Decisions and Givens

A conversation with Chris today during which I realised that despite my moaning about collaborative decision making in my last post, I had actually made some decisions that I hadn't informed Chris about.  Or maybe not decisions, rather there are a few things that I had assumed were givens that maybe needed some discussion.  These are:

• I am drawing everything, including speech balloons and lettering - we're not using a computer programme to do this.
  
• The panels will all be hand drawn, too - straight lines, but hand drawn straight lines, not done with a ruler.
  

These are givens to me because it's just how I draw - it's what feels, and looks (to my eye), right.

A decision that we have arrived at jointly is that the page layout will be based on the Golden Section.  I had previously understood a bit about this, but last year I picked up Scott Olsen's book The Golden Section: Nature's Greatest Secret, which is actually pretty mind-blowing.  It's too complex (for me) to fully explain here, but you can of  course read about it on Wikipedia, but Olsen's book (published by Wooden Books) is more aesthetically pleasing.

A conversation early tomorrow will have to be about whether we're going for portrait or landscape layout.  Pretty fundamental...

As I've thought about what I'm aiming at for the look of the strip.  It has been impossible not to pitch it, in my head at least, in relation to the work I know, to the comics I have read over the years.  As we approach the time to actually start drawing the work, my instinct seems to have settled on a look somewhere in between two key influences: the cleanness and poise of Dave Gibbons' work on Watchmen (and a strip he drew for Doctor Who comic, Stars Fell On Stocksbridge [?]), and the anarchy and energy of Jaime Hewlett's early black and white Tank Girl strips for Deadline magazine.  That ambition of course is then filtered through, or restricted by, my actual ability, and we'll see pretty soon how that turns out.