Inking and Sergio Leone

Not a good match

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.

This week was a nice one as I begun a period of nothing but inking that should last me for two weeks more (at least). Inking is usually a good place to be - you can attentively watch/rewatch/listen to movies, podcasts, music and it’s easy to pick it up again if you’re interrupted. And with small kids, you’ll be interrupted. Trust me.

But it turns out that my main choice of the week - a rewatch of Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy - was not a good one. But more on that below, because I can you hear you asking:

What’s being inked?

Last weekend I managed to finish pencils for both The Sacrificers 11 (issue 2 of 3 for me) and for the cover of Phenomena Book 3. That freed most of the week for inking both things.

I started with the cover for Phenomena, inking it over the course of two and a half days of hard work. Being a wraparound cover (like for books 1 and 2) it was bound to take much longer than usually a cover does. The nature of this one was a bit different, focusing mostly on the characters, so less perspective and background than on book 1 and especially book 2’s cover. See here a very sneak peek (TELL NO ONE ABOUT THIS!)

Grey tones added on Clip Studio Pro, as usual

I then moved to The Sacrificers, picking up right from the first page on my current exploration of brush and its textures. I’m using mostly a Raphael 8404, for those of you curious. It’s thin enough for detailed work and thick enough for some larger, more expressive strokes (more of those in the coming weeks).

I have to admit, however, that of everything I’ve penciled, the character below is the one I’m looking forward to ink the most. He uses a black cape, shirt and gloves which will be a nice challenge for me and I love his face and overall design (full credit to the co-creator of the book here, Max Fiumara).

And then there’s these two as well.

Such a great book.

Back To Sergio Leone

As I begun inking, I saw that the entire Dollars Trilogy was available on Prime, so I decided to rewatch it as I ink. Bad choice.

That’s because Sergio Leone (particularly in that era) was a very visual storyteller, relying very little on dialogue. So much so, that all of it is dubbed, meaning there was whatever was said was not really the thing moving the story forward. After I found myself stopping numerous times to watch the first movie, I stopped it and decided to do a proper rewatch instead and got some podcasts, the Ashley Madison Netflix doc and F1 practice sessions going for the inking part.

And I’ll tell you one thing about this trilogy: what an achievement. You get A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, all released in three consecutive years (1964-66). It’s impressive to see the growth in scope as the budget and ambition were more than doubled with each entry.

The first one is already impeccable, particularly the shootout near the end of the movie, with some truly great shots and an incredible tension build up.

On For A Few Dollars More, the highlight for me is the character introductions. All the three main characters have a scene that perfectly establishes them in the beginning part of the movie with such an elegance and restrain that not even The Good, the Bad and the Ugly can match. On the third one, Leone presents the characters famously (as the titulars Bad, Ugly and Good) but in a more interwoven manner within the overall narrative. Though the world it then creates is so vast that it propels the movie to a completely different league from the other two.

The most impressive thing about the trilogy for me, however, is that Sergio Leone manage to surpass himself just two years later with Once Upon A Time In The West. The opening scene alone in that one is one of greatest things ever committed to film.

A rewatch is in order, I say.

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Back to ink now, I’ll see you next week!

André