The New Times interviewed me for a feature on local comic artists. Check it out!

Well, it finally happened. I skated right past a Monday update deadline. Today’s Eleanor — actually, yesterday’s Eleanor — is officially late. For about two minutes I felt really bad about this, but then I realized that now I’ve opened the door to even greater disappointments, all of which I’m looking forward to sharing with you.

I kind of had a feeling I’d blow this week’s update, though. I could shoulder the blame completely, but I’m going to spread it around. Like, for example, on my landlords, who three years ago gave us the keys to our home and said, “We’re so glad to have a couple renting from us who will be here long-term.” They stressed the ‘long-term’ part so often, actually, that it caught us off-guard when a month ago they met me for coffee and said, Well, it’s time for us to retire, so we need to sell the house. You can buy it, they said, but if you’re not interested, then you’ll have to move on.

Long-term, my ass.

So if you want to assign blame, I recommend the landlords, our mustache-twirling villains of 2012. If not for them, I’d have been promptly sharing today’s Eleanor page with you, instead of renting a big truck and stuffing it with our every earthly possession.

I suppose the one thing that might mitigate this blown update is that the page I was supposed to post yesterday is actually one that might be familiar to some readers already, as it’s the end result of the “making of” example found elsewhere on the site.

Alright, I’m letting it go.

I do quite like today’s page, although I’ll confess, its portrayal of the nervously-anticipated hospital rush bears little similarity to the one my wife and I made last December. You know how people always ask authors how much their stories are influenced by real life? Well, my wife and I had a baby. Paul and Agnes are about to have a baby. That’s pretty much where the similarities end.

As a writer  – and as an illustrator, as it turns out — I greatly prefer spending my time describing scenes to writing action. (I have a soft spot for good dialogue, but I don’t profess to be that great at writing it.) I say this because today’s page is a great example of the care I put into setting versus the rush evident in my scenes of people and conversations. Look closely at the backdrop of the page. I think I did a pretty good job with the rising floodwaters. (I spent hours and hours on that part.) Now look at the action in the foreground. Maybe it’s just me, but looking at this page now, I think it’s clear where I spent my time.

Alright, this page is late enough, so I will stop stalling. Enjoy your week, and thank you, as always, for spending a tiny bit of your time here in Eleanor’s story.

Agnes’s storm has arrived, and with it, the flood. I had a lot of fun trying to make this page into something epic. The secret seemed to be Make glowy crashy stuff. So that’s what I did. In retrospect, I think this page could’ve been a bit more glowy and crashy. You can never have too much glowy and crashy… well, yeah, actually, I think if you have too much glowy and crashy you end up with Transformers. So maybe I did a good thing here.

Here’s what the page looked like before the glowy-crashy:

Not so glowy or crashy. Yet.

Oh, and as a little bit of trivia, the title of today’s post is a little homage to one of my favorite Calvin & Hobbes strips.

And on a side note, last week I was interviewed by San Luis Obispo’s New Times, so look for the story online this week! I’ll share a link when it’s available.

Show your support for way off-the-grid webcomics like Eleanor! Download Eleanor to your iPad, iPhone or Kindle, or order a lovely giclee print!

As Eleanor’s birth approaches, Agnes’s valley grows increasingly darker. The correlation here is I’m sure not lost on any of you. Can you imagine what it means for mother and daughter once Eleanor has actually arrived?

I love the vague hint of destruction that this color palette suggests. As we dig into Agnes’s story in this second half of Chapter 2, that smoky, just-burned feeling starts to permeate the pages. It’s almost like the smell of distant lightning as it approaches.

Rather, that’s how I imagine it. Don’t sniff your screen the way I just did.

Eleanor is a book of slow builds, and this is one. Just wait until you see what we’re building to — Agnes and Eleanor unfortunately start their life together with one hell of an unspoken weight hanging over their heads.

Happy Monday! And as always, thank you for reading and for supporting my little comic. Spread the word!

Eleanor is now available in the Amazon Kindle marketplace! Be sure to leave a rating and a review when you download it (every little bit helps)!

Chapter 2 tells a couple of parallel stories, though in different time streams. In case you feel a bit lost this week — after all, last week saw Eleanor leap off of the cliff inside her mind again — then perhaps that bit of context will help. Today we’re beginning the second story of this chapter. It’s Agnes’s.

The last time we saw Agnes’s strange dream valley was way back in Chapter 1. The cabin she had slowly been building had taken a life of its own, and had expanded and completed itself between her visits.

And now we are here again. Rain pounding the windows and the mountains.

In this chapter, just as Eleanor is doomed to revisit the Pacific Ocean and its depths in her dreams, Agnes is, too, haunted by waters. But hers fall from the sky, much like Eleanor herself.

And you know what happens when rain refuses to stop falling.

Here’s a comparable bit of the manuscript that I drew this page from:

The storm has overtaken the valley. The skies above the cabin bloom with bruised clouds. The rain is violent, one hundred million frozen steel bearings like missiles into the soft earth.
 

Agnes sits in the porch swing outside. The rain turns the earth into stew and sends up a fine dagger spray. Her clothes are soaked, even with the wide porch roof above her.
 

Beneath the rain she can hear the hiss of what she feared would come. It grows in volume until it roars above the rain. The flood surges through the valley like a wall, illuminated only in glimmers by seams of lightning that stitch the sky. Agnes rocks in the swing. Thousands of downed trees surf the flood, cracking against each other violently.

There’s something dark coming.

Exciting news this week: Eleanor is now available in the Amazon Kindle marketplace! Be sure to leave a rating and a review when you download it (every little bit helps)!

Earlier in the week I promised a little treat, and here she is! This gorgeous pinup of Eleanor comes from Tony D’Amato, the talented illustrator who is co-creating The Caretaker with me. I’m particularly happy to share this pinup with you because I think it might be the first time a reasonably anatomically-correct Eleanor has made an appearance.

Tony keeps a sketch blog that you really ought to check out as well. It’s full of pretty cool things, like this and this.

So I also promised a Caretaker update: The script is complete, and Tony’s illustrating and laying out Part 1 of the story. The story, as you might recall, is about the future of mankind. It’s a pretty big story, so clearly we’re the people who ought to shoulder the load of telling it. (If the world actually ends, btw, you probably shouldn’t call us.)

Tony and I wanted to share a little more, so here are a few more concept sketches that Tony made while working out his approach.

Alice, our protagonist.

First, here’s a refined look at Alice, our heroine. (You might remember that we shared some even earlier Alice sketches when we announced this project about six weeks back.) Tony’s got a better idea about what Alice looks like now. And a little trivia? Tony initially styled the character after Battlestar Galactica‘s Boomer. Well, just a bit.

I wrote Alice the same way I write Eleanor, essentially. There’s not so much difference between the two of them. Alice could be a version of grown-up Eleanor. (She’s not.) But with both characters I’ve always kept one eye on a reference character who embodies the traits I’ve tried to instill in each one. The reference? Eleanor Arroway, the protagonist of Carl Sagan’s Contact.

And now you know where Eleanor’s name came from.

Rough layout for the first few panels.

Tony also worked up a rough layout of the first few panels of the story. And now you know where it takes place — at least partially. It’s not much of a spoiler to tell you that the story could be considered science-fiction — but maybe only in the respect that it takes place in a familiar science-fiction environment. Like the best sci-fi, we’ve tried to create a world where The Future doesn’t distract you from the human story at the center.

There are a number of science fiction books, films and TV shows we refer back to as we go, so we can make sure we don’t sacrifice that human story for the science-y part. Alien is one. Contact is another. Battlestar Galactica and 2001: A Space Odyssey, of course.

But naturally our story is nothing like any of those.

Hope you enjoyed another sneak peek at our little side project, and Tony’s excellent Eleanor pinup. (Tell me you wouldn’t be interested in seeing a whole Eleanor book with Tony’s artwork. He pretty much nailed the character and the tone in one shot.)

Happy Wednesday!

I was interviewed last week by DCN about Eleanor. … Want to read Eleanor without waiting for new pages week after week? Click here to get it from iBooks, or here from Graphicly!

Did you really expect anything else from Eleanor today? Last week she awoke from her billion-year coma to a hospital bed and a tangle of tubes and wires. Who wouldn’t burrow back into their own psyche when faced with a reality just like hers?

This is one of my favorite pages of Eleanor’s story. Hers is a life of repeated desperate acts, but in the midst of them, there’s a certain serenity about her. Some of you might remember an early version of this page that I shared last year, as a sort of practice run for getting it right. Both versions of this page are available as prints in my gallery.

Here’s a side-by-side of the two pages — the dry run, and the completed page. I like them both, for very different reasons.

Left, the practice run for page 52. Right, page 52.

Keep an eye out this week for a gorgeous Eleanor pinup from my Caretaker collaborator Tony D’Amato. (It’s so good I regret I never asked him to draw the entire Eleanor story.)

Happy Monday to you!

There are still fourteen pages left in Chapter 2… can’t wait fifteen weeks to read them? You can get the whole chapter right now! Click here to get it from iBooks, or here from Graphicly!

Thanks for your patience, everyone! Happy (almost Tuesday) Monday.

Today was just sort of one of those days where you were up and down the night before, you’re working from home because you’re meeting with the landlord’s realtor, who will be selling your home right out from under you, meeting with the contractor who will repair the walls your puppies somehow chewed right through, and still managing to make it to meetings and plot the course of the week. One of those days. You know the days I mean. The sort of day that means you’re way, way late posting the week’s update.

Well, here we are. Eleanor in real time, once again. When you think about it, it’s actually been quite a while since we’ve seen our girl. She pretty much sat out the entirety of chapter one, after taking a starring role in the prologue. And then, when she appeared here in chapter two — well, you doubted she was real, didn’t you. And yeah, she sort of wasn’t.

But she’s real now, and Jesus, look where she’s ended up.

The voice has been her guide through a sort of limbo… and now it has taken its leave, and Eleanor has surfaced to this awful, terrible reality, where everything she knew — including herself — has changed, and not for the better.

What would you do if you woke up like this?

I think I’d try to go back into the darkness. Except Eleanor’s darkness isn’t dark at all. It’s the pounding waves, the worn-smooth rocks, the damp sky. And she doesn’t get to just hover there in that darkness. Not anymore, at least. In that beautiful coastal air, Eleanor gets to fall. Again. And again. And again.

I’ll bet you can guess what the next page is all about.

I hope you all had a terrific Monday, and that the rest of the week treats you as well!

There are still fifteen pages left in Chapter 2… can’t wait fifteen weeks to read them? You can get the whole chapter right now! Click here to get it from iBooks, or here from Graphicly!

Check it out, we’re fifty pages in! That means we’re about — oh, maybe a quarter of the way through Eleanor’s story? Possibly just twenty percent. (Big story, yep.)

I really love today’s page. The previous page was just surreal enough — the blood bag spiked into the cliff like a signpost that reads YOU’RE CRAZY — but this page really hammers it home for Eleanor, I think. Pretty soon the awful twisting sensation she feels as she moves between her dreams and reality is going to be second nature to her.

(Also, I’m pretty happy with how the blood bag turned out.)

A peek at a page from Chapter 3!

While we’re working our way through Chapter 2 here, I’ve been working hard on Chapter 3. It’s called A Vast and Endless Sea. (We’ve got a bit of a water theme going on here, see.) I like to share little previews of what’s coming — some comic folks like to really protect the future pages of their story, and I completely understand, but I’m really just kind of giddy to share stuff. I’m as impatient to get on with the story as some of you might be.

So here’s the most recent page I’ve finished — this is page 71, and it’s innocuous enough that it won’t spoil too much of the story to come.

Happy Monday! Thanks for continuing to read and share and support this little story of mine!

Yesterday I posted a bonus page, my favorite page of the book so far. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), this little comic of mine was visited by nearly a thousand people. That’s a drop in the bucket for some comic creators, I know, but I’m a little bit stunned. A thousand people not only came here to the site, but while they were here, they read an average of 11 pages before they left.

People are reading my comic! And this makes me so happy I thought I’d post one more bonus page this week.

So here’s a page with a little bit of mystery about it.

Meanwhile, here’s what I’m working on in the wee hours after a really long day at work: colors for page 71!

Coloring page 71!

Cheers for making it so much fun to do what I do! Hope the rest of your week is excellent.

Read all of chapter 2 right now in iBooks! Also, today’s page is available as a print!

The print is available in my InPRNT gallery!

As far as I know, this is a pretty humdrum week on the Internet. No major holidays, right? No juicy scandals — well, maybe just not enough of them — to keep our attention. I thought I’d do something positive with the blahs. So please enjoy a bonus Eleanor page this week!

I know how tedious a once-per-week publishing schedule can seem, especially when you really can’t wait to see what happens next. But there’s good news! You can read all of the current chapter — there are still 17 pages to go — in iBooks or your Graphicly app! You can indulge your sense of awesome by being the first of your friends to read the rest of Chapter 2, and feel good about doing so because you’re supporting the comic and the artist.

Now, today’s page:

This is my favorite page of the book so far (including the 25 pages that follow it which I’ve already drawn). I liked it enough to turn it into a print, so if you’re fond of it, you should hang it on your wall. (Better yet, hang it on all of your walls!) There are several other Eleanor prints in the gallery, among other off-the-wall illustrations, so check it out!

This page was a bit of a revelation to me, too. As I colored it, I discovered that my inks really worked against the art. The hard black lines around the ocean suds just didn’t work. So I started toying with a few new techniques. In some areas, I began erasing the inked lines altogether (look closely at the foam on top of the water) and in others, I began tinting the inks with colors (check out the edge of the water where it meets the sand). This went a long way towards maintaining the mood of the page, but better yet, it contributed one more little bit of style to Eleanor’s visual language. You’ll notice this technique cropping up on later pages as well.

Well, that’s that. Happy Tuesday, everybody! Thank you kindly for reading.