This is Page One. I’m thinking my opening sentence lacks flavor—too 21st-century. That sentence isn’t doing its job. I need to sweep my audience into the mid-1500s from the get-go.
I like Gothic-style architecture. When it’s uncoupled from religious purposes, it lends itself well to this kind of sinister setting.
I cut a stencil out of sketch paper and dabbed ink on it with a sea-sponge and flicked ink off of a toothbrush. Still needs work, of course.
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.
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.
John Dee is the alchemist/inventor who supplies the king’s intelligence agents with their gadgets. I need some transportation for him—he rides out to see the big climactic battle of our story. The wagon is small, but I think I need to add a horse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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