Cursed Objects and Comic Art

Look at this thing. I had to handle this decades-old used paperback as if I were suspending a cat’s cradle made from a spider’s web between my fingers, but I managed to thumb through the short story, The Monkey, very gingerly, and hacked out a partial script for a horror comic.

I’ve read through this collection every so often for years now, and it’s always filled me with dread. Some of that was Stephen King’s stories. Skeleton Crew collects some of my favorite blood-curdlers. But a good measure of discomfort came from the anxiety of paging through this decaying book and worrying the spine would finally split and spill its pages onto my lap like an infant spitting up his strained peas.

So in its own way, it’s a cursed object. All the more reason to use it as inspiration. Though I’m following Oz Perkins’ lead on this, for the most part. His horror film, The Monkey — based on that same story — creeps into theaters later this month. King’s cursed object tale always gave me the shivers and had me side-eyeing the childhood teddy bear that still sits on a shelf in my room. So I flipped open my sketchbook and roughed out images that fit my truncated script, and scanned them into Clip Studio Paint.

This is how I begin my process. Because it works most of the time for me. But there are dozens of ways of making a page (or a hundred twenty pages) of comics, and we just have to find what works best for us. And so, the experiment continues.

After setting up the panel borders, the next step is digital inking. Sometimes I ink over the rough pencils, other times I have to tighten up my frenetic doodles with a digital blue pencil.

Part of the reason for the next step in my process — blocking in colors for each panel — is to set the mood of each scene. It’s kind of similar to doing an old school underpainting that tones the canvas and informs the final image with emotion, atmosphere, and depth.

But I do it mostly to cover myself if I screw up and miss a spot while coloring the foreground elements. This way, there’s always something solid in the background, a foundation under everything else, hiding the stark white of the empty page.

After that, I can relax and lay in colors as I want; hard-edged brush, set to varying opacities so I can pick and blend colors as I go. The figures are usually more straightforward. Flat color with just one or two highlights or shadows. I want the figures to pop, and the backgrounds to feel rich without imposing themselves. But none of these are unbreakable rules. Like I said, this is practice. And with practice comes experimentation and more learning. So I’m comfortable with trying different things. But maybe I got a touch too comfortable…

In my haste to finish this project, while coloring this panel I reached too quickly for a keyboard shortcut, swung my elbow too far left, and that brittle, old paperback finally tumbled off my desk, along with the poorly stacked pile of sketchbooks it was resting on. When it hit the floor it coughed up its innards like a cantaloupe thrown to the street from a ten story building. The monkey had claimed another victim.

At the end of it all, I managed to turn out two pages of art, shook some dust off my comics-making skills, and reignited my interest in the form. And all it cost me was a three dollar softcover whose condition always jangled my nerves (current list, by the way, twenty-two bucks!). It’s all about practicing your craft and having fun. To make it even more fun, Michelle and I put together a process video on this whole thing and, as a bonus, somehow conned our friend, voice actor Owen McCuen, to perform the two pages in a dramatic reading. You can see the whole thing at the link below which, as far as I know, is not cursed. Go ahead. Click it.