Lead Poisoning

I never penciled so much in my life

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

In the first days of April, Brian Bendis sent me the complete script for Phenomena Book 2. At that moment we had 93 complete pages of artwork. So that left me with 44 pages to finish the book. After a few days of doing thumbnails, I started penciling… and never stopped. Hence the title (which I stole from a brilliant book from the even more brilliant Geof Darrow).

So. Much. Penciling.

It might sound like I’m complaining but I’m not. I love my job. But in the end of next week I’ll have all 44 pages penciled in less than a month. And these are not simple pages. This is where we begin the final big battle, turn it around, settle things down and twist the narrative until we point everything to the third and final book. So it’s a loooooot of work. Me condensing it so much is for one reason only: let’s wrap this in style without derailing the schedule (which I think we will be able to do).

And I like working like this: absolutely focused on a thing. It allows me to get into a flow, so I always divide work in waves. Whenever I get a script (or a bit of a script), I’ll do all thumbnails for that bit. Than all the pencils. Than all the inks. And finally, all the grey tones. The only times I won’t do it is when we have a deadline so tight that finishing pages to pass them to colorists or letterers is essential, in which case I’ll jump between disciplines in order to provide batches of pages to keep the comics making machine going.

Now let me show you some of my favorite panels from this section (that are not spoilers, obviously). This first one is a neat establishing shot with not much space on the page to do so. On this sequence, we’re going back and forth between two locations with different groups of characters having an important dialogue that echoes among both parties. The characters in this panel were walking on the previous panels, so to frame the next part I had to show they were in a new place already while leaving space for a few balloons. The better choice to me seemed to be a low angle. Allows me to show all the characters, the place (you can see the Big Ben) while leaving lots of open space for balloons (the sky).

A few panels later, we have a panel Brian described as “Reservoir Dogs shot”. I think this nailed it:

The next two I really liked for the sense of depth (an ever going battle for any artist, particularly in comics). These are both small (ish) panels, leaving substantially less space to work on when compared to a good establishing shot. One of the panels only has characters, forcing me to use scale alone to make it not feel flat:

The following one I like because of the posing of the characters. At this point, I had been penciling for more than two weeks and stuff was just flowing out of the tip of the pencil.

But the one that really put up a fight was a double page spread full of characters. It took me double the time of everything so far because of the sheer volume and density of characters and the complexity of the location. Without revealing too much, this is a party/banquet. I used a simple one point perspective grid, centered, to bring to the scene the serenity that the moment deserved. After all the tension, this is a moment of relaxation, so no dutch angles or aggressively dynamic shots.

A lot of the time was spent laying out the location: perspective grid, symmetry, column spacing, banners etc. Then even more time was spent populating the place with characters. Because I want the scene to feel lively, I had to think what each one is doing to bring variety and life to the scene. And to make sure I kept everything consistent in the following pages, here’s a shot of me using the spread as reference:

I still have a few days of penciling ahead of me, but next week my aim is to begin inking this 44 pages.

“So shall it be written, so shall it be done”

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As always, thank you for reading. See you all next week!

André