Hi folks! As a little sneak preview of the sort of thing you'll likely be seeing as work on the new book gets going, over the next few updates I'm going to go behind the scenes of my first book The Aviary. Today I'll be talking a bit about the first story I drew for the book (though it actually appears third in the final collection), The Social Circle of Professor Winterbottom...

To begin, let's turn the clock back a ways, to the spring of 2001. I'd been living in Brooklyn for close to three years, had an absurdly low-paying job at a stock photography archive, and hadn't really drawn any new comics since graduating from art school in 1998. Much like now, I was frustrated that I spent all my time making ends meet (and just barely, at that) and could never seem to make the time for drawing comics, which for some odd reason I've always considered my "calling", if you'll forgive a little hyperbole. I had recently discovered Scott McCloud's 24-hour Comic idea / constraint / challenge - basically, one writes and draws a complete 24-page comic from scratch in 24 consecutive hours - and decided to give it a try. If memory serves, when Memorial Day weekend rolled around, I sat down at my drafting table and set to work. As a starting place for inspiration, I grabbed some random photos I had in my tiny "archive" of reference materials (less necessary these days, what with these internets, but still great to have around) and started making up a story. After an hour of making notes, I had a story that would be waaaay too long to finish in 24 hours. Frustrated, I decided to abandon this convoluted mess, grabbed some small scrap illustration board lying near my desk, picked out a handful of different photo reference, and started drawing a new story directly in ink...


Those are a few of the random images I was looking at. That dog on the left for some reason became a liquor-loving socialite scientist named Professor Winterbottom, and faux old-timey silliness ensued. I wound up breaking the rules of the 24-Hour Comic by splitting the work into two 12-hour sessions (more or less), but when that weekend was over I was thrilled to have made a new comic. Drawing a large part of it directly in ink without planning made things a little rough - just look at how our title character changed shape over the course of the story:


Let's fast-forward a little bit. Over the next few years, I would resort to similar binges of cartooning - a few long weekends a year would be spent cranking out the idea for a new story. The stories were self-contained at first, but then connections started to suggest themselves. Characters from old stories seemed to want to appear in new ones. I began to see that all of these comics I'd been making lived in the same strange little world. Our canine professor and his compatriots turned up in later stories, usually drinking and chatting away. Here they are in a story called Unraveled Bandages:


And here they are again in a story toward the end of The Aviary, called Amber (fun fact: Amber was the title of my convoluted, aborted first attempt at that 24-hour comic I mentioned earlier, ideas and characters from which would find their way into various nooks and crannies of The Aviary...):


When I eventually decided to collect all of these connected stories into the one big book that would become The Aviary, I realized that the goofy little comic I had drawn way back in 2001 was in no shape to be included. The characters looked different, the drawing was sloppy, and the original pages were actually drawn smaller than the final book would be. So the only solution was to redraw the whole comic...


As you can see, those scraps of paper I'd drawn the first version on were a totally different shape than the final book would be. But I still liked the narrow vertical compositions of the original, so to make the story more at home in the new format but still keep that verticality, I added a little old-timey border around the panels, which fit the tone of the story nicely. Re-drawing gave me the chance to make the characters visually consistent, add the occasional little detail, and just make the whole thing cleaner. Here's a few before-and-afters for ya...








Aaaand that'll about do it for now. You can read the whole story in The Aviary, of course. Thanks, everybody! Just a little over 3 weeks left to go until funding ends - keep sharing the link to this project with everyone you can. The more, the merrier. If you're not a backer yet and like what you've just read, there's lots more on the way, so join us!

Next update: Inside The Aviary, Part 2 - The Call of the Quiet Bird-Man...