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Tuesday, February 26, 2008
 After watching Shaun of the Dead on DVD, I was struck by the similarities to zombies attacking humans, hungry for their brains, to an annual student event here in Omaha called Meet the Pros. I pitched the concept to their board of directors for their 2007 conference and they bit, resulting in on of the most thoroughly enjoyable and successful projects of my career (more on that one later). When the time came to handle Meet the Pros 2008, I was struck with the question: how does one follow-up the best thing they've ever done? Answer: Don't.
I pitched three ideas to the Meet the Pros board, instead of one, and they came back selecting the idea I'd tossed in as a personal aside: the comic book. It was an idea to show students at Meet the Pros and chronicle their experience in comic form, telling a story rather than selling a headline and an image. I pitched this idea because at the time I was becoming more serious about my illustration as a career and wanted a testbed — but I never thought they'd go for it. Sure enough, they did.
Now I'd read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics a few times back in the day and had recently picked up his newer Making Comics a few months before this. Added to a childhood spent reading the things and patterning my illustrations after my heroes, I felt confident, just untested.
As with any good story, it starts with characters. I needed a few: a hero, and antagonist, a love-interest/triangle, and a few complicating members of the cast. You can see their genesis below:
For the Hero, it all began with one sketch of his panicked face (which ultimately was inked and included in the final poster) and was expanded in the sketches below. Astute designers will notice his shirt is an homage to Saul Bass. Detailing was heavily inspired by Japanese anime and manga character designs — not out of fandom on my part, but an appropriateness to the subject matter. These kids would essentially be "battling" with their work, and they should be dressed for combat as such.
For the love interest, I created Hytome. Short and spunky — intelligent to a fault. As a copywriter, she doesn't know when to say when and often tries to say too much at once in her work. Her design was, well, not exactly "conservative," and it was my goal to make up for this with her strong personality. The jury's still out on how successful that was.
The other characters, including the main antagonist, Corden, filled out in sketches over the next few weeks. At one point I realized I had designed Corden and the brutish Ox essentially the same, so a few nips and tucks were put into place to separate the two, and Ox was introduced much later in the comic than originally planned. Student-X is directly based off the character Racer-X from Speed Racer, and the end of the story gives a wink to this fact as well.
Once character design was complete, I began scripting with a basic outline of the story and a loose sketch of the page layout. Being a designer, I couldn't let myself make a page that reads simply left to right, top to bottom. No, I had to go and make it hard. The comic would travel clockwise in a spiral, ending in the center of the poster where the relevant information regarding the event would be stored. This would prove to be a problematic decision.
The panels were then sketched out along side dialog markers, and the whole thing looked like this:
Once complete, they were cut out and assembled as such on an 18" x 24" poster.
Then it was the long and laborious process of fleshing out the illustrations, inking them, scanning them, and assembling them into the layout.
At this point the text was refined with the client, and small details such as the negative space in between the panels were tweaked. On a few occasions I tossed the poster onto the HOW Forums for assistance, as I was still acclimating to working solo ad needed some help getting past a few rough spots. I really have to hand it to the folks over there on the forums. They were both a great help and very encouraging.
In the end, the final poster looks like this: (click for a bigger size)
I call it "The Un-Poster." It has no central focal point. No short message. It cannot be read in passing, it requires you to stop and interact with it. And after it was posted on college campuses I heard from several teachers that their classes would, in fact, stop and read it. Some even going so far as to skip their smoke breaks. I don't know if it was that successful everywhere it was posted, but in as far as ambitious projects go — I'd rank this one a 9 out of 10.
I also handled their website — which you can check out at MeetThePros.org.
 
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