JAQrabbit work log (NSFW)

JasonAQuest

After spending the last few months focusing on my Holy Comics projects, the creative work on those is mostly complete (for now).  So I'm returning my attention to JAQrabbit Tales.  For those who may be repressing their memories about that project: it is a series of short stories, based loosely on experiences in my life related to romance and sex.  You could call it porn.  Because I do.   Taken as a whole, these stories will add up to a kind of biography of the protagonist (who coincidentally shares my name).

I have about 20 of the stories scripted, mostly 3-10 pages.  I have ideas for another 30.  I don't plan to draw all of these myself, because that would take forever.  A few of them have already been penciled by my housemate Zlatan.  I've penciled a few myself, and inked two.  My longtime friend/mentor Vincent has offered to help finance hiring artists to draw more of them, but I have to come up with half of the money myself, so I've been saving my dimes and nickels for a while now.  I'm figuring I'll color and letter them myself, since I can do a passable job of that myself, fairly quickly and free of charge.

Since I've had some good practice inking Fetus Christ the last few months, my first priority now is to get all of the existing pencils inked.  As I do that, I'm going to open communication with artists. And I'm going to resume writing Tales; I've been doing almost nothing but drawing since November, and I need to get some stories out of my head.

JasonAQuest

After reading the erudite and extensive elucidation by R. M. Rhodes about his in-development erotic anthology, I feel inspired to go into a little more depth about the nature of this project.

It started with an actual incident that really and truly happened to me, which – if conflated with a very similar incident several years earlier – would make for a hot and fun little story of the kind that readers used to submit to porn magazines (e.g. Penthouse Forum).  I had fun writing it and drawing it, and that got me thinking of a few other such stories I could tell.  It dawned on me that I've had a somewhat colorful sexual history which I could draw upon for many more stories.

The original intent was that this would be "true porn", with only the names and distinguishing birthmarks changed to protect the not-so-innocent.  But the writer in me found that limiting, and the lawyer in me found it incriminating, so I began to embellish things, revise characters, recast true stories that happened to people I knew, create altered endings, and just maybe invent some tales altogether.  So it's officially "fiction"... but I won't say how much.

Although I do call it "porn" (and it is) this isn't just about prurient interests.  The stories are all about sex, but not all of them are about the sex. The first story I wrote and drew was very sexually explicit, the second one could be filmed with a few different camera angles and bad lighting and get a "hard R" from the MPAA, the one I'm working on right now could make it on broadcast TV (well, maybe in Europe), and there are a few I've written that could even make it past the Comics Code (1990s revision).  While there isn't an ongoing plot to them per se, the goal is that these tales – taken from various times in the protagonist's life – will form a mosaic that implies a biographical storyline behind them.  Some are funny, some are a bit horrific, some are sad, some are kinky, and some are sweet.  Oh, and one is going to be flat-out science fiction (time travel). Just because.

I'm also using this project to experiment with the medium.  I'm going to draw a lot of them myself, but I want to use a number of artists.  This should make for some interesting "continuity" issues in terms of depicting the recurring characters consistently, but I've already had a taste of that with the pieces drawn (with coaching from me) by my housemate Zlatan, and I think it'll work out.  It isn't me, after all.   For example, I'm specifying that the protagonist has a fairly consistent hairstyle throughout his life (slowly getting shorter from one decade to the next, to help "place" tales chronologically), despite that not really being true of me. 

I'm hoping to get a variety of art styles, and I'll be trying a few different approaches to the art myself.  For example, for a tale that takes place at a park, I've taken photos of that park to use as the backgrounds.  For another one I plan to use stills from an old amateur video (sufficiently blurred to avoid any identifiable likenesses) as the color layer, and pencil/ink on top of them.  I'm thinking of using stills from a feature film as the sole illustrations for a story that takes place on a movie date.  Some (e.g. those featuring content of a legally-gray nature) will be prose with illustration, or combine prose with comics.

So that's where I'm coming from on this.

R.M.Rhodes

Shucks, Jason. I was just answering the question. But I will admit that I was excited that someone was actually interested.

This sounds really interesting. I remembered from previous write-ups that your anthology was rooted in autobiography, but reading the evolution of it makes me want to get a copy even more.

JasonAQuest

Hopefully that evolution will have a similar effect on more people. [-O<

But ultimately, I'm making the kind of comix that I want to read.  Ground in reality but not mundane.  Accessible but a bit experimental.  Something that can be read as just one piece, or a whole epic saga.  With sex.  If that doesn't appeal to enough other people... at least I'll have fun making them.

JasonAQuest

I've shown some of this in-progress before, but since those links are now inaccessible, and for anyone who wasn't following at the time, here are thumbnails of the two Tales that I have fully inked.  These images are pretty small, but still Not Safe For Work: "Intruder" (pencils by me) and "Seduction" (pencils by Zlatan Marić).  I'll have "Breakfast" (pencils by Zlatan) inked soon, and since it doesn't have any nudity (unless you count a shirtless guy), I'll post some actual images of that.

Jimmie_Robinson

Topless and being bare skin shirtless is a form of nudity.  I'm disgusted!  Haha!

SteveWallace

@JasonAQuest I've enabled a spoilers add-on that I think will be helpful to you, and a lot of others here actually. This way we can post NSFW inline instead of having to worry about linking off forum. To use insert tags [_spoiler][_/spoiler] without the _ and put whatever you want in there. Enjoy.

Should look like this

JasonAQuest

Hmmm, let's give this a try. Warning: Here there be NSFW trouser-dragons!

(But something appears to have broken the emoticon feature.)

SteveWallace

I had to disable it to make the spoiler work, there's a conflict between them. I'm working on a solution but I felt like spoiler was a more useful addon.

JasonAQuest

I have decided - unless I change my mind - that the protagonist of these Tales is named Jason Tiberius Quest.  So he's not me.

Here's an outline of the Tales that are currently in the illustration process.  Vague spoilers, I suppose, but nothing that needs hiding.

"Intruder" (the one that started it all) - Jason (34) wakes up in the middle of the night to find a drunk and disoriented college student raiding his fridge, and after confronting him in the nude... things happen. 7 pages, pencilled and inked by me.

"Seduction" (I don't really like this title; too generic) - Jason (22) follows a handsome guy into a bar bathroom and hits on him, to the guy's embarassment when one of his friends catches them in the act. 5 pages, pencilled by Zlatan, inked by me.

"Breakfast" (the only Tale not written from Jason's perspective) - Zlatan (22) has to leave the place he's been staying and meets Jason (35) in a 24-hour diner.  Zlatan is sketching, so Jason invites him over for a life-drawing lesson... and he stays. 6 pages, written and penciled by Zlatan, mostly inked by me.

"Vibe" - Jason (18) receives his first vibrator by mail-order, and tries it, with his father almost finding out. 6 pages, pencilled by me.

"Party Boy" - Jason (21) gets very drunk at a house party and sleeps with a hot guy, waking up the next morning to discover that the guy wasn't quite what Jason perceived through the liquor. 5 pages, pencilled by me.

"Bushwacked" - Jason (28) is depressed following the loss of his lover, and goes to a cruising park for filling-but-unfulfilling anonymous sex. 5 pages, pencilled by Zlatan.

"Cruising the Love Boat" - Jason (35) and his friend Vincent (49) go on a Caribbean cruise, also hooking up with a college senior (21) who has been dragged along on the cruise by his family. 13(!) pages, partially pencilled by me.

"Fountain" - Jason (20) wakes up in the middle of the night, badly needing to pee, but he's got a stiffy and can't get it pointed into the toilet. 2 pages, rough pencils by me.

There are more Tales which I've scripted.  They can wait.

JasonAQuest

OK, I've changed my mind. I just realized that "Jason Tiberius Quest" wouldn't have the initials "J.A.Q.", which would make the title of the series nonsensical.  If he's going to have a different name, he still needs the same initials.  The first name "Jason" is non-negotiable; the identification of Jason-the-character as Jason-the-creator is too important to the concept.  Giving him a different middle name would be meaningless, because I don't use my middle name online; no one would notice.  I could give him a different last name.... "Jason A. Quatermain"?

Changing gears: One of the challenges of this series is handling events which are too "controversial" to directly illustrate.  There are some that I can do by exercising discretion and implication in the art.  Others will require reverting to prose (probably with a few spot illos).  Today I took a start at one of those, describing an incident from early adolescence which is necessary to really understand a lot of what follows.  It's been quite a while since I wrote narrative prose, but I'm remembering why I enjoy it.  Maybe I'll post a little after I'm more sure of how it's going.

JasonAQuest

And on a lighter note... here's a page of "Breakfast".  It's represents a number of "firsts".  It's the first page of my first collaboration with Zlatan Maric, a young artist whom I met under the circumstances described in this very story.  He wrote it (with coaching from me) and pencilled it (wcfm) as the first comics he'd created since he was a kid in Croatia.  I inked it (not the first but one of the first times I've done that with someone else's pencils, including another story Zlatan drew in the meantime), and I colored it in Manga Studio, the first page I've colored using that tool instead of Photoshop.  (MS has some advantages over PS for traditional flat coloring like this.  But we'll see how it works for more fully-rendered color.)

Anyway, here's the first page of JAQrabbit Tales in which Jason does not appear.  (He shows up on the next page.) Oh, and the scribble of title/credits is just a placeholder until I do the actual lettering.  The dialog explains that Zlatan has been staying with a couple of friends, who are moving, leaving him to find somewhere else to live.

JasonAQuest

And here are the rest of Zlatan's pages, with my inks finished (and one bit of early color).
In which I bear a resemblance to Gaiman's Sandman if he were a shonen manga character.
Oh, and relax: this one's PG13.

JasonAQuest

Meanwhile, I've been working on "Fountain".  It's a trifle, a little bit of toilet humor told in one page of pantomime, followed by one [ahem] splash page.  I've inked the first page.
WARNING: No sex, but extensive turgid male nudity.

Maybe I'll get the splash page done by tomorrow night.  If not, it'll have to wait for a little bit, because the next morning I go under the knife, for surgery to fix the pinched nerve in my neck that's been causing pain up and down my arm.  I should be able to resume limited amounts of writing in a few days, but I figure drawing will take longer to recover.

JasonAQuest

They don't realize that I'm alert enough to be onto them, but my housemates Zlatan and Tyler are conspiring to make a Tale about my current medical predicament, during my current medial predicament.

JasonAQuest

I caught a glimpse of the Tale that Ty and Zlatan are working on, before Tyler caught me looking.  It's pure fiction.  I think.  I was a bit stoned out of my mind that night.

Now that I'm getting my finger coordination back, I'm working again on some layouts, backgrounds... necessary but not critical stuff, as a way of getting back up to speed.  (And a piece of fan art.)  I have a personal moratorium on writing Tales for now: I've got more than enough scripts in the can, and the "Write for May" project needs the attention more.

JasonAQuest

OK tring to get some serious work done again. Currently that means "inking" the pencils that my friend Zlatan did for a Tale set outdoors. I put that in quotes not because I'm not using actual ink, but because I'm doing more than inks. Seems the boy doesn't like to draw backgrounds any more than I do. So he left most of them out, and here I am drawing backgrounds for my "apprentice" rather than the other way around. I need to be careful because his figures are fairly simple and cartooony, and I don't want the backgrounds (trees mostly) to be too "busy" around them.

You just can't get good free help these days... which yes, is part of my thinking that I need to beg/borrow/steal money to hire me some professional artists.

JasonAQuest

As anyone following the "Drawing Trees" discussion knows, the background issues with "Bushwhacker" have been pretty much resolved.  It's been a learning experience for both penciller and everything-elser, and I'm beginning the final page of inks. I've done a little coloring work on it too, but I'm really more focused on getting things to the "inked" stage at this point.  (With all due respect to the professional colorists and letters, the colors are mostly icing on the cake, and the letters are something I can crank out when the time comes.  The tooth-pulling all comes at the pencil and ink stages.)
TOTALLY NSFW(or home) WARNING: Look, ma: no pants!

One implication of this is that Zlatan is currently without assignment.  (He and Tyler, his roommate here at the Baxter Street Home for Wayward Boys, are "secretly" working on an unauthorized piece about my drug-addled recovery from surgery, but that is... unassigned.)  Since he seems to have taken a special interest in the less uplifting periods of  the protagonist's life story (e.g. sex in the park), I'm giving him one which tells the narrative of a hook-up, but in each panel the "date" is a different person.  A not-so-subtle sequential-art metaphor for meaningless, anonymous, interchangeable sex.  (Which surprisingly isn't all it's cracked up to be.)  If nothing else, the pretentiousness of this gimmick is a good tactic for passing the Miller Test of "artistic merit", to avoid the project being labeled "obscene".  It'll be a good exercise, too, giving Zlatan a chance to draw a dozen characters who have to be immediately distinguishable from each other.

I still have plenty of inking of my own pages left to do (two 6-pagers ready for final linework, a few more stories roughed out), so I won't be starting to draw any new stories in the immediate future.  I do keep writing them, as the spirit moves, however.  To the point that I have a backlog of them.  If there's anyone in this online family who's interested in drawing a few pages of smut – anonymously or not, ranging from PG13 to XXX, some less queer than others, and I can scrape together some actual money if you're accustomed to getting that – drop me a line.  Unless you're uncomfortable with the basic premise of comics revolving around sex and sexual relationships, or with homosex itself – and seriously, I totally get that, and respect it; I'm not that much into zombies or sports dramas – I can probably find something in the file that falls reasonably close to your comfort zone, so take pity on the shyboy and give me a wink or something.

JasonAQuest

Has it really been almost a month since I last posted to this work log?  Rest assured that progress on this project continues to be made.  Last time, I posted that Zlatan was "without assignment", and that is true today, but only because he and I have completed the illustration of another 4-page story, entitled "Do the Hustle". 

I'd already written the script for it, but our method of operation for producing the art was a little different.  Instead of him working on the pencils (with feedback) until they were ready for inking, it involved a lot of tossing of sheets of paper back and forth.  He'd give me a page of pencils, I'd scan it, ink the parts he'd done to my linking, then hand that back (with gentle, fatherly, pedagogical feedback) for him to re-do the rest.  To be honest, some of the panels suffer from looking like they were pasted together from separate drawings (because they are), but it was a good exercise; the feedback of seeing his sketched figures turned into (digital) ink seemed to inspire him.  He successfully passed the challenge referred to at the start of this assignment, for him to make each new character distinguishable from the last, and I'm loving that.  NSFW (or most homes) pages of this story (without dialog) are here: 1 2 3 4.

So here we are again with Zlatan's hands idle, and those are – of course – the devil's workshop.  Which I don't object to in principle, but I do want to put him to work for me again.  The question is: on what?  The first story we did together ("Breakfast") was - and still is - one of the most innocent stories of the JAQrabbit collection; there is no actual sex in it, because it's about an incident in which there was no sex.  Since then, he's slected three more stories to pencil for me, which happen to be... well, let's call them "morally unflattering" to the protagonist.  Sex in a bar restroom, sex in a public park, and sex for pay.  He seems to enjoy exploring that angle of the protagonist's biography, but do I want to keep feeding him the red meat of depravity, or should I try to cleanse his palate with the crunchy salad of a relationship story?

Or behind Door Number Three, he's expressed interest in writing a story of his own, for either him or me to illustrate.  On one hand, I'm reluctant to relinquish creative control over a "character" of my own creation (especially one based on myself), but I don't want to get in the way of Zlatan's creative development, and writing fanfic is a great place to start.

JasonAQuest

I finished a story today. One that's been in the oven for a while. Finished writing, finished penciling (Zlatan did that), finished inking, finished coloring, finished lettering. Even decided on a new title for it (I didn't care for the working title it's been under since I started writing it): "Men's Room". Because that's where it takes place (believe it or not, most of the Tales don't)... and it's about two men who like men, and how they each self-identify. Here are small versions of the pages: 1 2 3 4 5.

Anyway, with a whole bunch of other stories ranging from nearly-finished to mostly-finished, this was the first to actually stumble across the finish line. It wasn't the first one I started. It wasn't even the first one Zlatan drew. It just caught me working on it with enough momentum to follow thru to the end. To be honest, it isn't my favorite (the young protagonist is something of a selfish prick in this episode ), but here it is.

This leaves me with two more stories that are fully colored, but just need letters, and another that's partially colored. Then there are a couple more that are inked, and couple more that are just penciled, and I'm not even sure off the top of my head how many that are scripted. I need longer weekends, longer lunch breaks, and longer evenings. :sigh:

JasonAQuest

I keep copies of my pages (in whatever state they currently are) in my Dropbox, so I can haul out my iPod from time to time and impress myself with my plodding progress. Here's the thumbnail screen for the folder with the colored pages (all penciled by Zlatan)... four stories, each 4-6 pages:

JasonAQuest

And here's the corresponding thumbs of the uncolored pages (some inked some not, all penciled by me)... four stories, each 2-7 pages, coincidentally the same total number of pages:

So that's 40 pages of material that's more-or-less "drawn". (There are a few more stories I've roughed out, but those don't count.) Not much, but it's a lot more than I had done a couple years ago.

Obviously the next step for me is to finish inking my own work, and get started on coloring it. Coloring mine is going to be more work than coloring Zlatan's on account of the less "clean" line work. The next step for Zlatan is going to be... actually I think I'm going to encourage him to just write his own story and illustrate it; since I've already tossed the "99% true" standard out the window, why not let him be creative?

JasonAQuest

Kind of following up on the previous update, plus a comment elsewhere on the forum about hiring vs. collaborating with artists.

JAQrabbit Tales was conceived as autobio: the protagonist was me, so the notion that it could be anything but 100% Quest-owned was... inconceivable. Kind of like, even though Harvey Pekar worked with artists, American Splendor was always his.

But over the course of the last year and a half, as I've been working with Zlatan on the project, that line has been blurred. He's been putting work into it with no pay – originally as an internship of sorts – and effectively earning a stake in it. He's penciled as many pages of it as I have, and his character interpretation/design has become part of the project. A while back we put that into writing, indicating that if this ever makes any money, he gets a cut of that for his efforts in developing it. I'm still not ready to relinquish my status as "creator-owner", but I have officially licensed him to use the "characters" himself, which could lead to some interesting he-said/he-said stories.

JasonAQuest

I'm currently working on a JAQrabbit Tale called "Party Boy", about a hook-up with a guy at a house party (hence the title, though it has a secondary meaning). This one uses the literary techniques of the Unreliable Narrator and the Twist Ending.

Unreliable Narrator is a little tricky to do in comics, because the primary narrator is the artist. Unlike prose, where that unreliability is usually tipped off to the readers by the style of writing (overly casual, saying things like "as I remember") there's less precedent for how the Unreliable Artist betrays himself. I'm doing it by simulating the cause of the unreliability: the perspective character's drunkenness. My first thought was to just draw the art distorted, but that's harder than it sounds. Instead I'm doing it straight (so to speak), and will run the "drunk" pages (the first 4 of 5) through Photoshop to distort them into "unsteadiness", just enough to give the reader a clue that something's going on. Then when the protagonist sobers up the following morning for the final page, that one will remain undistorted, telling the reader that now he can trust what he sees.

And that's where the Twist Ending happens. The unreliability was the protagonist suffering from "beer goggles": drunkenly misjudging the object of his attraction. No, this isn't "The Crying Game". It may be more controversial, actually, despite it happening way more often than straight guys falling in love with trannies. The guy that Jason hooks up with appears to him (and to the reader) as about the same age (21), probably a little younger. On page 5 we see that he is probably below the legal age of consent. This introduces three issues to the artist: 1) his actual age has to be instantly clear, but 2) it should be equally clear that he's the same person, and 3) frontal nudity of him would invite more accusations of victimless "kiddie porn" than I am willing to endure.

Another requirement to do the Twist Ending properly is that you have to provide clues to that twist ahead of time, which I'm doing in several ways: When Jason offers the kid booze, he is a little surprised, hinting that people don't usually do that. One of Jason's friends is scandalized seeing him go upstairs with the guy, which would not surprise anyone unless there was something "off". His bedroom (seen in semi-darkness until the last page) is that of a high-schooler. So on second reading, people should see and understand the clues they missed before they figured out that Bruce Willis was dead for most of the movie.

I hope I pull it all off.

JasonAQuest

"Focus? What's that?"

It's a miracle that I ever finish anything, because I am easily distracted by new ideas. Or in this case, an old idea that I've suddenly noticed is timely. Last year I wrote the script for "a very special episode" of JAQrabbit Tales called "September", set in 2001. Like most of the stories, it's based on personal experiences, with some dramatic license added. If the thought of a "porn" series doing a story about 9/11 concerns you, relax: it's rated PG...13.

As the "news" coverage of 9/11+10 has already ramped up, I remembered that script, and figured now would be a good time to illustrate it. So I've started. It's only three pages, but there's only a week and a half until That Date. I've figured out that the first page can be cut with a little tweaking of the dialog, so I'm going to illustrate the last two pages first, then do page one if I have time.

There are some foreshortening/anatomy/scale issues with this that I have to fix (yay for digital media), but I've got the first panel (of page 2) penciled:

JasonAQuest

I've pretty much finished up the two pages of this that I'm doing. Needs a few tweaks here and there (I'm thinking of reducing the lettering a point size, so it isn't quite so crowded in a few panels), but the pages are ready to go, with a couple days to spare.

I've done the basic setup of the site that will eventually host the whole darn JAQrabbit Tales saga, currently hosting just this two-page story: http://tales.jaqrabbit.com is now live!

This story will, of course, be completely overlooked in the.... I was going to say "trainwreck", but I suppose that's a poor choice of words... "tusnami" or "flood" is in poor taste I suppose.... let's go with "avalanche" of public attention on 9/11. But I'll run it up a few flagpoles... Facebook, a few e-mails to comics sites... to see if anyone notices it.

JasonAQuest

With the flat-coloring of "Party Boy" finished (and overlooking that a few stories are still unlettered), I now have the art on six JAQrabbit Tales nominally finished. That's 27 pages all together. I have another two stories (9 pages) inked, another 6-pager pencilled, and another 13(!)-pager in various stages from roughs to pencils. Finishing those will eventually double that total. Meanwhile, I have another dozen scripts written and waiting for me, Zlatan, and/or some artist-for-hire to start working on.

Gods, this is a slow process. I'm lucky to have a job; I really am, especially when you consider that I live in Michigan. But if my boss were to call me into his office and use the magic words "lay-off", enabling me to collect (extended) unemployment benefits while I tried to find another suitable day job... but spent most of my days drawing... I don't think I'd cry myself to sleep.

JasonAQuest

A quick status checkist, in chronological order:
Dad (prose) - first draft written
Church Outing (4 pages) - scripted, just gave to Zlatan to start drawing
Vibe (6) - penciled, started inking
Fountain (2) - finished
Party Boy (5) - finished
Do the Hustle (4) - finished
Men's Room (5) - finished
September (2) - finished
Bushwhacking (5) - finished
Intruder (7) - inked
Breakfast (6) - finished
Cruising (13) - roughed, started penciling

JasonAQuest

Some bad news with some bad timing has put this on the backburner for a bit. The person who the other character in "Church Outing" is based on - a guy I grew up with in Sunday School – was killed by a drunk driver over the weekend. We haven't seen each other much since high school, but even so....

JasonAQuest

Now that I've got a fancy new(er) tablet to draw on, I'm bequesting my HPad to Zlatan. He doesn't like computers much, but I want to give him a chance to try working digitally, in part because I think he'll grow to like it, and in part because it'd make it a little easier for me to collaborate with him.

JasonAQuest

I generally don't use reference when drawing figures, mostly because I'm afraid I'd become dependent on it.  Sure, I might find a photo of an appropriate figure in <i>this</i> pose to draw from, but what about the next panel?  It'd probably be obvious when I was "copying" and when I was making it up: better to draw consistently.

However, there's something to be said for "copying" as an exercise, whether life drawing or from photos.  It's a good semiconscious reinforcement of how anatomy all fits together, proportions, etc.  Since I don't have access to many willing life models, I've started doing warm-up drawings from photos. Since they're mostly porn, I call them my "Greg Land exercises".  It cuts a little into my productive time, but I think it's worth it.