The Protagonist Brain(part II)

Professor Paul Hudson taught me a lot of things during my time in the sequential art building at SCAD. He was a meticulous man with an incredible eye for detail, accuracy, perspective, anatomy. All things he brought to his amazing work, taught to his students, and imparted into their techniques. Invaluable technical knowledge that greatly informed and improved everything I've done since taking his classes back in 2004-2005.

But the single most important thing I soaked up was his endless pursuit of perfection in everything he does, under the mantra "A day without mistakes is a wasted day, as you learned nothing."

A healthy attitude to couple with a dislike for your own work. It keeps you from becoming bitter and drives you to continually reinvent your approach, refine your tools, explore alternate techniques. To generally try your damnedest to make daily progress towards the mirage on the horizon that is perfection and the complacency that would come with it. It's the recognition and the satisfaction that comes from looking at the work you did yesterday, seeing the faults and being pleased with finding them or having someone point it out(if you are so lucky).

Working on Scott Sigler's graphic novel adaptation of his book, "INFECTED", I thought a lot about my artistic approach, trying to keep in mind how the brain works, it's desire for simplicity and the clarity that can come with it, and the beauty and fascination you can impart with realistic perspective, details, lighting, everything you see in reality but usually lose in the process of making comics.

I decided upon a two pronged approach for the story, which, all characters and their various motivations aside, really has two opposing points of literal "view". The view of the infected, and the view of the uninfected.

The approach for the infected seemed like an easy enough problem to solve, throw in some ink washes, be a bit messy, impart some energy into the brush strokes. Some vertical panels to promote an overall sense of claustrophobia as the paranoia sets in and infection begins to cloud their minds, taking over.

For the uninfected parts of the story, I figured I would lean a bit more on clean line work, more intrinsic detail, a more traditional comic look.

For the uninfected, though, this posed a bit of a problem. How do I maintain a sense of unity with the art if I didn't come up with an alternate way of handling things to match the rich texture that ink washes can impart? Further, how do I make it as simple as possible for the reader to recognize the action, the characters, the moving parts of the story within each rendered panel equally?

I thought a bit about the work of Josh Middleton, who tries to remove all the unnecessary lines from his work, paring it down to it's essence, relying more on his colors to fill in the work. He does all his own colors, and the collaboration of mediums works really well together, as they inform each other, and maintain the same exact direction and goal in the hands of the same artist. I liked the idea of it and decided that the moving characters in both parts of the story, infected and uninfected, would share a more simple look, devoid of spotted blacks, intricate detail.

The backgrounds can be handled very differently, one with rendered washes with these stark characters popping out, the other either leaning on color or dealing with more richly illustrated backgrounds, with the bright, simple looking characters standing out equally.

It solves the problem of lending unity to two different looks within the same book, and helps the brain along in recognizing the characters, the movement, the energy of a scene that you might otherwise lose with a heavily detailed style.

But this would cause some crippling problems of it's own, as I would soon find out.