The Zombie Zone

After a marathon sketching session, starting at eleven this morning and ending about ten minutes ago, I've got my Fleshrot Halloween Special story not only laid out, but sketched in detail and ready for painting. I am particularly proud of the third page, in which I crammed a gruesomely detailed mutual fleshgulpfest involving five hungry zombies into five neat panels. Five connected panels, that is. It's one thing to draw five panels--that's easy enough. Getting them to flow naturally into one another, that's a whole other kettle of fish. I tried it before, in my contribution to Fleshrot II, but perspective and lighting problems prevented the experiment from being an unqualified success. This time, I think I've nailed it--I threw perspective straight out the window, and stylized everything completely. It's going to work. I just know it. I'm very excited.

Man, this is going to be sweet. Probably not as good as The Restless Season, since an out-and-out splatterfest tends to lack the emotional impact of an actual story, but pretty damn good. There is, as John (the art director) would say, plenty of zombie action. Without a doubt, this is going to be the most disgusting thing I've ever drawn. It has everything: wildly inappropriate sexual undertones, undead feasting, sickeningly cheerful raunch poetry, and, of course, rats. Dead rats.

I'd originally been planning a longer (and rather more dignified) period piece involving a masked ball which turns into a zombie banquet, but what with too much work and rubbish health and so forth, I had to abandon that idea. Truth be told, I'm glad things worked out the way they did. The original story didn't work as well as it could have done, since it had to be crammed into eight pages. There wasn't time to build up adequate suspense. The new one, requiring no element of suspense, fills five pages perfectly. Short and sweet...and, being completely free of gothic architecture, much easier to draw on a tight timeline.

Working from eleven in the morning till three the following morning might seem like a pain in the arse--and, indeed, it can be--but I was glad to do it today. As long as I was worrying about composition and lighting and perspective, I'm not worrying about money. I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to sketching: if everything isn't in its proper place by the time the sketch is done, it's never going to be. No amount of dramatic lighting or intricate rendering can save a lousy sketch. So I had a good day today, happily drawing and redrawing till the early news came on the telly. I didn't think about money or apartments or the state of Stella's cage, except when I paused to eat dinner and answer a handful of e-mails.

I'd meant to get some work done on a book I'll refer to from now on as Codename Hoser (I can't use the real title because of the non-disclosure agreement) this evening, but there just wasn't time. I wanted to get all the page layouts sketched while I was on a roll, sort of thing. It's always funny going straight from drawing to writing, anyhow. I find myself thinking about composition when I ought to be thinking about sentence structure. (My journal doesn't count as writing, since I don't think too hard about it. I certainly don't worry about proper grammar or spelling, or about foreshadowing, or symbolism, or any of that wankerly stuff you've got to put in a work of fiction.)

Tomorrow, I've got to get the first two chapters of Codename Hoser out of the road--I've been futzing about with them long enough--and possibly start painting up the first page of my Halloween Special story, too. If I hear from the art director, that is.

Right now, having nothing else to report, I've got to eat, then sleep.