The Bill Show: Episode Seven

Hi, I’m Bill. This is my show. Let’s begin.

Our Top Story

Something you should look at to prepare for next week. Yes, Bill just assigned homework.

Burnside and Wellingham. Who are they and why do they matter? We’ll see, dear reader. We’ll see.

Batman had his Commissioner, but we have Commissions!

Bad Brad’s been telling people individually, as they inquire, Bill’s commissions list is closed again for the season. (Boo! Hiss! Brad!) But he didn’t lie. To make it official: the commissions list is closed again. Bill has plenty of illustrations to complete in this batch, so you’ll be seeing some of the items as we go along, but no new orders can be taken. It’ll open back up in time, but Bill has other work piling up and should get to it.

What Did Bill Write This Week?

A few things, one of which he can begin blabbing about in the Ides of May. Lots of work on three different prose projects.

What Did Bill Draw This Week?

A few things. Some of what he drew shows up below, in the Writing/Drawing Tips segment. Some of it is here, in this segment.

Cerebus

Want to face a tough decision? Have a customer tell you, “You can pick any era of Cerebus you like for my commission.” I was frozen with indecision and second-guessing for a week. Eventually I had to make a choice though, and this is it. It occurs about halfway through the 30 year run of the Cerebus comic book, by Dave Sim, and later joined by Gerhard.

In all of comic book history, excepting none, no better fight has occurred as the one between Cerebus and his rival aardvark in Estarcion, the female cleric Cirin. No company owned comic book would have allowed such a duel to continue, over multiple issues, and trusted the dangerous tension to build so carefully. “Make it more bombastic,”some undertrained editor would say (a quote from one of Bill’s own editors in a different context).

Elric

Seems pretty straightforward. Try to steal the cursed jewel in the idol’s forehead, become a zombie. Basic dungeon crawl stuff, right?

Bill’s pretty sure he finished up the Elric piece. As per usual, he’s going to put it in a drawer for a few days, to see (with fresh eyes) if he can spot any mistakes in need of correction before he gives this to Brad to send off. So far, he’s pretty happy with how it turned out though.

Wood Elf Maiden

Needs a background though.

The underboob thing is a joke. That part of this illustration is just Bill being silly. Red Sonja would understand, but seriously folks…

? and the Drider Queen

And finally, here’s a thing in progress, a commission for a client who wanted one of two characters, Bill’s choice. He loves it when a client gives him a choice. Bill says, “An image popped into my head which I couldn’t dislodge, and so it turns out he’s getting both characters on his wish list.”

Some of you in the Old Guard might recognize one of the battling women from a certain cover painting Bill did, oh so long ago, for an adventure module, for a certain role playing game company. In case you’ve been wondering what the lady’s been up to since those bygone years, it looks like she’s still active.

The spell she’s using is one of Bill’s devising called Throwing Stars. They expand as they approach their target, but like even the best microwave popcorn, not all kernels pop. You have to roll well when you use this spell, to get a truly impressive result. Roll too low and the entire batch might fizzle. Roll really low and the stars turn to shred you and your companions. It’s like a Claymore mine: deadly to the enemy or the one’s employing it.

What Do We Like?

Should we talk about Zelazny some more, or start with someone else and work our way around to talking about Zelazny gradually? No, but seriously, folks, we’ll get back to Roger Zelazny in time. For now let’s take a look at The Sandbaggers. Actually, Bill is out of time. It’s almost midnight on Friday, which is his deadline for these weekly reports. So, next week we’re going to talk about the most excellent TV series Sandbaggers, and how it’s without question the best spy drama ever put on any screen, and arguably the best TV show of all time.

That’s a bold statement, so next week we’ll defend it.

What is Bill Going to Try to Sell Us This Time?

Just one thing. It’s his children’s book called Down the Mysterly River. No, that’s not a typo. The title is gleaned from a malapropism uttered by one of the characters within the story. Down the Mysterly River, which we’ll just call Mysterly for the rest of this segment, was written a few years ago (prior to Fables in fact) and published by TOR Books a few years after that.

It’s a hardback, prose story.

It’s about how one day Max wakes up lost in the woods, which isn’t possible, since Max is a top Boy Scout and is a wiz with map and compass, and orienteering. And yet, here he is, in a deep and strange woods, lost like an untrained tenderfoot, with no idea how he got there.

In quick succession Max meets a talking badger, a talking cat (well, it might be a cat, but it’s hard to tell, what with how scarred, wounded, injured, mean and dirty it is), and a talking bear. All three have the same dilemma: they woke up in these strange woods, with no memory of how they got there.

And, to make matters worse, there are evil people who call themselves Blue Cutters who want Max and his new friends dead — or perhaps much worse than dead.

A friendly tree (yes, a tree) tells them if they have questions, they should hie themselves off to the great wizard Swift, who has answers. And so they set off, these four odd companions, hoping to solve the mystery, as they make their way to the wizard’s sanctuary, before the deadly Blue Cutters and their relentless hunting dogs can catch them.

It’s a quest. It’s a chase. It’s a fair play mystery (which is good, because Max also fancies himself a pretty good boy detective, and even has his Five Rules of Detection to prove it), and it’s a deadly game of cut and run.

For the record, while I’m certainly a New York Times Bestselling Writer, more than once, I am not a New York Times Bestselling Author. An author tells the entire story, whereas, in a comic book, which is how I got on the bestseller list, the entire story is told by both the writer and the artist (or artists). Collectively the writer and artist are the author, but not just me alone. I keep trying to teach this to editorial folks mired in the customs and standards of prose publishing — comics and prose are two different beasts! — but, like the proverbial goldfish, they can’t hold onto that concept for too long.

It was wonderfully illustrated by Mark Buckingham, of Fables fame.

Max the Wolf is a wolf only in the way that a hammerhead shark is made with real hammers and foothills are composed of real feet. Aren’t Buckingham’s illustrations elegant? We at the Bill Show think so.

It’s about the adventures of Max the Wolf, who isn’t really a wolf. He’s a Boy Scout, and a member of the Wolf Patrol in his troop, which is how he got his nickname.

Banderbrock is a badger of feisty disposition, who claims he can beat at least two of anything, and possibly he can.

It’s available now, this very moment, in Bill’s online store, which you can find here. (Did you notice that we’ve learned how to insert live links here, since last week? The miracle of old dogs learning new tricks huffs and puffs along.)

Mysterly was written about a year before the comic series Fables began, and it seems that sort of story was already percolating in Bill’s brain by then, because you can find many of the precursor ideas of Fables within. No, the story is completely different, but the flavor is there, almost as if the cook used many items from the same spice rack when composing both concoctions.

This was going to be my painting for the cover to TOR’s publication of Down the Mysterly River. It depicts the badger Banderbrock in the Heroes Wood. I didn’t finish it because, as I learned, in the big professional publishing biz, writers don’t provide their own covers to their books. That’s what illustrators are hired to do. They didn’t even want to see what I’d done and there was a bit of condescension in their explanation. In any case, keeping with the theme of unfinished works, I used this as the back cover to the sketchbook coming up far too soon. I like the way the moss on the fallen tree came out. There’s a bit of a luminous quality, which one should see in a fantasy forest.

If you were to buy a copy of the novel from Bill’s store, it comes signed (by Bill), and you can have it personalized, if you want.

Comic Book Drawing and Writing Tips

On Comic Lettering.

Bill says, “I hand letter because I like doing it. Yes, computer lettering has many advantages that cannot be argued. You’ve a wealth of fonts and styles to choose from. It leaves cleaner art pages. Mistakes are more forgiving, and can be corrected instantly, with the push of a button or two. You can play with the lettering placement on the page, over and again, until you get it just right. And it’s faster, by a wide margin.

“But hand lettering has a few lingering (if not quite advantages) qualities too. For one thing, it’s a skill I have, worked hard to improve, and don’t want to lose. I first learned comic lettering from the able hand of Jeff Dee, way back when we both worked together in the TSR art department. He was a recent alumnus of the Joe Kubert School, and learned the art of hand lettering there, at a time when hand lettering was our only option in making funnybooks. Thank you, Jeff for your patient generosity in passing that instruction along.

“In my own projects, for which I have to pay for everything out of my own oft-empty pocket, it’s another way I can save money, by doing it myself (I give myself a generous break on my usual page rate).”

A summit meeting of gang lords, an idea I stole from a popular TV show from back when, because it was an idea that made too much sense. Is it just me, or did the Devil Maker character come out looking a wee bit like a younger John Travolta? This is something new I’m working on. It’s sort of a big job, so don’t expect to see it for some time. The visual design of one or two of these yahoos will change.

Bill continues, “One other advantage over computer lettering: Presuming you will also be the one drawing a given page, you can letter the page using the Jim Aparo Method (which he probably invented, otherwise we’d be calling it after someone else). Jim Aparo was a page-a-day comics artist. Typically, every work day he’d draw, ink, and letter exactly one page. No more and no less. Only he’d start with the lettering. Why? Well for one thing he’d never have to find room to squeeze in the lettering once the artist was done filling the page. Pencilers that don’t leave enough room for the lettering are among the eternal banes of the comic business, and it persists today. I loved the work of Mike Leeke, who penciled Elementals for many years, and penciled most of my Pantheon series. And I loved working with him. He has crazy good talent and is as friendly a soul as you’ll ever find. No lie, I’d take a bullet for Mike. But if Mike ever left enough room for the lettering in any issue of anything, I’ll eat my hat. He just couldn’t seem to stand empty space in comic panels. It was frustrating.

“These days, if I’m writing a comic for someone else to draw, I only write it full script, because then at least the artist will know in advance exactly how much room in every single panel, of every single page, he must leave for the damn words, every one of which is there for him to see. No surprises coming. And yet, no room left for the lettering is still a problem, from time to time, from job to job.

“But do the lettering first, the Jim Aparo way, and you’ll never have that particular problem again. It creates other problems and challenges for the artist (even when you’re about to be said artist), but at least not that one.

“Fine and wise comics writer Kurt Busiek disagrees with me. He hates the Jim Aparo method with the heat of a thousand suns. Okay, maybe not that much, but he isn’t a fan of the practice. There are some clunky lettering placements to be found in Aparo’s books. But not so many, Kurt, considering the man’s Herculean career output.

“I like it, and do it that way whenever practicable. I lettered all three published issues of my short Coventry series that way, and most of the Ironwood series that preceded it. In the sample above I wrote first, then lettered, then began blocking in figures, where I’d previously imagined they’d be placed.

“And one can cheat using this method, whenever you need to. In the sample above I stopped lettering twice to very roughly block in where a figure might go (and at least once moved a caption as a result).

“Granted, my lettering isn’t the best in the business, and I’ve worked with the best in the business (Hi, Todd), so it’s a comparison I cannot dodge. But it’s mine.

“If you’re going to do everything in a given comic story, writing, lettering, penciling, and inking, maybe consider trying it this way, once or twice.”

On Note Taking

On longer jobs Bill will often sketch out visual and written notes (including bits of dialogue and such) as He goes, to make sure he doesn’t forget something important coming up later. If, like him, you often write such notes on anything handy (the back of the envelope for the gas bill gets put into play often), be sure to have a place to keep all of those notes, or they will scatter. A dedicated “Stories in Progress Notes” basket will do nicely.

Our Moment of Hilarity

My friends treat me like a god. They ignore me until they need something.

Our Closing Benediction

For those of you who keep coming back to read and see The Bill Show, thank you. If there is some particular recurring segment (or segments) that enlightens or appeals to you, do please let us know in the comments. We want to continue doing more of the things that are helpful to you, and gradually phase out those things that aren’t at all entertaining or helpful.