- Like I mentioned in the notes for the last page, I rewrote this scene numerous times at the last minute eventually settling on a simpler, less wordy version. This isn’t even am important part of this scene really. More of a bridge to what is to come. Sometimes it’s these kind of scenes that wear you out and make you work that much harder I guess.

- It’s been a long time since I drew rain and I am sure I’ve never inked it so I actually had to look around at how other artist’s handle it before I could do the first panel on this page. My recent fallback artist for inspiration is Naoki Urasawa and Volume 6 of Pluto has a really good rain scene.

- Not much more to say here but the next page things start getting weird.

I appear to be getting a lot of traffic coming from Brigid Alverson’s webcomics article on Robot6 si I just want to take a quick opportunity to say hi and encourage you to do the same here and let me know what you think of the comic so far. You’re all coming at a good time because there is a healthy but doable archive of pages so far that you can catch up on but we’re still early on into the story. I put out a new page on a semi-weekly basis. There is no set schedule for when new pages come out but there are a number of opportunities for keeping up on updates such as:

RSS Feed

My Twitter feed (Or the Nathan Sorry twitter feed where you don’t have to hear me talk about web design, politics, my kids and what I ate for lunch)

The Nathan Sorry Facebook page

Or you can get email updates whenever a new page goes up.

The story is just getting under way. Coming up next we’re going to see Nathan begin to lose himself in his new identity plus he’s going to get an unexpected visit very soon.

Once again, please leave a comment. I love to hear feedback.

- This is going to be a quickie 2 page scene before we move into a longer scene with Nathan slowly losing it in his new home. The idea is to lighten things up a little with some back and forth banter between Casey and Freddy. I realize this book is loaded with reflective moodiness but I’m trying to keep it from being a total downer. I’ve always liked stuff that was dark but not relentlessly heavy or depressing so hopefully I’m nailing the tone that I’m actually going for.

- When you’re working on a big story like this on a protracted basis, it’s weird to come back to a location (the diner) and characters (Freddy and even recently Casey) that you haven’t drawn in almost a year. I’ve made a lot of progress since I was last in Freddy’s Place yet I think I’m still making a lot of the same lighting and perspective mistakes.

- On a technical note, this is the first page that I’ve inked with my new Pentel Brush Pen. For those of you that don’t know, it’s a cartridge ink pen that has a synthetic hair brush for a tip. Up to this point I’ve been inking with a combination of tools but mostly with a #2 round brush. One of the goals of this book has been to teach myself how to ink like a real comic book artist and I’ve certainly learned a lot so far (though I’m far from being good at it) but I think can learn just as much with the brush pen and I swear I probably finished inking this page in about half the time. Efficiency and timeliness as you all know is something I need to get better at too so maybe this will help.

- On another technical note, I took this blog posting by Bryan Lee O’Malley to heart and tried keeping my word balloons as anchored to the top of the panels as possible. I usually fit them in where I think it makes compositional storyflow sense but his point might make even more sense.

- Oh, hey, this is page 50! That should be considered a milestone right? There’s still a long way to go but back when I started, 50 pages seemed like quite a long ways away.