Guest Strip for The Comic Community

I had a neat opportunity to write a guest strip for a webcomic writer I'd discovered on Twitter, which was a first of its kind for me. Check it out here.

I hadn't produced a comic for another site before (although the Fundraising Faux-Pas series was designed with a fundraising consultant in mind).

@TheComicCom simply tweeted out to see if anyone were interested in drawing a guest strip, and I jumped at the chance.

Shortly we connected, mostly via Facebook, and he gave me a few comic ideas. I picked one I liked. Truth be told, I hadn't really done a zombie comic before, which is crazy - - I've drawn zombies, but nothing with a story or anything.

Dinosaur Zombies, on the other hand, I have had a chance to experiment with (like the zombie brachiosaurus, zombie stegosaurus, zombie parasaurolophus and a zombie t-rex (and I've got a bunch of neat new ideas on that front!).

So I drafted a quick blurb using his ideas and made a very rough mock-up of what it might look like.

He responded with a thought about omitting any reference to Jane Austen and the "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" book series, and perhaps have the incoming zombie be a bit more confused about the whole situation. Which I was happy to incorporate.

He'd considered including some of his own existing characters, or adding some dialogue, but ultimately just left me with those two quick thoughts.

He mentioned that he was unsure of his Internet connectivity in the near future, so I set to work the very next morning to get it on paper, and ready to be coloured right away. My wife was really good about it, helping out with our son while I spent a little extra time working on it that morning, just to make sure it was ready in time.

The outline looked like this. With so many characters in the scene it was a great opportunity to tell a few stories at once, and I think it worked out well.

There's Mother, The Castigator, The Idiot and the Zombie. Everyone's story moves forward just a little bit, ironically, except for the subject of the joke, The Idiot, who is just taking everything in as it happens.

I had a fun strip earlier where there was some story development for a series of characters in a series of scenes that went with the King St. Capers - - which you can check out if you'd like.

Ultimately, this type of a strip is a LOT of fun to draw and write. There's so much going on that it leads to multiple readings and a series of different elements of humour. A real favourite.

Then there was the colouring!

I wanted the window to resemble (in part anyhow) the Dawn of the Dead (2004) DVD artwork, and I think it translated nicely.

Last step was the lettering to make the final product which you can find HERE. I hope you liked it.

Thanks again to my wife for helping make it happen, it would have been a real struggle without her support.