kartooner

Lately I’ve been receiv­ing emails in regards to the sta­tus of Sidev­ille, my pend­ing web­comic. I could have typed up a polite email, saved it to my hard drive and mass mailed it to the Sidev­ille mail­ing list but I decided that in order for me to clar­ify the progress of Sidev­ille I would need to post the offi­cial word here on kartooner.com.

First of all, I’m excited that so many peo­ple are inter­ested in Sidev­ille. It’s some­thing I’m eager to share with those who express inter­est and like you I’m anx­ious to see what devel­ops. Yet, I’m some­one who doesn’t spare qual­ity for quan­tity and that essen­tially means that I’m going to deliver the comic in tip-top form with­out cut­ting any cor­ners or bet­ter yet wast­ing your time with garbage. It’s in my nature to cre­ate imag­i­na­tive things, like­wise my cre­ativ­ity works in such a way that I do my research and spare no expense in deliv­er­ing some­thing unique and appeal­ing. You could call it per­fec­tion­ism, but I like to call it “pol­ish­ing a dia­mond”. When you think about it, a dia­mond doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily need to be pol­ished but by swip­ing it with a cloth you’ll enhance the shim­mer and you might impress a few more people.

In the past few months since I announced Sidev­ille I’ve been work­ing on con­cep­tual sketches, out­lines and most impor­tant of them all, the script. The story is pretty much all in my head but in order to for­mu­late my thoughts and get things in order it’s cru­cial to me that I write a script. I’m sure most of you are famil­iar with a script and it’s pos­si­ble you might have come across one once or twice in your life­time or bet­ter yet, you might’ve writ­ten one yourself.

A script out­lines the dia­logue between your char­ac­ters and not only that, it allows you to paint a pic­ture of each scene. One advan­tage of this method is that you can iron out the kinks and rework cer­tain sequences and when you’re ready to sketch it out you’ll have room to impro­vise, with­out wor­ry­ing if the plot­line makes any sense. My friend, Max Riffner, comic book artist and mole­skin lover, out­lines and scripts his comics before he even starts sketch­ing the pan­els. By doing this he can visu­al­ize the comic in his head as he reads the script to him­self. When it comes time to lay the ink he doesn’t have to sec­ond guess him­self unless he’s play­ing a vicious mindgame with himself.

In addi­tion to all of the above, I’ve also been swamped with var­i­ous projects, attend­ing col­lege (once again) and doing my best to be a good father and hus­band, main­tain­ing finances, yadda yadda yadda. The bot­tom­line being that Sidev­ille will still be unvieled, but when the time is right. Let’s just say that I won’t pull a Duke Nukem For­ever and keep up the hype with­out deliv­er­ing any­thing of sub­stance, that just isn’t in my nature.

If you haven’t already, add your­self to the Sidev­ille mail­ing list. Only those who’ve opted in will receive “juicy”, “cap­ti­vat­ing” and “mind-boggling” updates on the progress of Sideville.