I decided to do a web comic, because I knew whatever “next” project I would do, it would be a big one, and therefore I would be out of the published eye for at least a year. Even if working on a web comic, in addition to my regular projects, would slow down my major projects, I felt it was worth it to keep myself publicly visible during this interim. I also liked the idea of exploring this new medium, in which each short entry would need to be self-contained, while contributing to the larger story.
I hoped to produce one four-panel entry a week. This seemed like a light and realistic enough expectation, which would give me time to continue working on whatever project I felt like working on. So for example, when I first began Dick Hammer, I was still finishing pages for the second Doris Danger humongous treasury. For the most part, I was able to do one Dick Hammer strip and one Doris Danger page a week. When I finished drawing Doris Danger, I tried to continue doing one Dick Hammer entry a week, while editing, page-cleaning, lining up letters and title pages for Doris Danger, etc.
However, with trips to comic conventions every other week taking away so many weekends this season, as well as the fact that we have bought a house, need to pack, move, unpack… and have a kid…I quickly fell behind on my hoped-for schedule. Rats. But I hadn t begun publishing anything to the web yet, because I wanted a head start before I did, so I was only letting down my own expectations.
On November 30th, I drew a logo/cover image. The format I chose was horizontal, like a comic strip, rather than vertical, like a comic book. My original vision was that I would publish the strips like a typical comic strip collection, with two or three or four strips on each page, in a column. Over the months of creating new panels, as I began breaking the borders, changing the widths, and expanding spaces out from panel to panel, I realized stacking multiple strips on a page was no longer aesthetically possible. I decided I would use the comic book-sized page proportions on each page, but horizontally instead of vertically, with one strip on each page. That strip would only fill about half that vertical space (usually), centered with a lot of dead white border around it. So it became a lot of unused space, but necessarily and eye-pleasingly so.
On the logo/cover image, I used bold thick lines, and retro shading. I was trying to reference the iconic profile of Dick Tracy. I was pleased with how it turned out. But then for some reason, from the very first panel of the very first page, which I began on December 4th, I threw my original idea of a Dick Tracy parody/Chester Gould artistic style out the window. A frenzied sort of spastic line style just developed that I felt encapsulated Dick Hammer s personality. Sort of a pent-up rage and hostility of line. I visualized Bill Siekiewicz s line work, or Simon Bisley s or Sam Kieth s, although I feel ashamed to even say it, since it s so unachievable with these hands of mine.
The first page I drew was not the first page of the comic, although I had intended for it to be. It was of Dick on the freeway. In the script, this was the first page. I fell into my style of line work due to the frenzied, road-raging feel I was trying to achieve during this sequence. When I d finished, I thought, it might be nice to build up to this page, rather than just jump right in. I should draw a couple cityscapes, to establish the “Crude Bay” setting. Give the readers a feel for the location the story takes place in. I found a few photos of Los Angeles (because let s face it, Crude Bay is just Los Angeles), and scribbled out a three-panel page of cityscapes.
But I still had some cityscape images that I had found and kind of wanted to draw, so I thought, what the heck. I ll draw some more of them. And I realized that even though I didn t use a ruler for any of them, they still looked more architecturally sound than I had envisioned, so by the fifth drawing, I was trying to muck up perspectives, and make things more shaky, ominous, and nightmarish. More like these decaying, corrupt buildings could collapse on top of its inhabitants at any moment. Could crush and destroy them. And I figured, this will work fine story-wise. It will be a descent into madness.
And I was enjoying drawing these cityscapes so much, I then decided, I should have a terrifying two-page spread of them, crashing out of the borders. I would throw perspective out the window. I wanted just a hellish Cubism-looking mess of nasty architectural chaos. I planned to draw two pages worth, side-by-side, but as I began drawing, the buildings stacked higher and higher on top of each other. So I decided, Why not? It s still a two-page spread, but the two pages are stacked rather than side-by-side.
And of course it s in the back of my head to draw another city scape at some point later in the story. But that one, I might make a two-page spread horizontally, since I d wanted to do it and haven t yet. And maybe I ll draw it in more of a Dick Tracy style, since I was getting farther and farther off that track.
Now I had pages and panels (which ended up being the first four or five pages, depending on how you count them) of city scapes, and I was pleased with them, even though nothing I d drawn so far wound up as I d imagined. And now I had all these new pages I hadn t originally even intended to include at all. But sometimes you just have to see where the project takes you. I liked the idea of letting the project tell me how many pages it needed, rather than telling the story it has to fit into this much space. I m my publisher, so I ll give myself permission to make it as many pages as I want. It doesn t have to be exactly six issues with exactly 22 pages per issue here. I d let the project dictate what needed to be shown and said.