Hello friends and ghouls! I was going to put out a new blog yesterday, but getting my 2nd vaccination shot made me want to sleep all day. It really wasn't that bad, and I suggest that everyone go and get it. I haven't talked about it much, but I lost my step-father to Covid four months ago, and I wouldn't want any family to go through something like that.
Moving on to comics and the main subject of this blog entry – thought bubbles! What the hell happened to the thought bubble (or balloon) in modern comics? It probably got phased out to make comics feel more like movies and TV, a more cinematic vibe. We have enough comics in film and TV now, so I feel the time has come to bring them back. I started using them a little in a western short strip The Rifleman, and I plan on using them on my next project, which is a horror adventure series The Forbidden Museum.
Thought balloons can do something that movies and novels can't, they can show visuals and inner monologue at the same time. A novel lets you inside a character's mindset, while movies give you epic visuals, but only comics can give you both. Caption boxes have been used in place of thought bubbles, but captions work better to set up a page, or to tell a reader time and place.
How awesome is it to show what a character is wrestling with internally, revealing Information that only the reader and the character know? It instantly makes the reader feel closer to that character, and it's a great device to build tension and drama. A great example is Spidey thinking about how he's about to run out of web fluid in the middle of fighting the Sinister Six, or the hidden love that Logan feels for Jean Grey. These are things that are easy to express with no words in film, but much harder in a drawing.
What am I up to this week?
I'm getting colors and lettering finished up on my sci-fi book Mars City Vice issue #2, which will be mailed out to backers in early July. You can read issue #1 right now on Comixology here (or just look for $2.99:
The Kickstarter pre-launch page for my new horror/adventure comic The Forbidden Museum is up:
If you like classic monsters and Hammer Horror films, then you need to check this out, and please share! If that does sound interesting, go to the pre-launch page and follow us. It helps to gauge how many people will be there on day one of our launch in July. Thank you!
We have a great artist team on this book: Luke Archey (The Rifleman, Kubert School) doing interiors and award-winning artist known for horror Tom Mandrake (Grimjack, The Spectre, Martian Manhunter), oh and some roustabout named Craig E. Sawyer writing.
Dracula did not die at the hands of his hunters: Jonathan Harker, Van Helsing, Mina Murray and Quincey Morris, but was imprisoned, along with other legendary monsters, inside Harker's Forbidden Museum, located a mile under the British Museum. Now, Dracula, Wolf-man, The Mummy, Gill-God, and Frankenstein's Monster have been freed again to walk the Earth by Jonathan's great, great-grandson Henry Harker, who must re-imprison them or stay the museum's undead curator for eternity. Artist Luke Archey and my take on a new shared classic monster universe. Our goal is to do a successful Kickstarter and then seek a publisher for nationwide distribution.
We also have a pretty cool trailer for the comic (see below)
Thanks for reading my blog and please follow me here and on Instagram: @csawyerwriter. If you have any questions about making comics or writing in general, please comment. Be safe or be dangerous, but always be creative.
Craig
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