22 pAGES OF SHEER TERROR!!!
Alright, so for my final project I am making a 22 page horror comic. Sounds simple right? Well, when you have the tendency to be overly ambitious and are generally an insecure perfectionist it becomes much, MUCH harder. I have written and sketched up what feels like countless versions of this thing and I have this creeping feeling that if I don't get it just right then it will be my version of Megalopolis, AKA nonsensical pretentious twaddle.
Writing this has felt like chipping away at a mountain with a plastic spoon, slow, tedious, tiresome and wrought with failure. Now as tired as I am and feel I'm not going to give up and I hope that by the end you'll be reading a story of triumph rather than that of failure.
Writing this has felt like chipping away at a mountain with a plastic spoon, slow, tedious, tiresome and wrought with failure. Now as tired as I am and feel I'm not going to give up and I hope that by the end you'll be reading a story of triumph rather than that of failure.
Research, ideas & writing
The initial Idea:
So, I got the initial idea for this comic after seeing the movie Heretic (2024) in theaters here in Carlisle. In that film a man traps two Mormons in his house and forces them to confront their faith through a series of sick and twisted games. At the end of the film Hugh Grants character concludes that the only real religion is power. On my way home I was thinking about the film and about the idea that religion is power, from that I thought of a way that a religious figure could have supreme power over another. From then I had a sort of terrifying idea of a person who gets manipulated by a cult to completely give up their body and willingly turn themselves into a kind of vegetable, I had the image in my head of man hanging from cables in a dimly lit basement, the man had no limbs and had a lot of his human features shaved off, he looked like he was caught in a spiders web. The man had a bandaged face and crimson blood seeped through the bandages, his face had been sanded down into nothing. I later had the idea that he would have parts of his brain scooped out, a man who chose himself to live in what can only be described as a fate worse than death. It's a pretty stomach churning thought having a man turn himself into a living breathing piece of meat. I researched types of horrific injury and various life support systems the man could be hooked up to, I wish I didn't research the injuries because it made me feel sick.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
But the problem was that I needed a story, who is this man and what is the context. At first I thought of having the story be about the man slowly turning into that monstrosity but I had at that point already written 2 stories where somebody turns into some kind of monstrosity so I decided to tackle it from a different angle. So I had the idea that an outsider met with the cult that has this man. So, OK. Who is this outsider? My first thought was a journalist of some kind, maybe somebody from a newspaper or something, In my mind I had the idea of a reporter who looked like somebody from the early 20th century. I also batted around the idea of having this take place in modern times and maybe having the character be a blogger but I ultimately hated that and decided that the main character would be a journalist for a magazine. Now, OK we have this guy meeting with this cult leader and I had the idea that the big horror twist would come with the reveal of the mutilated man but besides that what do I do? At this point I realized that my previous comics were awfully narration heavy so I decided to restrict myself to only using speech bubbles, I needed to practice doing dialogue scenes. Now originally I just had the idea of the man meeting the cult leader, he would talk to them about their ideology and then the mutilated man would be revealed and it would be revealed that the cult members are also mutilated (they self mutilate). After that our character would then run out of the basement, now I wasn't sure what to do after that or if there should be anything more than that. I did some versions that played out differently (as you will see later) but eventually I decided to have the story just be about a man who meets with a cult, talks to them, sees some unimaginable horror and is forever ruined after that (very Lovecraftian). One aspect that I thought was integral was that I did not want the cult to be one-dimensional villains (although I did write one version where they were one-dimensional villains and it was just awful), in fact I kind of wanted the reader to come to an understanding of their ideology and I wanted the reader to come to their own conclusion. But if the comic is mostly just about two people talking what do they talk about? And how do you make a comic about people talking visually interesting?
what a world it would be if i was actually a good writer
Doesn't it suck that you can't just automatically be good at something? Sadly that's not how the world works and I have to try to get the results I want despite my subpar writing skills. This was definitely the biggest source of pain and I wasted waaaAAAAaaay too much time on the writing, in fact I'm still rewriting stuff, IT'S NEVER ENDING. Anyway I needed to figure what the characters would talk about before the big horror twist. First I sort of unwittingly copied Heretic and made it about how bodily control is the ultimate form of control and the only way to truly take control of your life or the lives of others is by controlling the body, one slight problem, I don't quite believe that. I mean sure an element of truth is there but as I was writing it I immediately felt how phony it was. I was also concerned that a story about a group of people who groom and manipulate people into mutilating their bodies and preach that as liberating would be misconstrued as transphobic. Conservatives spread that kind of vile rhetoric about trans people and refer to gender affirming surgery as mutilation and I wanted to avoid that as much as possible since I am not transphobic and do not want to accidentally spread that kind of messaging.
After that debacle I tried to make their conversation be about a type of nihilistic body horror. The horror of having to live life in a body that withers and dies, that there's only a couple of centimeters of skin between life and death and a denial of dualism. I'm not sure which is more embarrassing this version of the script or the older one but this one really tapped into the "14 year old who just discovered nihilism" nonsense which isn't surprising since I think you need to be pretty careful if you want to have those themes as you can easily fall into that trap, as I did. So, yeah, writing that kind of made my skin crawl and I'm currently cringing out of my skull as I write this. Also the elements about dualism and physicalism felt forced and pretentious so I scrapped that.
After that debacle I tried to make their conversation be about a type of nihilistic body horror. The horror of having to live life in a body that withers and dies, that there's only a couple of centimeters of skin between life and death and a denial of dualism. I'm not sure which is more embarrassing this version of the script or the older one but this one really tapped into the "14 year old who just discovered nihilism" nonsense which isn't surprising since I think you need to be pretty careful if you want to have those themes as you can easily fall into that trap, as I did. So, yeah, writing that kind of made my skin crawl and I'm currently cringing out of my skull as I write this. Also the elements about dualism and physicalism felt forced and pretentious so I scrapped that.
|
|
|
|
After that I decided to make the cults ideology center around the subjectivity of reality and I think I finally found a road that I'm happy with. Essentially it deals with how our reality is purely subjective and cobbled together from sensory data, not that the outside world doesn't exist but that the world we experience and our body controls how we see and experience the world. And that part of the cults ideology is that the human body is our god since it creates our experienced world and control over your own body and your own reality is the closest to godliness one can achieve. The mutilated man would be somebody who took the cults ideology to the extreme and decided to fully control his experience with reality by changing what his body therefore himself can experience with the world. This was the basis for the (then) final script and will be the basis for the actual final story.
Old layouts
Originally I was going to restrict myself to only using 6 panel pages until the reveal but I quickly scrapped that idea. You can see that in these old sketches.
Older layouts. I put the pages in order and put multiple versions of those pages next to each other.
Newer layouts.
The (old) final script
Visual inspiration
I was heavily inspired by a Dracula comic I had read that was beautifully painted by Martin Simmonds. The basement which the comic would have took place in would have been an oppresive mix of yellows and dark browns, with touches of blue when light reflected off of glass or metal. I later decided against doing it this way as I was tired of painting digitally at the time and wanted to get back to my roots, that mainly being pencil.
Lettering
Originally I wanted to have the artwork be painted digitally and I wanted the speech bubbles to have no outlines since I feel that inked speech bubbles clash with painted artwork. Later I tried to hand letter the comic, the speech bubbles and lettering had harsh black outlines and my original instincts proved to be correct. I stuck to my original plan and re-lettered the comic digitally.
|
|
Drawing comics the traditional way
In the end I decided that I wanted to draw the comic traditionally and that I wanted to draw it with pencil. At the time I (Naively) thought that this would help me get work done quicker since I enjoyed working in pencil but in reality it ended up complicating things to an incredible degree as I will detail later.
For the artwork I bought professional comics Bristol board, the same stuff that's used by Marvel and DC comics, I did this mainly since the pages are already outlined for comics and the pages are pre-measured for 9 and 6 panel grids (at the time the story was going to primarily be 6 panel grids).
|
|
Bristol over Cartridge
Tony suggested that I use rougher paper for pencil illustration. Here's a comparison between the same illustration done on bristol board and on cartridge paper. I decided to go with bristol board since it allows me to draw more detail.
experimenting with digital
After illustrating 8 pages on Bristol board and especially after the nightmare situation I ended up with during page 8 I decided to switch over to digital to speed things up. I experimented with these brushes on page 9 and tried to emulate the analog look as best I could. In the end I decided that I couldn't emulate the analog look sufficiently so in the future I will illustrate the rest of the pages like the first 8.
|
|
Reference photos
Me and Máni went thrifting one Saturday so that I could take reference photos. Moira and Máni were nice enough to be my models.
These are images I found on the internet.
development
Analog pages
Page 1
page 2
Page 3
page 4
page 5
At this point I was running out of time and sketched directly on to the page. I do not have images of the work in progress so for pages 5-8 I only have the finished page and the digitally enhanced version.
page 6
page 7
page 8
Digital pages
page 9
Front cover
Final Outcomes
front cover
page 1
page 2
page 3
page 4
page 5
page 6
page 7
page 8
page 9
