First proper pic!

Having dug out my (faulty) scanner from under a mountain of paperwork, I've managed to scan an actual pencilled picture from issue one. This is Marwood returning to his home town following a nasty run-in with the local beat bobby. Like the church interior pic (which hopefully I'll be able to post in a week or so), this is another one which I was dreading attempting but again actually turned out okay. I used a fair amount of photo research on it – the town is a mixture of three or so photos while the cliff edge in the distance is something I added at the last minute to both give a bit of depth and also suggest the town's geography.



I'm quite pleased with it - I think I've captured the 'steep hill into town' look I was going for.

Another crappy flatplan

These are the first 8 or so pages in grotesquely-rough-but-not-as-rough-as-the-last-flatplan form. The pages have changed a little since I did this sketch, mostly in terms of the pacing.

Original notes

These are the original notes for The Absence... Good luck reading it - my handwriting is awful, but it's interesting to note the first 'drawings' - a little doodle of the cliff-top church from the prologue and even a basic map of the town, too.



Yes, I'm well aware, considering this is supposed to be a comic, that I've uploaded bugger all in the way of actual art. I don't own a scanner at home so I'm gonna have to wait until I can scan everything at once at work. Hopefully in a couple of weeks.

Sketch book

The Absence originally started life as an idea for a novel, but once I'd decided to run with it as a comic I need to revisit the visual element of the story - including character design. The images below represent some idle commuting-based doodling but they were enough to make me radically rethink one of the lead characters and actually added an entirely different spin onto the whole idea of the story.

The images are actually a little 'spoilery' but a) you'll be hard pressed to work out any detail in my scrawls and b) you find out the gag in issue one anyway.

Flatplan

This represents the extent of my detailed flatplanning for #1...



Yes, it's as rough as houses and was for a while, it turns out, utterly wrong (I'd miscounted the pages!) but it's enough for me to figure out where I am and what needs still to be done. Because I'm writing the script as I draw the pages it's all fairly fluid anyway. No, really.