These updates will hopefully give you a better idea of the comic-making process, hopefully without giving too much away story-wise. Think of them like DVD extras.

It was Zandria's notion to come up with an advertising poster. She had done some beautiful, initial panels, but when she suggested we do a poster, I got really excited. We're both highly-influenced by dark movies - and this story relies heavily on noir - so it was an exercise in trying to eek out the darkness and plot while playing with established noir themes.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I came up with the idea of a phone book advertisement for the robot escort service that's going to play heavily in the story.

Oh, I should mention that me and Zandria work remotely from each other - she's illustrating in Salt Lake City while I'm writing in San Diego. While we have a good understanding with what we want from this, sometimes it's hard to articulate ideas through email, so I came up with an idea and decided to make a crummy mock-up:

My accompanying email: "Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about that poster idea and I think I came up with a pretty simple, effective idea. It would be a close-up of an ad (possibly in a phone book) for the robot escort service ("Roboutique"...?). The ad would be only partially visible, as it would share focus with a gun laying somewhere in the frame...
But you can see the surface would be a little grimy and noirish. That Edgewater would also need to change - what do you think of something scary and jagged, similar to the Metropolis font? "

Here's her initial sketch: You can see that she improved my idea with the gun pointed around, towards the woman. Perhaps not the most subtle imagery, but nobody ever accused comics of being subtle, especially hard-noir stories. It also acts as a visual reference to direct viewers' focus - something I completely ignored in the mock-up. I thought it was the perfect amount of bad-assery needed to make the poster mint.

With black paint:
With text:
And finally, the finished product, with shading (and Zandria's hidden sig):
I can't speak for Zandria about how long this took, but she worked on it for a good weekend, and I can't tell you how proud of her I am. She had never drawn/painted a gun AND she was working with complex perspective stuff (images within images - something you don't think about when you're making dumb mock-ups). It all turned out beautifully.

Hopefully, this gives you a little idea of the process, but if every frame turns out like this, I swear to you, it'll be worth the wait and effort.

-Ryan