- I mistakenly thought I’d be able to fly through this particular page but two things tripped me up a little. One is: drawing woods is something that seems like you can just jump in and start laying down spidery branches everywhere and it will just work. You know like Bob Ross does when he’s painting forests or mountains. Not the case. These panels got a little messier than I wanted them to be.

The other thing is in panel 5, I found that showing someone sliding down a hill in the span of one panel was not as easy to pull of as I would have thought. In hindsight, part of my problem here is the positioning of the panels. The cause of the fall happens in panel 4 but the result is diagonally across the page. So the simple act of the reader’s eye moving across the page seems to break up this action unfavorably. I wish now I had made those two panels smaller (which would have implied a quicker pace than the rest of the panels) and fit them next to each other. Then spread out the following panels to emphasize the shock a little more.

Possibly another reason I had troubles is that the reference I was looking at was these fantastic, hi-def shots from a cheese-rolling competition in Gloucester, England. The fast shutter speed freezes the action of these  blokes tumbling down the hill to the point that when you really look at it you almost lose sight of the motion that was involved. So there wound up being something kind of static about how I drew Nathan sliding down the hill.

All in all it still came out okay though. I mean, I probably didn’t need to have him fall for any real story reason here. If this was a movie it would be handy to have him fall  in order to get him down the hill quicker rather than make the viewer sit through him carefully stepping his way all the way down. In a comic I can have a character cover a great distance in the span of one panel without using a transition to show time has passed. It’s also not that big a hill anyway. I guess in terms of character building it further proves the point that the hero of this story is not exactly sure-footed in anything he does.

If anyone wanted to know why I don’t draw comics about ninjas or people fighting each other all the time it’s because I have trouble with something like a guy tripping.

- Something I’ve been meaning to do here for a while is to recommend some other webcomics that are out there that might appeal to you if you enjoy Nathan Sorry. Every once in a while I’ll try to pick one that I think is pretty great and write a little something about it if I can.

If you’ve been following comics for the past decade you’ll know that even though the industry is in dire straits financially it’s also been in a golden age of creativity. In most cases the writing and in a lot of cases the art is so much better now than it has ever been in the history of the medium. Plus, people are making comics about all kinds of subjects and in all types of genres  This is especially the case in webcomics where creators are generally unconstrained by editorial dictates or market feasibility. You can make a webcomic about anything you want and if it’s good people may start reading it.

All that said, even webcomics can feel like they’re treading a lot of the same ground over and over. And even webcomic creators want to get readers and make money so you see a lot of comics tackling subject matter that is going to find an audience pretty easily (comics about video games, Star Wars gags, office culture, geek culture, etc.). One thing that I love about Dan Goldman’s Red Light Properties is that even though on its surface it’s a comic about ghosts it’s really a comic about real estate in Florida. It’s about a husband and (ex-)wife team who help Floridians exorcise their homes of ghosts in order to put them on the market. What I used to love about one of my favorite TV shows ever, Six Feet Under, was how refreshing it was to see a show that was about a profession other than lawyers, cops or doctors. Yet they managed to tell a lot of interesting stories set around that funeral home. The business Dan sets his comic around here seems just as fresh and just as ripe for storytelling.

The other thing I love about it is that it is populated with quirky, unusual but seemingly real characters. It’s really more like a good HBO or Showtime program than what you might expect from a webcomic. I’ll be honest in that I haven’t read as much of Red Light Properties as I’d like. It’s hard to keep up with because Dan updates like every day or something. I’m not sure how he does that except that his unique art style incorporates video screengrabs of actors and locations that he shoots and 3D renderings that he then seems to rotoscope. I’m sure I’m doing a disservice to his process by trying to describe it but he seems to have it down to the point that it saves him a lot of production time. It really fits well with the type of story he’s telling and helps give it that quality, premium cable drama/comedy feel that I think it has.

- Speaking of webcomics, I recommend checking out the new webcomic portal site, InkOutbreak.com. It’s a nicely designed way to follow a number of different webcomics when they update, including Nathan Sorry. For webcomic creators, it gives some nice tools to help gain new readers. I just started using it last week and it seems promising. Similarly, Neatorific.com is much simpler in its scope but is also pretty nice way to find new webcomics.