Issue #5 - Signed, Sealed and Delivered

I finished Get That Chicken issue #5 this week, printed it and dropped it off around town (Metro Phoenix area). A thank you goes out to all the shops that provide me space to give away my book: Atomic Comics (Metro & Paradise Valley), Red Hot Robot, Drawn to Comics and Stalking Moon. Thanks to these great stores, their owners and workers, I have been able to hand out well over 500 copies of my mini comic so far this year.

During this week I also realized I was out of issue #3 (100 copies move fast) and I am almost out of issue #4. I also received my first written letter from a reader. A special thanks goes out to Stevie Hinton of Florida, the feedback was great.

Below is the cover from issue #5. I was trying something new with this cover, but could not get it to work to my liking. It appears that while I am able to do the panel and page work with the assistance of the computer, the cover is another issue. One of the problems is my scanner is not big enough to scan the full cover image in, so I have to copy it and reduce it, then scan it. Another problem is my abilities in Photoshop are on a novice level at this point and I am not sure how to use the technology to it full potential. Maybe next summer I will read a book on Photoshop and learn how to applies the programs many capabilities, but for now I am enjoying the learning process through trial and error.



Below is a scan of an interior page. I was fairly happy with the majority of the interiors. Still working on getting the backgrounds just right. I have been looking at old Krazy Kat and Bloom County strips and studying the background techniques in those strips. The clean up method I used for these pages was hot and cold. Sometimes it worked beautifully and sometimes it messed the pages up so bad that I had to start over. I will be applying what I learn to the weekly strips next year(Starting January 2009.)



All things are going well now, after my laptop took a crash last weekend. I had to move my work over to my wired computer. Good thing I saved my files on both the laptop and a jump drive, although I forgot to save all the tones I have been using. I was lucky that most of the tones I am using were downloaded with only a handful being custom creations at this point. I was able to replace all the tones in a matter of a couple of hours, including the custom created ones.

I Looking forward to working on the weekly strip during the month of October, then finishing up issues #6 & #7 in November.

take care,

dennmann