Welcome to my first Blog Post!
What 3D-Kid taught me.
I recently finished my first contribution to the art of sequential storytelling. Here is the half baked version of the story and what it taught me.
When I was twelve years old I realized that I wanted to be a cartoonist. The kids around me wanted to be firemen and pilots, but I had my sights set on creating the comics that I would want to find as soon as I walked into a comic shop. The beautiful thing about comic strips is that it marries the capabilities of the moving image in movies with the intimacy of literature. With only a pen, ink, and sturdy piece of paper I could breach the line between reality and my imagination just as an Author composes words to write a story, as a great musician uses notes to express a feeling, and how an Auteur can compose a mesmerizing scene through moving images.
The time and effort it takes to hone in on the demanding need to refine these skills, however, was quite daunting and intimidating as a beginner in the field. Draftsmanship is one area of concern. Storytelling, however, is a whole other cow to slaughter. To this day, the act of storytelling remains at the top of the list of the few things I can honestly point to as something I am actually good at. This is only because of the time I invested in becoming as good at the fundamentals as possible. But an artist’s education is a forever one.
While I would try to refine my abilities with anatomy, caricature, rendering, line weight, and perspective, I was simultaneously writing scripts for potential comic stories. One day I did a little doodle of a kid in a red and green outfit with a blue cape and glasses. I did the drawing purely as a warm-up sketch to refine my skills as a colorist. It never occurred to me that I would make an entire graphic novel about him since I had ambitions towards other ideas I had been flirting with at the time.
Every spectator to my sketchbook was smitten by that doodle I did and wanted to see more. I reluctantly drew him some more and refined his look a little bit. Mostly just to please their interest in him with the hope that everyone would then move on and pay attention to my idea for a Noir comic, or my Sci-Fi buddy comedy adventure!
Clearly, that was not about to happen. I tried as long as I could, to dance around it, but the truth was that no one cared about any of the other stuff I had cooking on the stove. They wanted more of this little twerp I had boiling on the back burner. I soon came to realize that things happen for a reason, and as much contempt I may have had for the comic book superhero genre at the time, I had created a character who in his early years of development had already started resonating with a whole lot of people. He was not going anywhere, and neither were my ambitions to make a kick-butt comic.
About one year and eleven abandoned scripts later, I sat at my desk staring into the eyes of this kid. Just us guys in my studio. I asked him his name, to which he replied, “Gary Larry. But after the bell rings and the bus stops, the shades come on and I am 3D-Kid!”
From this point on he practically wrote himself! I would provide him with a situation or an environment and then just jot down his little exploits almost like a journalist. Not long after that a script emerges! That script would become “3D-Kid : The Metal Seeds!” four years later (today).
Making this book has taught me many things on both an intellectual and technical level. But the most important thing I think every creative person should learn from my story is to show your ideas and crumbs of your visions to people. Then listen to the kind of response you get. Attempts and Failures are the waters for our growth as artists. Sometimes from these “failures” not only emerge education, but happy accidents that spawn into the projects we crave commitment to.
I plan to blog once a month. So stay tuned!
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