Revising the format of the older artwork has allowed me to tweak the storytelling. I didn't notice as much when inking the first time how much information was crammed into a given page. By allowing panels to 'breathe', the story actually flows better. Having reformatted the very first Ninja Baby story, we arrive at 16 pages. I'll be reformatting the second story as time permits.

Looking forward to this book being completed! We've plotted the third story that will be in the book, I'm excited by what's in store....
 

Incremental forward progress

My wife's input has been invaluable; her comments have allowed us to steer our publishing venture in exciting directions, and I'm grateful for that.

We've discussed the format for our first book, based on printing cost; she also brought up the point that a certain book size is popular, and it got us rethinking the pages I'd already inked. With rescanning and reformatting, we can package Ninja Baby as a 'manga digest', which will allow the artwork to breathe better, and appeal to our target demographic.

I'm thrilled by this direction, and will start tweaking the finished artwork. As a bonus, it'll be easier to achieve a certain number of pages, without necessarily creating much new artwork. 

I'm looking forward to having our first book ready to sell!

A New Year, ripe with promise

It depresses me a bit how I haven't spent much time on our small press endeavor over the last few months. Focusing on paying work remains a priority, and I look forward to the day when I can place all my attention on our 'baby'.

Discussing things with my partner in crime, it seems that a decent sized 'graphic novel' is the way to go. That would be easier to sell than a comic book, especially considering that the market for kid's comics seems so dead (which is itself depressing considering how comic books were a powerful entertainment phenomenon in the past). Deciding to target young readers hungry for graphic novels just makes sense.

The trick is figuring out the size of the book. 100 pages seems daunting; even 80 pages (a size which appeals to me on account of the Silver Age 80 page giants I love to collect) is a lot of pages to fill. I think 64 pages might be the answer, a decent amount of material for the print format we're looking at.

Currently I have 24 inked pages of Ninja Baby; expanding the book as described above will involve some work, but the end result should be exciting and inspiring. Just gotta get cracking on it, which fits in with my resolution to sharpen my focus in 2013.