UPDATE: Ehh, next up will be a li'l somethin' somethin' in the Distressed Damsels vein for the $5+ tiers, which I had originally intended to post today. Yay?
Comments
Adam Warren
In this case, Brian Denham followed the roughs pretty closely. However, it is extraordinarily rare for artists to ever be confronted with layouts THIS ridiculously tight; to put it mildly, this approach is emphatically NOT a constructive use of a writer's worktime, unless you want to claim a layout page rate (which I am personally loath to do).
Dean Reilly
When doing the finished art, how closely does the artist usually stick to the layouts? Is it a common thing for the artist to say "For this page, it might look better if we did THIS instead?"
Stuart Little
I loved Hypervelocity to bits. Cool twist for the story and the tech/engineering stuff incorporated into things was really neat.
Will_K
All things being equal, I don't recall ever hitting "Like" on anything. I appreciate seeing your layouts. It's good to see your work on things that I wouldn't see otherwise.
