I feel like I have a never-ending supply of old notes, sketches, odds and ends, but, uh, I don't. Anyway, here's some more.

That page there is the FIRST PAGE EVER DRAWN!

And if you click here, you can see the original plot outline for the first half of Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, scribbled down the margin of a page of notes.

On my flickr there's some other stuff, like pages of script, and I even dug up one of the original release party flyers.

Early notes as I prepared to write the first Scott Pilgrim. Click to make big.

Note uncertainty about the band name, etc... it was a while before I was fully comfortable with "Sex Bob-omb". Because it's idiotic. But at least it's idiotic in a way that is true to the characters!

I found some earlier notes (from 2002) and see that I had whittled the characters down from a larger number.

Stephen Stills was the last "final" character to appear. Young Neil was named first - although he was originally an actual young kid, for HILARIOUS purposes - and Stills flowed naturally out of that, I guess.

Originally, Scott had a number of friends based on old characters I made up in high school and stuff. Of these, only Kim Pine survived (thank god).

He also had multiple roommates.

I am really happy that I figured out a little thing called "narrative economy" between conceiving this book and executing it.

Anyway, this scrap of notes is from pretty much immediately before I wrote the first book.

2003:


2004:


2005:


still 2005:


I've been working on the same surface since 2004, a cruddy table I took from my parents' basement.

I was going through an old archival backup CD and I found some stuff which you can see on my flickr now. (I was looking up some old web designs because I'm planning a half-decent new website and needed some ideas.)

These are Lost at Sea thumbnails. I used to print out sheets of proper-sized thumbnails and draw thumbnails straight to pen. I stopped doing them so fancy, because I'm lazy and I like to do thumbs in my sketchbook now so I have plenty of room for sketches, notes, costume and hair design, etc.

Someone asked me for some general pointers on making comics, so I'm posting them here too in case anyone needs tips. It's easy to get hung up on "the basics" when you're trying to get started. I know I spent seemingly years worrying about what kind of paper to use, what kind of brushes Jeff Smith would want me to use, how much biographical information to write down for each character, etc. So here's my basic advice (for this guy's general questions about planning, page sizes, inking, and scanning). ( Read more... )