Chapter 3 is well and truly underway, now, and as you might imagine, this is yet again the first part of a two-page spread.  I’m going that a lot more these days, because I think that, not only are the results more coherent and satisfactory, they also are a lot more fun to draw.  It’s also a bit of a head start to me to have the heavy-duty sketchwork done in advance, two pages at a time.  So it’s off to the races.

The supersaturated colors I’ve used up to now are giving way to a much more limited palette here.  There’s basically only four or five colors here, but I think they work pretty well overall.  This happens to be one of the creepiest and moodiest scenes I’ve done so far.  All the atmospheric effects and so on: it’s new for me, but I think it’s retaining the original artistic direction of this comic pretty well.  Portraying the aftermath of an atomic exchange isn’t easy to do because we haven’t ever really had one, except for Japan, and that was pretty limited, however horrible it may have been in and of itself.  However, I can say from experience that this is what the aftermath of a wildfire sometimes looks like.  While I was living in Florida some years back the upper Everglades caught fire, and were burning as I drove up the edge of the event.  It was very eerie, as I was practically alone on the highway, the sun was dulled out by the smoke and the sky was kind of sickly red-brown.  I found out later that the stop-line for the fire had been only a few hundred yards from where I’d been; I remembered thinking I’d seen a bit of flame off in the distance, but had convinced myself it was my imagination.  In retrospect, it was quite possible, given that I was so much closer than I’d thought.  I drew on that experience for this sequence.

So anyhow, the first 6-Commando “stuff” I’ve been so cryptic about is apparently wending its way across the continent as we speak, having been completed about a week ahead of schedule.  I have to go through the whole rigmarole of seeing what I need to do to sell them, from a legal standpoint, but they are at least going to be in hand by the middle of the week, and when they are, I’ll make some kind of grand announcement or some such.  But until then I’m going to keep being cryptic.

Other than that, thanks for stopping through, and see you next week for the next half of this spread!