Seven Deadly Sins!

I’m still plugging along, working on the new & improved version of Gloriana. One of the benefits of expanding to a 160-page graphic novel is that I have more room to include things that didn’t fit into the previously-planned 48-page comic book.

Dr Johanne Faustus is the villain in this tale. He’s a character from mediaeval morality plays and puppet shows, then became the title character in Christopher Marlowe’s play. Here the demon Mephistopheles shows Faustus the Seven Deadly Sins, with which they can corrupt mortal beings. This little clip shows 2 pages drawn in blue pencil. I’ll ink them soon.

Work continues

I may have mentioned that I will be releasing Gloriana in ten 16-page installments. Each will end on kind of a cliffhanger scene. I’m wrestling with this one. The bad guys (the wizards Cornelius & Valdes) have followed Elizabeth to Kat Ashley’s school. When they don’t find her there, the bad guys burn down the building.

I don’t like this kind of scene. It’s gratuitous violence. I feel uncomfortable watching all the wanton destruction in a Mission Impossible movie, for instance. The last one I saw Tom Cruise wrecked half of Venice by driving his car into everything. I had a hard time watching Mel Gibson’s Patriot when the Brits burned down a church. So, sure, I’m a sensitive plant.

On the other hand, I need to show you that my protagonist, Elizabeth, is in grave danger. If my villains don’t do awful things, they’ll be mere comic relief.

Here is the sketch of Cornelius & Valdes and their henchmen walking away from the burning school.

Rage & Lust

Here’s some character design. Early in our story, the devil Mephistopheles convinces Dr Faustus to trade his soul for worldly riches and power. For instance, Faustus wants to eliminate the Tudor family so he can take over England. How will Mephistopheles make that happen?

Even the Devil has limits. Mephistopheles can’t kill people—instead, he lures them to their own destruction. He tempts them. His big weapon is Sin—the Seven Deadly Sins.

Here are sketches for Rage and Lust. Lust was tricky because I don’t want to make this comic book X-rated. What I drew here is a variation of the most lustful kids’ cartoon character I can think of: Pepe LePew.

A low den of nefarious scoundrels

After her long walk to the seaside town of Portsmouth, Lady Elizabeth finds a place to sit down in a sailor’s tavern. Here are rough sketches I drew to get the feel of the place. The tavern needs to be in town but a little apart from other buildings. It needs to be near to the sea. I’ll draw more. There’s a spectacular barroom brawl I will stage, so the floor plan needs to be worked out.

I should come up with a name for it, like ‘The Salty Dog’ or ‘The King’s Arms.’ I’m working on a crowd-funding page. Maybe naming rights to the tavern will be an incentive.

Portsmouth sketches

Lady Elizabeth escapes her kidnapers and makes her way to Portsmouth on the southern shore of England. I continue world-building—here are sketches of a mediaeval town gate and an old street (neither of them are Portsmouth, actually). I’m mimicking on a very small scale what animation studios do. I want to have assembled sketches of all the locations and backgrounds I need before drawing the comic.

Les Matelots

French sailors, that is.

England under King Henry VIII was having a back-and-forth war with the French. He raided France, so France decided to raid England. They were trying to steal territory from each other. Back in those days land equaled wealth. The Industrial Revolution was still a few centuries away, so most trade was in agricultural goods—produce and livestock, lumber. You need land for all that.

This is a pirate tale, so our heroine, Elizabeth, will run into the French navy around Page 54. Here are sketches of French sailors who serve aboard the Carraquon. In Elizabeth’s day, navies didn’t provide uniforms for their sailors. I should probably have drawn them with bare feet, as they would have been aboard ship. Many sailors wore big, wide-legged trousers called slops.

Thumbnail sketches

The GLORIANA manuscript is written. You’ve seen that I’ve been designing the characters (I think I got almost all of them now). The manuscript needs to turn into a graphic novel—that means lots of pictures. I need to map out how I’ll tell this story visually. So I start with thumbnail sketches. Little rough drawings—no frills, half-size—whose job is to give me a starting point for drawing the tight sketches.

W’s Office and Mistress Hapenny

A couple of loose sketches. I’m trying to create a little world here. The climax of GLORIANA will be a showdown between the English and French navies on a body of water called the Solent. Leading up to the battle, Henry VIII will receive info about the French through his Royal Intelligence service. You met Sir Thomas Wriothesley in the last post. Here’s a sketch of his office. I’m taking a lot of liberties with Sir Thomas, so out of decent respect for his memory I’m calling him simply ‘W.’

Here’s a sketch of W’s secretary, Mistress Hapenny. Her duties include managing the homing pigeons used to communicate with the service’s field agents. In Tudor days, ‘mistress’ meant ‘lady of the house.’

Thomas Wriothesley

More character design! Rough sketches for Sir Thomas Wriothesley, Lord Chancellor who runs Henry VIII’s intelligence service. When Elizabeth goes missing, Henry taps Wriothesley to find her. Wriothesley (“Call me Risley”), or Sir Thomas, or W. In real life, he dressed kind of flamboyantly (he’s sporting a leopard-print scarf in his painting—I did his caricature here. For me, I want him to look more business-like. I designed him without much reference to his portrait. The modern men’s business suit would aptly tell us about his character but of course I can’t dress him like that. Still, I want him to be dressed somberly. Also, his body type in my sketches is beefier than Wriothesley’s own. I want him to look like a boss. The American actor Ed Asner often played bosses so his body type was my starting point.

The sketch with W leaning on his desk seems a little too aggressive. W’s character is trying to run an intelligence agency staffed with at least one loose-cannon field agent. He should be a steadying figure. His character is patient and efficient in the face of chaos. The third and fourth sketches are closer to what I’m after. I think the fourth sketch is the winner.