Kurt’s sense of humor has rubbed off on Melissa a little over the years, clearly.

This and a couple of the other bonus comics in Chapter 7 are to show a little bit of Devi’s discontentment with their relationship. In the original strips, I felt Devi dumping Jason comes off a bit suddenly, even if the explanation — that Jason didn’t love her (enough) — was always kind of there.

Anyway, so that’s where this bonus comic fits in.

So for the long-time readers of Multiplex, here’s a strip from the upcoming Chapter 7 (Book 2) eBook, set after #122 in the archives — although it’s really more just one of the many bonus strips for the collected editions about bolstering Gretchen’s presence earlier in Book 2 so that her prominence later in the book feels more congruous, when read in the planned printed collection:

#122 1/2: Hot Off the Press

If you’re shocked and amazed by the three updates last week and four strips this week, the reason that’s possible is that I’ve had a bit of free time this week, as I’m in-between paying freelance gigs. (This despite getting a bunch headaches that forced me to keep off the computer. I’m pretty sure they’re eye strain related, and am seeing a doctor on Monday about that and other general things. I’m sure she’ll just tell me to stop surfing the internet on the new smartphone and exercise more.)

Anyway, this lack of freelance work also means I don’t have any money coming in, which makes things a little, um, difficult. So if you’re thrilled about the extra strips this week, don’t want me to starve to death, or just have a few dollars burning a hole in your pocket, please consider buying something from the Store (or Amazon, for that matter), advertising on the Multiplex site via Project Wonderful, or even donating to Multiplex via PayPal:

For a little side-by-side (er, top-by-bottom?), you can see the pencils, as well, after the jump:

Anyway, this strip takes place before Multiplex #108 from the archives (which of course lead into another bonus comic that I’ve posted already). A little note for Jane Austen fans (and Becky/Jason hopefuls): Jason’s line in panel 3 is a quote from the Ang Lee/Emma Thompson Sense & Sensibility, which Becky just-so-happens to be watching in the other bonus comic.

For those of you curious about the bigger picture, there will be a grand total of six bonus comics (plus two “extended scenes” — meaning additional panels to old strips) in the Chapter 6 eBook, all but two of which are done. Plus the cover illustration. So I think I’m pretty close to getting that out. “Pretty close” means hopefully within a month, but don’t quote me on that. I never know when a freelance gig will fall in my lap and monopolize all my time.

Book 2, of course, is comprised of Chapters 6–10, as it is in the archives. Each of the Chapter eBooks will have some amount of bonus material, but instead of a longer, exclusive story in Book 2 (like the Prequel story in Multiplex: Enjoy Your Show), there will just be 8–12 more bonus comics — exclusive to the print collection — spread throughout the chapters. So you’ll still have some incentive to buy the book instead of, or in addition to, the eBooks.

Stay tuned! I’ll let you know when the Chapter 6 eBook is available at the Multiplex Store.

I’ve got five more bonus comics for Chapter 6 left before I can release the eBook, and I’d like to crank them out as quickly as possible, but bills come first, of course. If you’d like to speed up the process for Chapter 6 and/or Book 2, please feel free make a donation or buy something from the Multiplex Store or whatevz.

I noticed that around this time in the archives, Gretchen had sort of disappeared, so to help her prominence late in Book 2 feel a little more natural when you read it in the collection, I need to give the red-headed she-devil a little more screen time in the earlier chapters.

The next bonus comic will either go up on Wednesday or Thursday this week, depending on how many regular Multiplex updates I can crank out. It will continue from this one, hence the “1/3″ instead of my usual “1/2″ for bonus comics. I’ve got five more bonus comics for Chapter 6 left before I can release the eBook… If you’d like to speed up the process for Chapter 6 and/or Book 2, please make a donation!

UPDATE (6/2): The second bonus strip this week is up — Multiplex #115 2/3: The Apartment All to Myself.

It’ll be a while longer before Chapter 6 is a finished; there will be about 10 pages of bonus material (either bonus comics or extended strips) in it, and about five pages of bonus stuff in each of the other four chapters in Book 2, or about 30 pages in all. There won’t be a standalone story like Book 1′s Prequel this time around.

Anyway. You shouldn’t need to re-read Multiplex #108 again to follow what’s going on here, but even so, this bonus comic from the upcoming Chapter 6 eBook (and Book 2 print collection) doesn’t really stand on its own for a few reasons — it’ll work better in context, I promise. In this bonus strip, it’s Christmas night (or around there), after work, and the gang has just finished watching the horror remake Black Christmas (as seen in #108), as indicated by the movie poster in the background of panel 1. Devi is back in town from college for the holidays, and Jason is up to his usual thing: complaining. Coincidentally, this strip sort of ties in to what’s going on in the strip now with Jason and horror movies.

I changed Devi’s shirt color from #108; in the collection, it will be changed in #108, too. The day-glo pink I used here would be impossible to print, so I figured if I needed to change it, anyway, I may as well make it a different color from the one she wears on New Year’s Eve arc just a couple of pages after this in the collection.

Yes, I will do more hand-drawn Multiplex comics as time permits. No, I will not start drawing the regular updates by hand, except in the same sorts of instances I have before: imaginary scenes, flashbacks, and such.

I left off with the finished pencils. I scan those in and print them out again onto Bristol board so that — if I screw up a page (or panel) irretrievably — I can print out a new page and take another shot.

I ink with a Winsor & Newton Series 7 #2. I’ve used cheaper brushes, but they’ve all lost their points much more quickly than some of my oldest Series 7′s. I’m sure there are other, good brands for cartooning, though; I’ve just never used one. I’ll occasionally use a #1 for smaller details (although oftentimes, it’s just as easy — or even easier — to use the larger brush), and I often pull out the old Microns for the dots of characters’ eyes or other small details where an even line doesn’t hurt.

If a brush gets a stray hair that will just not get back into shape, I use a cuticle trimmer and snip the stray hair out at its base. It keeps my brushes in active duty a lot longer.

One of the things I can never quite get the hang of with digital inking is turning the Cintiq in order to get the best line of attack on a line, like you can with a physical page. Clearly, other people don’t have this problem, so don’t take that as some sort of argument that traditional techniques are better than digital. (And, y’know, it’s me. I draw Multiplex. Obviously, I don’t have a problem with digital art.)

I generally avoid using a ruler at any point when I ink, because I like my inks to look organic (or maybe I’m just lazy). With this strip, I left the panel borders and lettering for the computer, so you can see that I just ran my lines off into the gutter and off the page; they’ll get masked off after I scan the inks in.

I keep two jars of distilled water at my table: one for my bleedproof white brush, and one for the India ink. I use Speedball, but tend to let it sit out and evaporate a bit to thicken up before I use it — if it gets too thick, I add some distilled water. I use Winsor & Newton Bleedproof White, which will solidify after sitting around in the jar, but you can just add some distilled water and stir it up and it’ll bounce back (even after months and months of sitting around).

As a leftie, I should, but I forget this a lot and end up smudging my inks sometimes. So, out comes the bleedproof white, and I’ll fix any smudges and do some light touch-ups before I scan in my inks.

Below, you can see my inks without the letters and borders (left) and then with them (on the right). Apparently I forgot to ink the word “Manager” above the Manager’s Station and the movie poster frame behind Jason in the last two panels. Oops.

Next comes the retouching. Some things you can fix more easily with bleedproof white and a little re-inking; other times, you need Photoshop. My hand isn’t especially steady, so I almost always use Photoshop and my trusty Cintiq to do some touch-ups on the final inks. I kept that to a minimum on this page, only straightening out the top of the Manager’s Station in the first panel, moving Kurt’s head down a little in the second to last panel. If I’ve forgotten to ink anything, I’ll tend to do it digitally, rather than scan in my inks again.

At this point, I’ll add in the balloon pointers and call it a day (unless I need to color it, which I’m not doing for this strip).

After the cut, you can see how the finished page looks.

So there you go. Thanks again to Kirk Damman for allowing me to post this comic (he owns the original art).

If anybody’s actually interested, I might get something ready about how I draw Multiplex in the future…? That’d probably be worth a few posts. :)

First, obviously, you need an script. The idea for this comic was for one of the Kickstarter backers, Kirk Damman. He requested something about the Cubs/Cards rivalry. Bad news for him, though: I don’t know squat about baseball. So I took it in my own direction after a little brainstorming.

When I write for myself, whether I’m drawing something by hand or in Illustrator, what I end up doing is start with a blank template and start typing dialogue. I try to keep the bare amount of dialogue to hit the beats needed to get from Point A to Point B — in this case, from the premise (movie geek sort of ranting about not getting baseball) to the inversion of it (the idea that he’s basically a hypocrite). It’s a common set-up, particularly with Jason.

With vector-drawn comics, one luxury I have is the ability to revise dialogue until the last minute, because I’m constantly able to recompose a panel around a larger or smaller word balloons, shift panels around, or whatever.

With hand-drawn stuff, I need to plan things out a lot better, because once I ink a page, I can’t revise things nearly as easily. After the dialogue is pretty much nailed down, I cut and paste the panel borders and letters into Manga Studio Debut and scribble out little more than stick figures and a few scratches to get the general idea down.

I try to do at least three passes of thumbnails, with each pass getting tighter and fine-tuning the composition of each panel. The more thumbnails I do, the better my finished pencils turn out. A better inker than I — or someone with a looser style, at least — could probably get away with just a couple of scribbles and jumping straight into inks, but not me.

I do each pass on a separate layer in Manga Studio, keeping the previous pass visible at about 15% opacity. I typically change colors on each layer, so that I can easily distinguish which lines are from which pass. This is roughly analogous to the way I use Colerase pencils for penciling.

This is where my process gets a little weird. I like the ability to digitally tweak my thumbs in Manga Studio, but for finished pencils, I prefer the way a real pencil feels and reacts to real paper — so what I’ll print out the final pass of thumbnails onto Bristol paper using my large format inkjet and do my finished pencils traditionally. Printing that out at about 10–15% cyan is basically the equivalent of a non-photo blue; it won’t get picked up by the scanner (or if it does, it will barely be noticeable). Before I got the large format printer, I would use a lightbox to “transfer” my thumbs to the Bristol page. It was slower, but it worked well, too.

I do my finished pencils on top of the printed-out last round of thumbs with a Colerase Dark Blue pencil. The finished pencils for this comic were done at about 11″x14″; you can see them below (after the cut). Before I ink a page, I scan my pencils in and print them out again, so that if I screw up the inks dramatically, I can just print out another page — but I’ll get to that in Part Two.

This is probably the last of the Kickstarter backer comics I’ll be sharing here. The others have requested their strip not be posted online. But there will be other hand-drawn Multiplex comics coming… sooner or later. This is what Deleted Scenes is all about.

Not my best inking job, I’m afraid. I attempted to pencil it more loosely than perhaps I should have (and another example of why I prefer to letter digitally — or at least do the balloons digitally), but there’s bits I like in it.

I’ve been playing around with a semi-digital workflow on hand-drawn pages recently, where I pencil the comic digitally in Manga Studio Debut, then print it out to ink it traditionally. I use a mix of brush, crow quill and markers, but mostly brush.

This is what at least 50% of all webcartoonists look like 15 minutes after posting a new comic.

The rest of them look like women.

When Stand By Me came out, people insisted on calling me Gordie all the time. It was fucking torture. I’m not sure if it bothered me more or less that it was such a great movie.

(It’s not Gordo, Gordy, Gordie, G. Gordon Liddy or Gordon Lightfoot. It’s just Gordon, please. G is alright, though. And I don’t even mind Flash, depending on who’s calling me  that.)

I can’t draw the same thing the same way twice, so this is actually decent practice. Except that my hand got tired and I started getting super-sloppy. Sometimes that’s good because it forces you to loosen up, but whatever.

Also, my Copic nib started going wonky on me again. I seem to burn through those…

(Originally posted at LiveJournal on July 28, 2008.)

The strip stems from something comedian Jean Villepique says within the article: “I think being a white male is the hardest thing in comedy now. If you’re gay or black or a woman, you can get away with a hell of a lot more. If you’re a white guy right now, you can’t make fun of anything.”