Layouts for Grimwood's Daughter

These popped up on eBay the other day. You can see the auctions here and here. Stop by and give 'em a bid or two.

Grimwood was drawn from a full script, so even at this early stage, I wanted to work out the line endings and balloon placements. These were slightly text-heavy and I was a novice so knowing exactly how much space was available for the art was important. The final lettering was done by Harvey Kurtzman's letterer at the time, Phil Felix. I think I took over the lettering myself on the later chapters to avoid mailing the boards back and forth.

And, just to see if anyone was paying attention, I slipped in a Springsteen lyric in the last panel.

Grimwood's Daughter: cover sketch

It looks like this was drawn for a previous Grimwood collection that never came together.

1986 KC Convention promo art

Convention organizers occasionally ask their guests to produce a piece of art to help promote the show. You can see one such piece here and another here.

For the drawing below, I decided to draw Brii from Grimwood's Daughter (in a different outfit) along with Dr. Strange, Moon Knight and an oddball, cartoony character I'd been trying to turn into a series called "Mr. Lizard".

True story: The fellow who bought this original hated the "Mr. Lizard" drawing so much that he painted over it with white out.

Grimwood's Daughter: Chapter three, page four

Several sketches for this one.  I think I could have gotten away with the first version, but my final take on the last panel has better expressions, or at least it has expressions that fit the dialog better.

Pencils for the Grimwood cover

Who knew I'd made a copy of the pencils before I started painting this all those years ago?  I didn't, until I found this halftone stat the other day.

Grimwood's Daughter Hardcover Collection

Grimwood's Daughter wasn't my first work in comics but I think it was the first thing I did that was really worth buying. It ran as a back up feature in Dalgoda during the early 80's. The script was terrific. It was dark and sad and fit my twenty-something attitude better than any of the super-hero stuff I was being offered.

This collection is in black and white, with a "new" cover painting. I think it was done back in the early 90's for a French collection that never came together. We had a tough time rounding up art for all the interior pages and I ended up redrawing a few of them. I think most of you will be happy with the results.

If you enjoy those "sketchbook" sections in the back of collections, you're gonna love this one. There are pencil scans, thumbnails, rejected logo designs... more than a dozen pages of bonus material that's never been seen before.

So, go out and order a copy already! If you live anywhere near Wichita, Kansas, order it from Prairie Dog Comics. The owner, Marc Brown, is not only one of my oldest friends, he helped us out by supplying original art -- both story pages and prelims -- from his private collection. The book wouldn't have been as nice as it is without his generous assistance.

The order code for Previews is: JUL09 0942 GRIMWOOD'S DAUGHTER HC (MR) 09/30/09 SRP $12.99

Or you can always go with Amazon. They're offering it for 20% off.

End of plug. Thanks to Patrick Wedge for the prompting. I tend to overlook these things.

Grimwood's Daughter: the last page, inked

Grimwood's Daughter: the last page

Jan Strnad's script asked for a small inset of Tirol and Brii in the land of the Frost Giants, framed with a garland of ivy. I sketched it several different ways, two of which I'm showing here. But neither of us were satisfied with the layout and Jan thought the garland looked too much like a Christmas decoration so he suggested dropping the inset panel all together.

It made for a rather stark final page but it fit the mood of the story.

Fast forward 26 years...

We're trying to pull together all the art for a new Grimwood Collection, but no one can locate copies of the last few pages. I decide to redraw them and look forward to taking a second crack at a few details that always bugged me about the earlier versions. Most of them are just little inking problems but this final page cried out for a larger revision, in keeping with Jan's original script. I discussed it with our editor, Scott Dünbier and he agreed, if we're going to go to the trouble of redrawing that last page, why not get it right this time.

So I dropped the garland and made the inset much larger. I'm really happy with the results... finally.

I'll post a scan of the inks as soon as I finish them. Maybe even later today.

From 1985: Prelims for Grimwood's Daughter

I'll be talking more about Grimwood's Daughter later but for now I'll share a few preliminary sketches from the final chapter.  First, some rough thumbnail sketches.  These are tiny, four on a sheet of typing paper.  I was just trying to work out the basic compositions and see if things would fit.  Balloon placement and the flow of the story were two of the main concerns at this stage.  I also try to get a feel for the gestures and attitudes of the figures.

Next, I started working out the individual panels at a larger size.  Working at this size on a sheet of scrap paper is very liberating.  You can start over as much as you want, flop images, come back to an earlier take.  There's no rule against moving from thumbs to the finished board but I do better with several stages to refine the drawings.

I ended up using that last sketch, in the lower right corner, but I cropped in tight on the guy's head and hand.  If I had it to do over again I think I'd pull back a little and so that we see both characters a little better.  The body language is very important here and I lost some of it when I moved in closer.