[Sketch #8 - Devour Them]

"So this is the new year and I don't feel any different." This is a quote Death Cab's Ben Gibbard uses in a song that I traditionally listen to every 1st of January. Although I will undoubtedly repeat said tradition when I get into my car today, I can't say that quote is true for me this year. There are a lot of things I'm very hopeful for and as I said back in a fall post, I welcome the changes 2010 will bring into my life. There's a lot to do, but I'm really excited about doing it. Excited for meeting new people, going new places, and in many respects reinventing myself. This I especially hope to accomplish through my art. Last week, I posted a preview for one of the characters in my new comic, Devour Them. This week, I give you a preview of page zero for issue one:

"Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That in a spleen unfolds both Heaven and Earth,
And ere a man hath power to say, "Behold!"
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion."
-William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream act i scene 1)

Lately, I have become enthralled with William Shakespeare. We all recognize him as a playwright and poet that we are all but forced to read in Middle School and High School, but very few people delve deeper into the man or the stories. Currently I'm enjoying reading through Twelfth Night, and just picked up a box set of twelve more of his plays through Amazon.com. I'm most excited about reading The Tempest, his final play. I'm using the above quote to open up Devour Them not only because I am a fan of Shakespeare, but because I find it has a deep resonating tone to my story.

This page was fun to work on despite it's simplicity. I haven't had a lot of opportunity yet to play around with screen toning in Photoshop, so this was mostly experimentation. I'm really looking forward to working rest of the comic which will be much more complex. I'm sure I'll be posting more as I go along, including more character sketches, environments, and whatnot.

For now, I'm off to watch Land of the Lost and District 9... and sketch more :)

More to come in 2010!