I'm going to use this thread to address more general questions about Multiplex -- how I draw it, where the idea came from, etc. I'll pull questions (and probably my answers) from the various threads here, but feel free to ask me stuff in this thread, too, if you like. I'll delete your question when I'm through, to keep things nice and compact.

First question:



I use Adobe Illustrator almost exclusively. I occasionally do a little bit with Photoshop (for the perspective on the movie posters, mostly), but most strips are done entirely with Illustrator.

It's basically the same approach that South Park uses, although a bit more detailed. I have libraries of character poses, backgrounds, and few props that I pull from and assemble the majority of the images, and then I fill in the backgrounds and draw all the new characters or limbs that I've got left over.

I use the Phantasm CS plug-in from Astute Graphics pretty much constantly to manipulate color and whole-heartedly recommend it to all vector artists.

I used to do it a little bit, like for the Creepy Loser strip or the King Kong strip, but those were some of the earliest strips. Even then, I only really did it for the incidental characters.

In actually working on the weekly strip, I almost never do any pencils anymore, except just to get the idea down, but I wouldn't call those "pencils," so much as thumbnails. I do these just in a notebook I have, and I don't scan them in or anything. They basically look like stick figures and scribbles, to anyone besides me. It's really just to get the idea down.

Then, I usually break things down into panels (often starting from a template) and figure out the dialogue, if I haven't already. Once I have a pretty clear idea of what "shots" I'm going to do, I usually drop in any stock backgrounds, draw any new backgrounds I need, and then I add in the characters, finalize the lettering, and make any tweaks to the characters' faces, posture, arms, or whatever, until I decide it's done.


Since I "direct" Multiplex with a fairly straight-forward camera setups and the characters tend not to be very active because of the dry humor, most of the time it's just not necessary for me.

I'll often sketch out layouts when I'm breaking from the "two people talking to each other for six panels" standard, but I don't bother scanning that in. Talking, gesturing, and most facial expressions, I don't need to sketch out; I just do those straight in the computer (modifying the existing character models of course).

Sometimes in the course of drawing a panel, I'll sketch out a complicated hand gesture, though, and I'll usually do roughs when I'm trying to design a new character, because when do character straight in the computer, they tend to look too much alike and not have much personality. (Most of the early characters were done very geometrically that way, which is why they sort of look alike.)

I used to scan sketches in, but more recently when I draw rough sketches, I use my Cintiq (bought in January '09, although I had a regular graphics tablet before that) using Illustrator CS4's Blob Brush (new to CS4, which came out in November '08 or so). That combination is pretty much the same as drawing by hand and scanning it in as a template, just taking out the "and scanning it in" step. The results of the Blob Brush are sometimes good enough to use intact for way-back, tiny background details, but for anything that I need to look crisp, I usually simplify the linework by redrawing it with the Pen tool.

No, I haven't. I love it when movie theater workers read the strip and assume I've worked in one, because it helps me know I'm keeping things on-target.

I did my research, though: I watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Okay, seriously, a lot of the wage-slave stuff is really pulled from my days in the bar/restaurant business (host, busboy, waiter, or bartender at various places).

And also, I have to give credit to my boy Kurt (yes, the basis for Kurt). He's an old friend of mine from Peoria (my hometown), and before I moved away, he was an assistant manager at the Willow Knolls 14 theaters in Peoria (he's since moved on to bigger and better things). I worked out of my house at that point, so I kept odd hours and ended up visiting him at his job all the time. So, I'd watch movies when they were busy, screw around with him when they weren't... It was almost like I worked there, except for the having to actually work or getting paid part.

At some point, Kurt suggested I do a comic about a movie theater, and I guess I was like, "Oh, that would be stupid," but several years later, here I am. When I decided to do Multiplex as a comic strip (after making a couple of false starts trying to do it as an animated short), I started taking a ton of photos and made a lot of doodles for reference whenever I would visit Kurt, and I'd take notes, that kind of thing. Writerly stuff. You know.

The old adage "write what you know" includes doing research as knowledge.

Kurt and Melissa are loosely based on real people, and Jason is to some extent.

Kurt is one of my closest friends, as well as the guy who first suggested I do a comic set in a movie theater, as I mentioned earlier in the FAQ. Melissa is, as regular readers of the strip might have guessed, his girlfriend. The last few years that I lived in Peoria (before moving to Chicago), Kurt and Melissa worked together at the Willow Knolls 14 theaters in Peoria, Illinois (my hometown), which is the basis for the Multiplex 10's layout and overall look.

Jason isn't supposed to be me, exactly, but Jason is the most similar character to me: he's Filipino (I'm actually half Filipino, half white), he's a movie snob (a bit moreso than me), he's a bit of a bastard, and he's got dimples. He's really more similar to me ten years ago than to me now in ways that I don't want to get into, since it would spoil one of the long-term arcs that I've only hinted around so far.

It's true that Multiplex does occasionally use -- without permission -- film stills or posters from various films. These images, of course, remain the property of their respective owners.

The movie posters are reproduced at a very small (often unrecognizable) size, and I believe fall under fair use because the size of the pieces as they are reproduced in the strips, and due to the commentary/criticism aspect of the comic strip.

I have also used stills either from movie trailers or stills that are available on the internet for the purpose of commentary or criticism of a specific film or trailer. These uses fall under fair use, which makes allowances for use of "a very small excerpt" where "your use is for purposes of commentary, criticism, scholarship, research or news reporting." (Quotes are from the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use site.)

Should any owners of these copyrighted images disagree with my interpretation of the fair use doctrine with the use of their images, they are welcome to contact me to discuss the matter.

The Wikipedia entry can answer this better than I can, so I'll just refer you to that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics

This older thread about my WCCA Awards "presentation" strip shows a picture of with Becky's dress in outline view (with the points and curves showing), just as another example.

The key thing about using vectors is that I can scale the artwork I've created infinitely. I could literally blow the drawing of the lobby up to the size a building, and you would be able to read the names on the candy bar boxes in the concession stand plain as day. There would be absolutely no degradation in the image quality whatsoever.

UPDATED (12/09): I mostly draw Multiplex with a mouse, because I find that I work much faster and more precisely using a mouse than with a tablet. But I do have a 12" Cintiq and use that to sketch out complicated gestures or poses, for new characters (see one of the earlier answers), and, occasionally, but increasingly, for some of the finished vector artwork, thanks to Illustrator CS4's new Blob Brush tool.

You might find it interesting to know that while I'm left-handed and use a tablet left-handed, naturally, I use a mouse with my right hand. When I was a kid -- like, mid-'80s -- mouse cords were always too short, so you physically could not move the mouse to the left side of the keyboard. So I just learned to use them right-handed, and I still can't use a mouse left-handed to save my life.

I'm hoping the book will be available by August, 2010.

I'm currently working on the fourth of five Chapter eBooks, with the goal of compiling them plus some additional material (including an all-new "prequel" comic), into a print collection.

Thanks to the generous pledges of 318 Multiplex fans, as soon as I've finished with all of that material, the book will go to press — in China.

Keep your eye on the Multiplex: Book 1 Progress Report on the front page of the Multiplex site!

Set the color for a block of text to #EFEFEF by highlighting it, clicking on one of the colors in the "Font color" bar to the right of the composition window, and then changing the number code manually.

Like so:

Highlight this paragraph to be amazed. Got it?

Sorry, there isn't an easier way to do this, but I'll look into it when I get a chance.

Kind of both.

The long-term storylines are planned months, sometimes years in advance. Multiplex has an ending, for instance -- several years away, don't worry -- and I have a general idea of what happens to all five of the major characters before then (the major characters being Kurt, Jason, Becky, Melissa, and Franklin), as well as some of the supporting cast.

I usually have a very loose "plan" breaking down what strips will (probably) be about which movies, where I can fit in more character-related stuff and sometimes ideas about which movie-related strips can play into the character arcs. (I knew Angie and Jason would have issues with religion, so when Expelled came out, I decided to tie it into that.)

A lot of times one small gag strip will blow up into a full-fledged storyline. The robbery was originally conceived as a one-off strip where Kurt just doesn't believe that Melissa didn't plan it, but the repercussions of the theater actually being robbed became impossible to ignore, and a little in-jokey detail like the idea that the robber would be Brian's friend from #29 turned into a much bigger element, and I decided to reveal that Calvin and Gretchen were in cahoots a bit earlier than I'd had mapped out.

Some of the character related stuff — i.e., Brian "actually being smart" (but… not really) or Chase being gay (first hinted at in #96, over a year and a half before he came out) — I have filed away in the back of my head for the right time to do them — often the right movie to coincide it with. Calvin and Gretchen being in cahoots was set up in #196 and hinted at in one strip since then where I showed them talking in the background.

Most of the movie-related stuff is made up the same week before they're posted. (The day before for Monday's and on Tuesday/Wednesday for Thursday's.) Obviously the movie news-related stuff is improvised whenever something comes out that I feel the strip "needs" to comment on.)

I would love to do Multiplex more frequently than I do now, yes! But right now, it definitely wouldn't be profitable enough. Multiplex currently gets around 7500 readers per day, which is pretty good, but it's not huge by any means.

I do expect the book to do rather well for me (partly because it's almost pure profit, thanks to the Kickstarter backers), and if the first book sells briskly, I'll definitely try to get Book 2 off the ground as quickly as possible. If that also sells well, I might be in a position to concentrate on my comics for a year and see how it goes.