Maron's Cluster of Comics & Cartoons

[Maron]

Hey guys. Finally decided to come around and start putting up work here. I love to draw and within the last year I've been working on developing the characters I have for use in a graphic novel. I've been reading books about comics and learning some things about the language behind them lately along with trying to look more closely at the work of artists I admire.

Currently there are three series I'm developing, two as a series and one a standalone. I'll be posting various comic strips and hopefully down the road short stories here of them as I pull them together into their final form. With that, I figured it'd be nice to start off with a Mother's Day comic I made yesterday. I'd rather quit blabbing and start putting things up!

Mother's Day comic strip

[Hiroy]

Wow dude! Do you have AIM, Skype or something. We gotta hook up.
I think you are inspiring me. And that comic! It's quality work!

[Maron]

Thanks man! You have no idea how much it means to hear that from you!

And yeah I could PM you the info today.

[Hiroy]

Looking forward to it champ.
There's much I can comment on, but I love how you rendered those backgrounds. It's skillful stuff.
And The story. It's a cute little comic.

[Maron]

For some reason the colors look weirder after uploading to Imgur. Wondering if this is because I colored the files in CMYK. Looked fine when I put it on Facebook though, but that was directly from my Mac instead of actually being a hosted JPEG. I'm happy to see you enjoyed it! I honestly spent my whole Saturday making it so it was a nice exercise in working under a deadline too. Never thought I'd be able to turn out a color page in a day (the color itself took about 4 hours!) so it was fun to actually manage it.

I've had that one character (writing the card) running around my sketchbooks for months and months so it was a nice release to finally use her. A friend of mine commented on the picture saying she loves the character so I can't wait to use more of her over time and learn who she is.

[Chrissie]

Oh hey! You're cool dude! O: Can't wait to see more from you! :D

[Hiroy]

Well, CMYK is mainly for printing I think. Not sure what's the issue when it comes to uploading. Also. Add me on FB. I'm Akeem A Mayers on there.
Yeah. I'm not afraid to share my real name XP

I've had that one character (writing the card) running around my sketchbooks for months and months so it was a nice release to finally use her. A friend of mine commented on the picture saying she loves the character so I can't wait to use more of her over time and learn who she is.

Hahahah! That's that kind of mentality to go for when writing a character. I mean, a long description is fine and dandy, but I like getting to know a character from a blank slate. It's like saying "hi" and going into a conversation.

[Maron]

Yeah, I like to make color prints of my comics when I can so I went with CMYK. With the comic I made before this being RGB, I should've remembered that it would've looked just fine printed anyway if I didn't change it. Plus the studio I was working at yesterday has a really nice high-quality printer so I wasn't gonna leave without a few prints! And I'm glad I'm not the only one that writes that way, although I do worry that moments I feel comfortable writing for the character at the beginning end of being OOC later on, I guess it's inevitable.

Oh hey! You're cool dude! O: Can't wait to see more from you! :D

Thanks for reading! I'll post more stuff really soon.

Edit: I'll be posting some "Holiday Specials" I've made for my company's FB page here too.

Valentine's Day Special

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[Maron]

Here's a little picture I made for the end of a Powerpoint last month for a presentation on the importance of communication for a Graphic Novelist.

[Hiroy]

That's an interesting subject there. Did you use your drawings throughout the whole thing(well, aside from the ending)?

[Maron]

No, lack of time! I did have fun with it though. It was a communications class so I used the final as a chance to talk about how comic artists need good communication skills. I used things like the importance of networking from personal experience as examples and things some pros have told me.

[Maron]

Here's a little pic I made for my Built On Xscaping page near Thanksgiving last year. Those gray creatures are part of an alien race called "Randomz" that we made as our mascots.




I dunno how clear it is here, but the idea is that they both fought each other for the Indian's land and the Pilgrims lost. Defeated horribly without landing a scratch on the Indians they declare a truce for the first Thanksgiving.

This was the description I whipped up for the Facebook page back then:

It's not our job to report history at B.O.X, but we came across this ancient picture from the first Thanksgiving and decided to share it in the spirit of the holiday.

By the way, I'll be posting some of my other comic strips this week too!

[Maron]

Made in June 2011, this is what I consider to be the first comic with this particular main cast, made for a scrapped comic series concept called TOONATICS. I did shorter strips with some of them back in 2008 (and made other things with a couple before then) but I guess this was me trying to be "serious" about it or something. I dunno, I kinda like the dialogue (even though there's a ton of it), but hate all of the art except for the hand in panel 1. I thumbnailed this about 5 times before I thought it was ready to go to the page. Nowadays I don't average nearly that many thumbs. Back when I made this I used Paint Tool SAI for linework, but now I use brush & ink (which suits me muc better anyways). You'll see in the other 4 comics I'll be posting here every Friday that I was experimenting with tools to use and this was actually the last time I use the computer for lineart. Afterwards I go with markers, brush pens, and then brush & ink.

I also just wanna say that when I originally made this (and the other 4 "classic" comics I'll be posting here) it wasn't for the intent of showing them to anyone. It was mostly for myself and a few friends. So I feel very vulnerable right now. I may redraw this someday.

[Hiroy]

It doesn't really look that bad dude. Consider your past comics as progress, because one day you would look at your comics from now and probably say the same thing. Love your characters though. And the story reminds me alot of this comic made for a guild once. There was constant request for characters to be included, and when I did, people demanded more spotlight or cool powers or attention. From there, I quit and never look back. Bunch'a ungrateful bastards XD

[Silence]

Dude.

DUDE!!!

I LOVE your art style man, wow! So simple, yet expressive. This is great.

[Maron]

It doesn't really look that bad dude. Consider your past comics as progress, because one day you would look at your comics from now and probably say the same thing. Love your characters though. And the story reminds me alot of this comic made for a guild once. There was constant request for characters to be included, and when I did, people demanded more spotlight or cool powers or attention. From there, I quit and never look back. Bunch'a ungrateful bastards XD

Oh I do consider it progress, didn't mean to give off a spiteful impression towards it. And yeah, you're right about saying the same about the work I made now, I'm already doing that to the Mother's Day comic! I'm actually really glad I made these. Before I did my mentor was telling me that I had all these ideas and stuff but wasn't doing anything with them since I was just constantly redrawing them over and over, so that drove me to make that and several other comics with these characters last Summer.

The kid in the hat is actually meant to be the main character, his name's Tyler. I didn't notice until just now but he's not even referred to by name in this first strip! It focuses more on Monica. I designed her not long before I thought of making these comic strips, so she's prominent in most of them and I just played around with her personality (just like what I'm gonna do now with that girl in the Mother's Day strip!) She's cool, I share a lot of her flaws. And yeah, I figure a ton of artists could relate to this too, I always felt uncomfortable when people in High School would ask me to draw them. XD

Dude.

DUDE!!!

I LOVE your art style man, wow! So simple, yet expressive. This is great.

Hey, thanks Silence! Appreciate it dude, now AP needs to see your Art Thread next!

[Maron]

2nd "classic" Toonatics comic strip. I made this on June 12 of last year!



Here's the description I wrote for it on the Built On Xscaping Facebook page:

It's been a long week kids so lets gather around the fireplace and look at another ol' Toonatics comic strip!

Also made June 2011, this sort of continues the "story" of the second one. When I originally made these 5 Toonatics comic strips I was basically just scribbling all the comic dialogue and thumbnails on after another in my old notebook. I wrote about over 10 1 page strips like these and wrote some much longer versions of stories like the one with Monica here.

To say I didn't know what I was doing would be an understatement. I eventually just decided to forget about this story and getting myself trapped in one when making these and just make some comics completely unrelated to any plot, although you'll see in the fourth comic I'll be posting in a couple weeks that I revisit this one last time. This is also the beginning of me moving away from using computers for lineart and using my own tools for the inking. I used some kind of marker brush pen thing here.

I also used a pen for the wordballoons, unaware at the time that using wordballoons that bleed to the top of the page is a big no-no in comics.

[Hiroy]

Another cute comic. It's interesting because I don't think she has to be funny to make a funny interpretation of herself. It's like... an average person putting on a mask and being a completely different persona. Maybe she does not know this yet, hehehe ^^

And I didn't know using word ballons that bleed on top was panel was a no-no... unless you are talking about the page itself... which is different and somehow instinctual... like a rule that isn't really a rule.

[Maron]

Yeah, I meant the top of the page. Having it at the top of panels is great because it'll have the words flow well with readers, I've learned. 'Cause, y'know, you want it to be a smooth reading experience.

To be honest with you man I didn't even learn of that "rule" before this week on Bryan Lee O' Malley's Tumblr page.
I think this is also the only time I've ever done that. Gives off a kinda weird look in this, I think.

[Maron]

This is at least two weeks away from being posted on the FB page (I wanna get all the older stuff outta the way first) so consider this an exclusive! I made it last Friday, as indicated in the final panel.



Really liberating to finally be able to make a comic that works in black & white. Gonna keep doing this from now on. I want color to be reserved for covers, color spreads, and occasional color pages. Oh, and the song Allison is singing is from Sonic the Hedgehog - the tune was used in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 as the ending song.

Another thing I wanted to note is that, in the original storyboard Nia's response was completely different. In response to Allison's request to join in on the singing she mentions coming back to the room only because she left her keys/3DS/whatever. Basically, a not-so-subtle way of saying no. When I was doing the pencils I realized that was completely out of character for Nia and changed her response to what we see here. May not be funny, but I still really like it. It's a sweet little moment between the characters, and it's nice to do something a bit different from the "gag rimshot" type stuff.

Also I notice here the tone on Nia's skin looks rather odd...I guess it's due to the resizing I did just now to the JPEG. Lesson learned.