Writing process, character design, art direction...

I'm in the middle of writing a webisodicly distributed graphic novel. It's not meant to be good or to publishable, even, but rather to work some story telling kinks out for myself. If I have to switch narrators or narrative perspective halfway through, so be it, etc. I just want the practice and I may as well share the process and the product of the labor with everyone.

I've got an outline and the seeds of the scifi story pretty firmly planted. It seems that character based stories do better than plot based ones, (and those with a nice mix of both doing even better than that) so that's where I've tried to focus.

From a visual design standpoint, I'm looking back to old comics from Gold Key and EC and adding a bit of Wes Anderson on top of that. It's the quirky character designs that seemed to dictate their personality, motivation and, ultimately, story for me.



Sometimes I find it's easier to start a drawing and let the visual aspects of the character conjur some traits as a bit of a brain storm. Lots of pages of my sketchbook are filled with a quickie sketch and a possible backstory, general personality type, or the motivation for the type of character represented visually.

The drawings don't have to be "good" and the character directions don't have to stick. They just need to get my mind going.