Laboring on Labor Day....as always

Hello Loyal Legionnaires and Jungle pals....well it is Labor Day, and I am laboring. I am working on one of the strangest layouts I have ever tried to do. I hope it shows a bit, but I have put in alot of time on this one. It is so complex in the layout that I had to do it several times and even redraw some of the panels and lightbox them so I could get it all in. Ha, and I just realized as I posted it that KiGor is in every panel. Anyway I will tell you this might be a bit of a spoiler, but mainly I wanted to post it to talk about the art.

I needed to show the passage of time, that it takes KiGor to track Helene, and I also wanted to show that his sense are so perfected that he can almost see the people he tracks - like a vision or something. Along with the passage of time, is the distance traveled and how KiGor travels in the jungle. The reason the pencils look alot cleaner than my normal pencils is because I had to lightbox so much of it. Also the figures are rather small in each panel and the paper I use doesn't take much punishment, so if I want to use a quill to do the details I have to be careful using my eraser. I tend to pencil pretty heavy so I tend to cut into the paper a bit much, which makes my quill line bleed into the fibers.

Also I talked Martin Powell, the writer of the story to work like the old Marvel way. So the layouts and choices are all mine. If it doesn't work in the final story, blame me. Don't blame Martin since I talked him into it. Martin is the best writer I know and his story really rockets along, so I was on task to get this page with as much visual info as I could get into it.

I hope it works, now the rest of the day is touching up the pencils, spotting my blacks, and doing some really fine line inking as I can do. I hope it works out in the end.

Because I have to put my best foot forward here, KiGor is a unknown character to most of the comic public. Pulp fans know of his exploits and that will bring in a few people. Jungle stories are a hard sell, I love them but most people just let them go by. But I think if I can do a good enough job on the art, and people read Martin's story, I think we can make people look at jungle stories with the adventure of a little kid again. I hope.