RAINY ROAD WARRIOR NEWSLETTER

October 17, 2021

This is part 2 of the production journal for the GunEngine Zero project. See the previous newsletter to read about how it all started.

And, just as a reminder, the plan is to launch a crowfunding campaign in April of 2022 to fund production of GunEngine Zero #1.

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Smoke me a kipper. I’ll be back for breakfast!

In the last newsletter, we left off at the point where some character designs had been done for GEZ (which was originally titled T.O.M. from Outspace). I was fine-tuning the concept and still in search of an artist to bring the whole thing to life.

I had actually considered completely scrapping the comic book version of this concept and reworking it as a novel but it was the sketches I had received from Andrey Portilla (particularly of Mya) that reignited my desire to see it presented graphically.

But, as I mentioned before, he wasn’t interested in working on it so I had to find someone else.

I eventually came across a group of artists calling themselves “Metakomik” (from Indonesia, I believe) that had an anime/manga style I thought would look good for the concept. They also produced some character sketches (based on more detailed designs I had developed) and test pages from the script for issue #1.

There were a few problems, however. Number one was, since I was initially dealing with the “manager” of the group and not directly with the artist, there was some miscommunication down the line. Add the language barrier on top of that and it was quickly becoming a frustrating experience.

I put a lot of thought into the details of every story and if some of those details aren’t correct, it can throw the whole thing out of whack. I can usually ignore minor deviations from the script and I’m okay with an artist exploring creative alternatives as long as they don’t run completely contrary to my original intent but there are some things I just can’t work around.

For example, while the first panel of the page below looks great, the scale of the boat and the dock/pier are way off.

The story takes place in a small beach town, not in a large city as indicated by the skyscrapers in the background. And the characters you see run a small, family-owned shrimping operation but you would get the impression that they were a massive corporation by the size of the boat and the dock/pier. Not to mention that the size of the cargo they unload is about three times what it should be.

Now, you might say, “Maybe you should have specified the size of these things in the script or given them photo references, jackass!” And my answer would be, “Why, I did, good sir!” And I would say it with a cockney accent because I’m a smeghead.

But I digress.

You can see in the “thumbnail” version of the page, their initial presentation to me was quite a bit different than the final art.

What I believe was happening is that one artist was drawing the thumbnails while another was drawing the final page all under the direction of the team manager, who apparently wasn’t conveying all of the necessary details.

Another example is the first panel in the page below. The road was supposed to be spotted with small rocks. Having the rocks instead be giant boulders makes no sense when you know where they came from. (You’ll be able to find that out if and when the first issue is produced.)

With all of these little mistakes and communication problems, we eventually came to a mutual decision to end our collaboration.

(To be clear, I’m not trying to bad-mouth anyone. Their artwork was good but we couldn’t get on the same page, so to speak.)

So, once again, I was off in search of an artist.

Maybe a month later, I happened to be scrolling thru Facebook when I saw a post for someone seeking work. His name was Ian Waryanto and it turned out that I owned some of his published work but his name didn’t ring a bell at the time and the samples I saw weren’t from that comic. I was impressed with his art and eventually came to an agreement with him to join the project.

It wasn’t until a short time later, when I looked at more of his portfolio, that I discovered he was the artist on Alterna’s The Mighty Mascots, which is a comic I had bought for my daughter.

Later, Ian suggested Anton Bandi for the job of colorist because they had also worked together on that comic and another colorist I had tried wasn’t able to produce the look I wanted.

In the next newsletter, I’ll show you more of Ian’s artwork as he helps me nail down Gunny’s look and get the ball rolling on the first 6 pages of the first issue of GunEngine Zero!

Exclamation points!!!!

~ Michael T Gonzalez

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INDIENOGO

This is actually the 3rd time I’ve tried using IGG. All with the same result: basically zero support. Why? I don’t know. But it’s clear that I’m banging my head up against a wall over there. So, while Kickstarter hasn’t been spectacular (for the reasons I’ve mentioned before) at least the little bit I’ve been able to scrounge up over there is better than the nothing I’ve gotten at IGG. So I’ll be concentrating on Kickstarter and showing at conventions in 2022. Unless society completely collapses between now and then. We’ll see how it goes.

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SHAREWARE

Did you know that I had (and continue to have) lots of ridiculous, crappy ideas? Let me show you one of them!

This is a sketch of a character called “Monster Moe”. He’s a hitman with a bowl haircut (like Moe from the Three Stooges) who operates in very unconventional — some might say slapstick — ways. Like, hiding in a coffin at a funeral to whack a dude.

Where’s my Eisner?!

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T-SHIRTS ON STORE FRONTIER

Click the image above to go directly to the store!

I’ve uploaded a bunch of t-shirt designs to Store Frontier that you might want to check out. I’ve tried Red Bubble, Teepublic and Teespring but they always had problems. Either the shirts weren’t printed correctly or the quality of the shirts were poor. I ordered one of the “Rainy Road logo” shirts for myself and the printing looks good and the fabric is nice. And they have sizes up to 3XL. If you have particular designs or colors (because they only allow me to set 3 colors per design) you’d like to see offered, hit me up and I can see what I can do.

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GIVEAWAYS!

If we can reach 100 subscribers to this newsletter, I’ll start giving away random stuff, like comics (or sets of comics), posters, sticker sets, artwork (Oh, my!)

So tell your family, your friends, your enemies, your pets, your pet’s enemies and your social media followers to visit rainyroadmedia.com and sign up for the newsletter.

The more the merrier!

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