Here we get Stranger trying his damned hardest to stay inconspicuous. This is the kind of troupe I enjoy in Western characters, like Clint Eastwood, or even DC Comics’ Jonah Hex, they just want a peaceful night with their drink and to be left alone. But as is the undoing of Western Heroes, trouble always keeps a keen eye on them with intent to turn a night sour.
I’ll talk a little about the color palette and page texture choices with this post. The idea from the start was I asked Emmanuel to try something new. I knew I wanted to attempt a more parchment-like approach to the page, so Emmanuel went with pencils and no inks with some bits of color on a tinted paper.
I loved the experiment, but what I discovered in the post-production process is that scanning toned pages is erratic on the uniformity of the whole. For example, some pages had a more tan hue while others a more reddish hue, or the pencil details were more gray in some and black in others. I think it was an auto correct function of the scanner compensating for the image’s levels, but ultimately I choose to work on the pages digitally to try to find a happy middle.
This took HOURS… and at the end of that experience, I still wasn’t happy.
Finally, I settled on one last night working on the pages and stripped them of the toned paper around the panels and then created layers of each panel, and another set of layers for components within each panel. I played with the hue, contrast, levels and saturation of each component, within each panel, within each page, and then used a textured stock image to unify the page itself.
I liked the idea of the warm hues to identify the setting and people in it, and then desaturating Stranger’s skin to make him seem even more out of place on a visual level.
If I were to do this again, I’d like to stick to white paper and do colors and texturing in post-production. You can’t learn lessons without taking chances and experimenting! That’s the motto I live by and I don’t regret it!
. For the non-literary types… think back to an old Simpsons episode about Bart as a raven and you’ve pretty much nailed it!
Lone Stranger Pitch: Page 4 of 8
Half way through the short, and here come the Trouble Brothers! Now’s the time to say a little about how this whole idea and goal came about.
At some point two years back I started to really REALLY get into public domain comics from the golden age. I got them where I could and consumed them. I started to focus on the western issues for some reason even though I never really got into western movies. Part of the reason for that is that it took me long enough to watch “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” and I ended up LOVING the flick. I didn’t want the magic of what I felt there to be ruined by a “bad choice”. Being a newbie to the genre, it was a fear that simply held true.
With the golden age stuff, what fascinated me the most was how FAST these stories were told. Heck, there were even ONE page stories in these collections. That’s what set me off: If I was going to put a pitch together, I’d keep the story tight, try to get out quick character development, hit the climax and ride off into the sunset. Done!
So, these two ruffian bastards are actually characters from a public somain story that appeared in Western Adventures #3 featuring the Clayton Brothers (and Dry Water Gultch) called “The Last Stand”. That tales was enough to give me the antagonists to my protagonists. It also set up for me a clear intent to tell future stories using golden age western details as easter eggs; characters, town names, saloons, you name it!
It was an excuse for me to keep finding more old PD westerns and imagining how Lone Stranger tales could keep some of that content alive.
Also, worth mentioning at this point was how I had to really minimize how much was said. I wanted Lone Stranger to say as little as possible to real people, so the story had to move with visual queues or with other characters being the “lead dancers at this shindig”… ha… four pages in and I already can’t help the comparisons…
Anyways, that’s a wrap for this post! More next time!