THE TINY PROCESS STORY OF THE EMCO COMIC PROJECT
At around mid-December 2015, I got this cool project of making some sort of love letter to Emco. They are this affordable brand of brick toys that made a series of Indonesia-inspired toys, which are pretty cool.
The aim is to make something playful that also features some of their Indonesian series, so we decided on a comic book after thinking that a stop-motion video will probably be too much work.
At first, of course almost everything is blurry. How do I want it to look? Will it all be photographs? What is the story? I listed down my thoughts and work on the story first. I set up a google-doc thing where everyone in the team can chime in on story ideas.
Once we’re settled on the story, I sketched up some visualization ideas, like, how many panels should there be, how fast do I want the pace to be, the flow, etc. This is my very first serious comic project, well, not big-stakes kind of serious, but pretty serious, so I had my own worries simply because I had no previous (serious) experiences in comics. I like reading them, but making them is a complete different thing that requires a different set of skills.
The next step is making the digital sketch, and coloring it. The coloring style changes as the story goes, I used two different styles for two different stages of the story; the Luguville stage and the Emco land stage. I did this to give a different feel and contrast between the two stages, from silence to explosion kind of thing.
My Luguville coloring style was influenced by the most recent graphic novel I read, which was Dockwood by Jon McNaught. I love the silent feeling it gives with the limited color palette and the play of shadows and highlights. Thanks, Jon.
The challenging part of the project is to feature all of the products while maintaining a nice flow. It took me longer to create a page of comic rather than a standalone artwork, simply because of the sequential element of the comic, like, how it interacts with the panels around it, etc. I had to make sure the flow doesn’t get too jumpy or sluggish.
After being done with all the content pages, one of the last pages I made was the cover page. It was a fun one to make, it’s hugely inspired by old Marvel comic covers, particularly the Incredible Hulk. We sort of wanted to make a parody of it and inserted out office dog somewhere in there.
As for favorite parts, mine would be the cover, the first page of the story, the page where he enters the museum and the one with satay in it.
You can download the comic here.
Cheers.
