NIGHT AT THE WESTERN

Sound and Fury

2010-05-04T02:26:00.000-07:00

Well, the sound and the fury of competition are over at Zuda, and not just for us, as it looks like the website is changing its format permanently, and eschewing the rough-and-tumble of the monthly competition in favor of some other - and yet to be named - method of choosing new comics. Part of me will be sad to see the competitions go: although it was a nerve-racking and painful process at times, and March probably aged me a year, I think that I learned a lot from competing. However, I have faith in the Zuda staff, and am sure they are making the right decision. Having runt he website one way for two-and-a-half years now, such a drastic shift would surely not be taken lightly, and I am sure it has been in the works for some time.

Meanwhile, we're working hard on Night at the Western: I've scripted out new screens, taking into consideration a lot of the comments that we got during the March competition: for one thing, you're going to be seeing fewer long caption panels and less voice-over as Yours Truly learns better how to tell a story visually. NATW is going to be a roller coaster of a ride, with plenty of bumps and shocks along the way, and I'm bursting with ideas but please do be patient, and keep in mind that October 2009's winner just started updating, so the leaves could well change before you see new panels from us up at the site.

In the meantime, feel free to peruse a tongue-in-cheek side project: because while Night at the Western might not be a barrel of laughs, many things in life are.

Night at the Western's "Soundtrack"

2010-03-24T10:43:00.000-07:00

I've always thought comics would be a little more interesting if comics came with a soundtrack, so here's a look at what our team listens to while we're working:

Music sets the mood, so when working on the darker stuff I listen to:

The Black Angels http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm9LEFETNOo
Dead Confederate http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ_FDT2tedc
Hank Williams http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JczEyQHBLEw
of Montreal http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBfgQvM7wtE
and Skalpel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDR3DnfzHg8

Skalpel, especially, with its cut-and-paste Polish Jazz tracks, has been in heavy rotation lately.

While Cesar is drawing, here are his top 5:

Los Punsetes - "Fondo de armario" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb_eIxp5DSU
Jay Reatard - "DOA" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiKd2wYJF20
The Wave Pictures - "I love you like a madman" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3NU8GFzaRs
Neil Young - "Old man" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVC2cszdTao&feature=related
The Jam - "That's entertaiment" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv55WsedLYI

Steven from Fonografiks has this to say:

I listen to Clutchy Hopkins a lot while I work. It's mostly jazz/funk instrumentals, like a tension filled score to a modern noir thriller that hasn't been filmed yet. Check out People's Market (as Misled Children) and Clutch Of The Tiger (with Shawn Lee).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9FkqPbYJsw

But what you hear in your head is, of course, entirely up to you!

Screen 8: From Story to Script to Screen

2010-03-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

Here's the penultimate competition screen -- where I'm trying to bring all of that menace we've built up together, and hint at the dark night to come. I'm working, in this screen, from this chunk of the original story:

For some reason, the kid's laugh set the man off, and he stopped dancing. "Shaddap!" he yelled. His eyes flashed. "Shaddap, retard!" He turned to the woman. "Emma, Shut up your retard son."
She smiled over at the table. "Go put some more songs on, Frankie. "Her eyes were sad. The man watched the boy get up. You could see in his eyes he hated the kid. The woman was ashamed, but she said, sharp and low to the man "Don't you tell him to shut up. He's a good boy."
They stood there and looked at each other for a while like a couple of wrestlers across a mat. I'd had enough of their show. I went to leaning against the wall again, smoking real slow. I disliked the cook very much. I have a kid brother who spends his time in a class with other kids like him. Some of them are in wheelchairs, or have braces on their legs. My kid brother just can't learn. Kids at school push him around. Once they got him to take a bath in the big sink in the locker room, and brought in the girls and stood around and laughed. Then when he got out crying and swung at one of them, they blacked his eye and busted his lip. The cook reminded me of those kids.

As with the other screens, I dialed up the menace a bit in the script:

Screen 8: Four panels, the first three across the top of the screen, the fourth a wider panel at the bottom.
Panel 1: Choker-shot of the greasy cook in his paper cap. Spittle flying from his mouth, in a rage:
   Cook: Shut up! Shut the hell up! Emma! Shut up your retard son!
Panel 2: Close-up of Emma, her doughy face now also twisted in anger.
   Emma: Don’t you tell him to shut up! He’s a good boy!
Panel 3: Medium shot of Frankie, sitting in the booth with an empty milkshake glass pushed off to the side. Frankie’s head is enormous, the hair on his scalp sparse, his mouth open in a worried O, with a line of drool sliding down his chin. His eyes are still invisible behind the thick glasses, which reflect the fluorescent light fixtures and, warped, the café itself.
   Emma (off panel): Go put some more songs on, Frankie . . .
   Caption: The cook and the waitress, Emma, stood there and looked at each other for a while like a couple of wrestlers across a mat.
Panel 4: The narrator’s face, high-contrast in the light of the café window, the cigarette still burning in the side of his mouth, drifting around the lengthy captions:
   Caption (top left): I'd had enough of their show. I have a kid brother in high school, a class with other kids like Frankie. My kid brother, he just can't learn. Kids at school, they push him around. Once they got him to take a bath in the big sink in the locker room, and brought in the girls and stood around and laughed.
   Caption (bottom left): Then, when he got out and took a swing at them they blacked his eye and busted his lip . . .
   Caption: (bottom right): Well, I found every goddamned one of them. Every. One. And now you can be damned sure they leave my little brother alone.

Hopefully leaving the reader wanting to see what lies ahead.

here's the thumbnail that Cesar worked up for this screen:

Followed by these pencils:

And these inks.

But the real beauty is in the final colored page, when the reflection comes to life. Check that out at Zuda, give us a vote, and add us to your favorites. Believe me, you want to see how this Night at the Western ends . . .

Screen 7: From Story to Script to Screen.

2010-03-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

From the Zuda message boards, it looks like Screen 7 is a bit of a favorite. It's one of my favorite screens as well, using a comics technique called a polyptych, where moving characters are repeated across a single background -- in this case, the three dancers moving left to right across the background of booths.

Here's the rather largish chunk of text I was working from:

He tossed me my keys and walked with a slow swagger back to the office. I gave him enough money for my whole room, since he was short. I knew I'd never see the half he owed me. But I'd won anyway. It was the principal of the thing that mattered. Not that he wouldn't have enough after L.A.; he'd have plenty. Plenty for the rest of his life.
I went over and took a look into the coffee-shop through the smudged plate glass. They didn't look like they expected much business. There was a man in a chef's hat dancing with a heavy woman. The man looked twenty or so. His black hair came out in greasy curls from under the short order cook hat, and his eyes didn't line up right on anything, like he was looking at two things at once. He had a big white grin on his face, and he could move. He had his greasy hands on the woman's hips and they were dancing something between a twist and a lambada--and he almost made it work. But the woman . . . she just stood there while he moved all over and laughed with her small lipless mouth hanging open. She had a very large pink uniform on, and I could see that her collar was sweat-yellowed even from through the window. She looked like a luckless forty or so, and her knees were being pulled down toward her calves by gravity. But maybe she'd been pretty once--when she was the man's age.
A kid sat in one of the booths, watching them. He was seventeenish, and his head was much too big for his body, so that it lolled always from one side to the other. His eyes were occluded behind glasses that told me he was near blind, but he watched them anyway, with his head lolling back and forth, and a thin line of drool hanging pendulously from his lower lip.
The man growled something at the woman, and sank his fingers into her expansive buttocks, which made her stop laughing long enough to slap at him playfully and say "Oh, sto-op!" This got the kid's attention and he started laughing too, real deep and slow like a steam train chugging up a hill. It was the laugh of a lobotomy case, and as he laughed he nodded his head up and down in time, and his mouth broke into an open-mouthed grin like a jack-o-lantern.
Which I stripped down to this page of script:

Screen 7: Two panels.
Panel 1: the hotel at night, with long quadrangles of light from the café window and the office, Nick walking away, a dismissive hand over his shoulder, who also has his back to Nick, and is faced toward the window of the café. The characters cast long, scattered shadows.
   Nick: Fine. I’ll have plenty of money once we get to LA, anyhow.
Panel 2: The café, viewed through the window, with the narrator’s head and left shoulder in the foreground (outside of and slightly obscuring 3, below). The panel is divided into three parts, with the action displayed as a polyptych across the three panels.
1: Near the jukebox, a man in a paper chef’s cap is dancing with a fat, doughy woman in a waitress uniform. He is wearing a grease-stained apron.
   SFX: Huh huh huh. Huh huh.
   Caption: They didn’t seem to be expecting much business.
2: They move across the floor past a table (in the foreground) with a couple of dirty plates and an empty coffee cup on it. The man has his hands on her fat buttocks. In the background is a kid, about seventeen, sitting in a booth and watching them, an empty milkshake pushed off to one side. His head is much too large for his body, and his eyes are invisible behind a pair of thick glasses. He is drooling. Now we see that it is him who is making the noise from 1:
   Emma: Oh, stooo—oop!
   Frankie: Huh huh huh HAH.
   Caption: This really got the kid going and his laugh started getting louder . . . like a steam-train going up a hill.
3: With a turn they are now in front of the lunch counter, and the man is holding the woman out at arm’s length. She is still smiling, but the expression on his face is one of anger.
   Frankie (off panel): HUH HA HA HA!!!
   Caption: It was the laugh of a lobotomy case, meaningless and loud, and as he laughed his head nodded up and down like a Jack o-lantern on a stick.

Cesar thumbnailed it out this way:

But then decided to change it.

And here are his excellent pencils:

Followed, as usual, by bold inks.

And of course, the full color, finished panel can be seen at Zuda Comics. Vote for us so we can continue to tell this story!

Screen 6: From Story to Script to Screen. ORIGINAL LYRICS

2010-03-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

The main feature of panel 6 is the use of tension -- voyeurism (the view through the window into the cafe) Slightly menacing lyrics issuing from the cafe jukebox, and dialogue that, at this point, is not fully comprehensible to the reader. Heavy shadows bring a Noir tension to the faces of the characters. I feel like we are taking big risks here, possibly alienating readers who want things spelled out right away -- but I want things to unfold at a suspenseful pace, rather than giving it to everyone on a silver platter and right up front.

Here's the chunk of story that I was working from:

Inside the coffee shop, there was a jukebox playing at low volume, and the tinny sound of "Mammy!" filtered under the door. Interwoven with the music was another sound which I finally identified as laughter--a woman, probably heavy. A young man's voice answered her. And then another voice could be picked out, a childlike one talking very slowly and deliberately. The woman kept laughing, and her voice, high but with the full sound of weight behind it, gave me chills.
I decided I was going to get the key from Nick before I lost my room rights--I was too tired to put up with his knocking around in the middle of the night tonight.
Nick was walking out of the office toward me. He had a big shit-eating grin on his face, and he was holding up two sets of keys.
"Separate rooms," he said. 'You're in number nine. I'm in number ten. Queen sized beds. Color television. Free HBO."
"You paying?"
"Sure . . . for mine."
"And half of mine." I was fishing through my pockets for a cigarette, glaring up at him.
'Fuck that."
"Pay for half of mine. I need to explain it to you? To spell it out? What?"
He stood there with the keys in his hand, weighing his options. I had the cigarette in my mouth and was trying for a lighter now.
"Fine. Whatever," he said finally. "I'll have enough to pay you back after L.A."

As with all of the panels, I pushed around a lot of the details, deciding to reveal certain things a moment earlier, and other things a moment later, than in the original story. Here's the script:

Screen 6: Five panels, arranged to fit best:
Panel 1: Nick coming out of the office door, in shadow, backlit, but we can see the grin on his face.
SFX: Music, drifting across the panel: I’m gonna turn you around and put you upside down . . .
Panel 2: The café window with the “Open All Nite” sign in close-up. A blurred figure wiping a counter down. A jukebox in the corner, all of it hazy through condensation on glass.
   SFX: Music, emanating from the jukebox . . . and if that don’t stop your runnin’ around
Panel 3: Nick’s hand dangling a key out to the Narrator:
   Nick: You’re in number nine. I’m in number ten.
   SFX: I’m a-goin’ to set my foot right down on you, a hoo-hoo . . .
Panel 4: Two-shot, the narrator taking the key.
   Nick: Queen-sized beds, color TV and HBO . . .
   Narrator: And you can pay for half of mine.
   SFX: Music continues: I’m gonna stop your struttin’ baby
Panel 5: Choker shot, the Narrator dragging on a cigarette, smoke curling around his face.
   Nick (off panel): What the hell for?
Narrator: I have to spell it out for you? What?
SFX: Music: Till you say you’re through!

At this point, the observant reader will realize that the music has already changed from what was playing in the story. From Al Jolsen to Buddy Holly. And it's not Buddy Holly in the final panels singing, but yet a third song. It was Buddy Holly until the last minute, when we found out that we wouldn't be able to use those lyrics (defensible, I thought, as a cultural reference) and had to replace them. And here's where a varied career comes in handy: I had lyrics of my own from way back in university, when I was upright bassist for The Chop Tops and I penned a country / blues number called "I Blame You." Since this screen is all about some unexplained tension between the two men, the lyrics fit perfectly.

Cesar thumbnailed the panel out like this:

And from there worked up these pencils:

Which became this heavy ink. But wait -- notice any difference? That's right -- the wrong character was smoking in the pencils :)

And here is the original lettering, with the Buddy Holly lyrics:

Sorry about the Copyright infringement, Buddy -- though technically, you've been dead over fifty years, so why does Paul McCartney still get to make money off of your work? It's a strange world, indeed.

To see the final panel, visit Zuda Comics. and don't forget to rate us, vote, and add us to your favorites!

Screen 5: From Script to Severed Fingers . . . er . . . Screen, that is.

2010-03-10T05:00:00.000-08:00

Screen Five is one of my favorites for sure, and the moment when we get a flash of what's in store for our characters at the Western Motel -- and we get to make a visual rhyme between the glow of a Coke machine and blood -- one of my favorite moments of this 8-page teaser. Here's the script:

Screen 5: Divided vertically into four panels.

Panel 1: The Narrator emerging from the office door, crossing toward the coke machine panel left. Behind him, Nick is leaning on the counter, talking to Laura.

Caption: But that’s how it was.

Panel 2: he is standing in front of the coke machine. We see him in profile, tense face in the red, bloody-looking light of the machine, plunking quarters in.

Inset: Quarter going into the slot.

Caption: Dead as dead could be.

SFX: Kt-Chunk!

Panel 3: The Narrator’s POV, looking into the office at Nick, who is leaned across the counter and holding onto Laura’s wrist. She is in mid-laugh, her teeth showing. It is her right hand, and it looks as if he is about to read her palm or something similar. We see all of this through the glass doors and OPEN sign on the window, all the clutter of looking in from outside.

Panel 4: A pool of blood on a concrete floor , a bloodied hand missing two fingers, and the top of a scalp, not identifiably any one character’s, though the hair is dark and matted with blood. Drifting across the inset in jagged lettering, and bleeding just slightly over into the full panel: LLLllaaauuuurrraaaa!!!!! Whhhaaaiiii???

Caption (to main panel): And he wouldn’t be the only one.

Which Cesar thumbnails out here:

And then turns into this set of unnerving pencils:

Followed by these heavy inks, after the jump:

But for this panel, like all the others, it's the colors that really make it come to life. You can see those at Zuda, where we hope you'll vote for us and add us to your favorites so we can keep Night at the Western going!

Screen 4: From Story to Script to Screen

2010-03-08T05:00:00.000-08:00

Screen 4 is the first interior, and gives us a chance to meet our "femme fatale" in this story -- Laura. if anyone gets that name-check, you let me know.

This, basically, is the chunk of story that I was working with for this screen:

The office was a shabby little room, with handwritten notes on the walls about smoking (none in the rooms) and checkout times, and dusty posters of desert island vistas and palm trees on beaches-neither of which were anywhere near this place. There was no-one behind the counter, but we could hear the TV playing in the back room. We rang the bell.

I remember the feeling that hit me when she walked out. Her face was like a painting I had seen once and stared at wondering. Nick started in on her instantly--I recognized that look; his face went a little white, and his smile came out, wolfish, charming.
"Hi."

She smiled at us. She was short, with black hair, pale skin, her face a little round. She had glasses on with thick frames that made her look young, poor, and smart all at the same time. She was pretty, but not in a California way. She was wearing a blue knee-length dress and a black faux-fur coat.

"Hi," Nick drawled. "We need a room and some gas." He leaned over the counter and nudged me in the shin (my signal).

And here is how I converted it to script format. I made a major change, and decided to use a film noir technique of heavy foreshadowing here. I want the reader to know that some of the characters are doomed, but just be wondering how . . . and more importantly, who will survive. Not as extreme a technique as D.O.A or Sunset Boulevard, both films which start with dead narrators, but I wanted Zuda readers to know up-front that there would be a bodycount.

Screen 4: Divided horizontally again. One widescreen panel along the top, then two panels below.

Panel 1: The office is a shabby little room, with handwritten notes on the walls about smoking (none in the rooms) and checkout times, a chipped formica countertop, and dusty posters of desert island vistas and palm trees on beaches. Happy people in ‘50s bathing suits grin out from the beach photos on the walls. The shot is from behind the two men, with the Narrator still on the driver’s side, slightly frame left, Nick to the center, ringing the old fashioned bell.

SFX: Ding!

Caption: There was nobody behind the counter, but we could hear the TV playing in the back room.

Panel 2: Medium shot of Laura, coming from the back room. A pale face with a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, hair in a bob with bangs, and thick-rimmed glasses that look out of place on a face this classically beautiful, in an old-fashioned way. She is wearing a thrift-store faux-fur coat and a dress with a lace collar.

Caption: She was pretty, but not in a California way . . . she had one of those faces that you find yourself staring at in wonder, like a painting that catches you in a gallery.

Panel 3: Counter-shot, Nick’s face with a wolfish grin on it.

Nick: Hiii . . .

Caption: He started in on her right away. I’d seen it before – this sudden shift in him, an alertness that came into him like a dog hunching its shoulders.

Caption: Suddenly so alert . . . it was hard to imagine that by dawn his blood and brains would be all over the cement floor of some lonely garage.

If that doesn't get the reader's attention, I'm not sure what will . . .

Cesar thumbnailed the scene out like this . . .

And from that, built these excellent pencils, which you can see after the jump . . .

And this ink. he captured Laura exactly as I wanted her -- like someone out of another era.

Here's the scene lettered in black and white, after the jump . . . but see if you can spot the difference between these panels and the final panel up at Zuda. I'll give you a hit: evitcepsrep

To see the full color final panel , come visit us at Zuda Comics, where we hope you'll cast your vote for us. And don't forget to add us to your favorites list, rate our comic, and say hello on our message board. We'll be waiting for you . . .

Screen 3: From Script to Screen

2010-03-05T05:00:00.000-08:00

This screen contains what is probably my favorite panel of these eight screens (although what I'm really looking forward to is beyond screen 8) -- the introductory close-up of Nick, framed against a starry country sky. Even the pencils are evocative, but I feel like the inks are perfect, and the use of color in the final panel is amazing.

First, the script.

Screen 3: Divided down the center, horizontally, into two panels. The first shows a high-angle shot of two men getting out of the car, both of them wearing tan barn coats and jeans. There is a real similarity to them, accentuated by this angle. The man on the driver’s side has slightly lighter hair.

Narrator (figure on driver’s side): I suppose we could just stay the night here.

Panel 2: Close-up of Nick’s face. It is a handsome, chiseled face, with an ugly expression on it of anger.

Nick: Since we’re lost and won’t make LA inside of five hours, why not?

SFX: ZZZZZzzzt!

Caption: I would just as soon have driven all night. The place was a dump, and I fully expected to see a cockroach making lazy circles in the sink in the room. But it was almost 1 in the morning, and I was practically falling asleep at the wheel.

Cesar roughs the panel out in this thumbnail:

The care that Cesar takes with the characters is amazing, especially in the panel 2 close-up:

But the inks are, on this panel, transformative:

At this point, we turned the screen over to Steven for lettering. here's the result, after the jump:

you can see the completed, colored version of this page at Zuda Comics. Please vote for us! And don't forget to add us to your favorites, rate us, and leave a comment on our board!

Add Us As a Favorite!

2010-03-04T22:39:00.000-08:00

In order to add Night at the Western as a favorite, click on the little red square to the right of the screen. I've circled it in the picture below. This is an important part of the competition, so add us and help us advance in the rankings!

Night at the Western Makes Headlines in Spain

2010-03-04T21:09:00.000-08:00

Check out this review in Entrecomics! I can't read it, but maybe Cesar can give us a translation! Night at the Western has the most worldwide team ever to compete at Zudacomics -- an artist in Spain, a writer in Tajikistan, and a letterer in the UK.

Screen 2: From Story to Script to Screen

2010-03-03T08:00:00.000-08:00

For screen 2, I was basically using this chunk of the original text, plus some left-over images from earlier in the story:

We'd been driving the back roads through the valley to L.A. I had suggested taking the back roads as an interesting alternative to the 101 or the 5. I'd also packed the wrong map, and driven this straight country road, passing the numbered gravel tracks on either side (too lonely for names) until they had approached the forties and then ended abruptly, leaving only the empty straight blacktop and the frostbit fields on either side. I yanked the Bronco across the gravel and brought it to a stop in front of the office. OPEN ALL NITE the sign said. A bug light near the door buzzed blue, victimless. It was January, and there was an unseasonal freeze, a newsworthy one that plunged temperatures to near zero and turned the promise of California to a chill lie. We'd stopped talking, Nick and I, an hour ago.

Which I converted to this screen in the script:

Screen 2: A 70’s model Ford Bronco pulling into the parking lot. The place looks shabby – window-model air conditioners sticking out, one room window boarded up with plywood, shingles missing from the roof, trash in the parking lot, the burned out neon of the sign. The café’s lettering is half peeled off the window.
Caption: We’d been driving the back roads of the valley to LA, as an alternative to the 101 or the 5.
Caption: But I’d packed the wrong map, and now we were lost on country road that rolled forever past frostbitten fields and numbered gravel tracks.
Inset panel: A sign in the café window reads “Open All Nite.” We see an out-of focus figure wiping a counter, beyond.
Inset panel: A blue bug light over the office door.
SFX: ZZZZZZzzzzt!

Cesar thumbnailed it out this way:

And then worked from that to make his first pencils, which you can see after the jump -- only this time, he made one small mistake:

Notice the light over the door . . .

I realized that "bug light" was slangy and not translating, so I went and found some images on the web and sent them along to Cesar. He corrected it in the inks, here:

Afterwards, we sent it off to Steven for lettering. To speed things up, we would send inked panels to Steven who would letter them, before the color had been done. Later he would drop the colored, finished versions, in -- making any coloring changes that were needed once he'd seen the final tones. Here's panel 2 with the lettering:

And of course, the final version can be seen here at Zuda Comics. We hope you give us your vote so our team can continue the story . . .

Completing the Team: Lettering Night at the Western

2010-03-02T06:40:00.000-08:00

There always seems to be a debate going on on the comics boards -- a very partisan debate, between the different aspects of comics. The artists have a tendency to say that it's the art which is preeminent: without good art, a good story is worth nothing. The writers often hold the opposite view: without a good story, the art is just meaningless images.

Maybe it's the fact that I am such a huge fan of the visual arts, but I hold the view that both are important -- are, in fact, integral to one another and inseparable. To me, it hardly seems to be an argument worth having.

Both camps, however, forget the importance of that often-forgotten comics art: lettering. I've definitely seen some comics with excellent writing, great art and cringe-worthy lettering, both online and in print. Cesar and I were determined not to make this mistake, so we put an ad up at Penciljack for a letterer to join us in the Zudacomics gamble. And just as I got lucky finding Cesar, we got extraordinarily lucky when Steven from Fonografiks agreed to round out our team. A professional with years of experience under his belt, Steven was the final piece of the puzzle for us, designing a lettering style that fit perfectly with Night at the Western's style.

Cesar sent the inked first page along to Steven for a test, and this was the result:

Clearly, we had a winning combination. And to see how it all came together in the end, stop by Zuda and take a look at the completed screen. While you are there, CAST YOUR VOTE for us so we can keep telling this story . . .

Screen 1: From Script to Screen

2010-03-01T13:00:00.000-08:00

I couldn't possibly find a better artist than Cesar for bringing my words to life. Cesar's not only a talented artist with a style that suits my vision perfectly; he's an attentive reader of the script, and brings every detail to life. I try to build room for the artist to innovate into the script: I want to be exact about how I see things, but not tell them everything. Cesar uses this room perfectly, "getting" where I want to go with a panel, but innovating as well.

Script to Thumbnail:

Here's the script for Screen 1 again. Let's watch Cesar take these words from thumbnail sketch to pencils to inks.

Night at the Western

For zudacomics

Words: Ray Nayler

Images: César Sebastian Diaz

Lettering: Fonografiks

All gutters and trim full black where panels are not full bleed. Colors are muted, dark, a focus on reds, browns, oranges and the occasional blue.

Screen 1: Night. Splash full-bleed full-color of the Western Motel sign: a neon sign shaped like a cartoony cactus with half of its letters burnt out announcing the W STE N OTEL and ACANCY in cursive below. Post-card-like insets in sepia-tone show different views of the Motel in better days.

Post card 1: an L-shape of rooms with and office at the left, long end of the L and a detached café. Sleek 40’s cars lined up in front of the rooms.

Post card 2: A pump-jockey in a paper cap filling the tank on a bulletnose Ford with a big grin on his face.

Post card 3: A man in a car coat leaning against the café counter, dinking a coffee and laughing while the waitress leans across, taking his order. Behind them, “Western Motel Café” is painted across the window in 50’s script (backwards from this angle).

Caption: It was the Coke machine that made us stop, and a lonely set of gas pumps on an island between the office and the coffee shop.

Caption: The Bronco’s gas gauge was below the red line and the little yellow E on the dashboard said it was stop now where we could maybe get the tank filled and a cup of coffee . . .

Caption: or stop later on the side of some lonely country road.

Here's Cesar's thumbnail sketch of what I'm going for:

Thumbnail to Pencil:

Which he uses to develop this amazing penciled screen:

I didn't see the thumbnail until we decided to put this page together for you -- Cesar would just send me the finished pencil so that I could proof it before he inked it. Since he nails the mood I'm going for here, and the details (with a few minor differences I would not quibble over -- see if you can catch them), I gave him the thumbs-up, and he went ahead and inked screen 1, the results of which you can see after the jump:

Pencil to Ink:

Cesar's inks are so immaculate that part of me wanted to stop right here, make this a black-and-white comic, and forget about color. But then he sent me a color sample . . .

And I was completely sold . . .

In the next post:

Lettering, and rounding out the Night at the Western team . . .

Screen 1: From Story to Script

2010-03-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

In the first entry, I gave you a look at a part of the original story that Night at the Western comes from. In this entry, I want to show you how I converted the story to the script.

The script for panel 1 basically covers this chunk of the original story:

The motel was a small dim island of light. Coming over a little hill, we saw it slanting along one side of the road. A neon sign shaped like a cactus announced it with burnt out and flickering letters as the WE_TERN MO_E_. Lights were on in the office, and in a little coffee-shop in the gravel parking lot. There was a sick old Oak at the opposite end of the strip of rooms, leaning over the furthest room from the office like a reproachful parent. Two near identical cars in the parking lot near the coffee-shop sat with rust eating their metal, frost and bald tires sagging. The road went on slightly downhill and straight, through a countryside as empty as the motel.
It was the Coke machine that made us stop, and a lonely set of gas pumps, the ancient bubble-head kind, between the office and the coffee-shop. The gas gauge on the Bronco had dipped below the red line, and was approaching the little yellow E on the dashboard. We'd been driving the back roads through the valley to L.A. I had suggested taking the back roads as an interesting alternative to the 101 or the 5. I'd also packed the wrong map, and driven this straight country road, passing the numbered gravel tracks on either side (too lonely for names) until they had approached the forties and then ended abruptly, leaving only the empty straight blacktop and the frostbit fields on either side.

Luckily, I've got a pretty visual style to begin with, so it isn't as difficult to convert things as it could be if I was a different type of writer. Still, the way you tell a short story with words, and the way you tell it with words and images together, need to be entirely different. I wanted to make sure that I was using the strengths of both modes of expression. Something I'm particularly careful about as a writer is using the form well: I don't want to do it with words if I can do it with images, and I certainly don't want the two to overlap.

Here's the original script page I came up with for Panel 1, after the jump.

Night at the Western
For zudacomics

Words: Ray Nayler

Images: César Sebastian Diaz

Lettering: Fonografiks

All gutters and trim full black where panels are not full bleed. Colors are muted, dark, a focus on reds, browns, oranges and the occasional blue.

Screen 1: Night. Splash full-bleed full-color of the Western Motel sign: a neon sign shaped like a cartoony cactus with half of its letters burnt out announcing the W STE N OTEL and ACANCY in cursive below. Post-card-like insets in sepia-tone show different views of the Motel in better days.

Post card 1: an L-shape of rooms with and office at the left, long end of the L and a detached café. Sleek 40’s cars lined up in front of the rooms.

Post card 2: A pump-jockey in a paper cap filling the tank on a bulletnose Ford with a big grin on his face.

Post card 3: A man in a car coat leaning against the café counter, dinking a coffee and laughing while the waitress leans across, taking his order. Behind them, “Western Motel Café” is painted across the window in 50’s script (backwards from this angle).

Caption: It was the Coke machine that made us stop, and a lonely set of gas pumps on an island between the office and the coffee shop.

Caption: The Bronco’s gas gauge was below the red line and the little yellow E on the dashboard said it was stop now where we could maybe get the tank filled and a cup of coffee . . .

Caption: or stop later on the side of some lonely country road.

I boiled down the imagery to a sign, with its neon half-burnt out, and three inset "postcards" of the motel in better days . . . decay (moral and physical) being one of the themes of the story. This way, I'm able to contrast the postcards with the establishing shot which will come later, in panel 2 . . . so some of the story material will end up in the second panel.

Another choice I made is to use what's called a COLD OPEN. This is a common cinematic technique where instead of the title right away, you get an opening scene and then the title / theme. The first panels of Night at the Western are all cold open. The title screen will come later (if we win). Cold opens are used for suspense, to establish mood, and to keep the reader's attention. That's what we're doing here . . . we hope we've done it well.

Next entry: from Script to Screen.

The Beginning: The Original Short Story

2010-03-01T09:11:00.000-08:00

Welcome to all of our fans and fellow Zudites! We thought it would be interesting for you to see a little bit of the behind-the-scenes work that went into the development of Night at the Western.

This is a journey that actually started a long time ago, when I was 19 years old and living in a Victorian-era studio apartment above a liquor store in San Jose, attending Foothill Junior College, working full time, and struggling to get my first short stories published. I penned the short story version of Night at the Western in a tiny breakfast nook I had converted to a writing room, sitting in front of a window overlooking a criminal stretch of The Alameda, with a view of a pay phone that hookers used to contact their drug dealers and johns. I was poor, overworked, and almost completely free: in short, it was the perfect time and place to compose crime stories, and that's what I began to do. I wove my own experiences traveling across the country by train and car together with the Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson novels that I had been reading ravenously in-between my classes and my job at a bookstore. The result was A Night at the Western and a handful of other dark tales. They all had different fates: some were scooped up by publishers of small magazines, others never saw the light. Meanwhile I had moved to foggy Santa Cruz and completed a degree in Literature and kept writing, publishing my first novel, American Graveyards, in 2001.

Cut to the present day: after a decade of traveling and working in a number of different professions, as well as continuing to write, I decided to try my hand at a genre that I've loved since I was a kid: the comic book. I'm not ashamed to call them comic books or comics: it's better if we don't get too fancy. I prefer the word "movies" to the word "cinema" and I think all of that highbrow language is just a way to divide people.

Looking for material of my own that I could convert into comics, I began with another story, "The Ride," and started looking for an artist with a style that suited the subject matter. I found the amazing artist Cesar Sebastian Diaz via the boards at Penciljack, and we set to work. Cesar suggested trying to compete at Zuda Comics. I had already finished "The Ride" and the script was far too short, so I began converting "A Night at the Western," probably one of my personal favorites. We teamed up later with Steven Finch from Fonografiks who lent some fantastic lettering skills to the project and rounded out our team.

And so here we are in Zuda's March competition. This blog will be about showing you how we got here as well as how things are going now, so I guess I better start from the beginning -- the original story that I turned into the Night at the Western script. Here it is after the jump -- or at least the portion of it that became these first eight panels -- there's lots more, but if you want to see how it all ends, you'll have to vote for us!

A NIGHT AT THE WESTERN
By Ray Nayler

The motel was a small dim island of light. Coming over a little hill, we saw it slanting along one side of the road. A neon sign shaped like a cactus announced it with burnt out and flickering letters as the WE_TERN MO_E_. Lights were on in the office, and in a little coffee-shop in the gravel parking lot. There was a sick old Oak at the opposite end of the strip of rooms, leaning over the furthest room from the office like a reproachful parent. Two near identical cars in the parking lot near the coffee-shop sat with rust eating their metal, frost and bald tires sagging. The road went on slightly downhill and straight, through a countryside as empty as the motel.
It was the Coke machine that made us stop, and a lonely set of gas pumps, the ancient bubble-head kind, between the office and the coffee-shop. The gas gauge on the Bronco had dipped below the red line, and was approaching the little yellow E on the dashboard. We'd been driving the back roads through the valley to L.A. I had suggested taking the back roads as an interesting alternative to the 101 or the 5. I'd also packed the wrong map, and driven this straight country road, passing the numbered gravel tracks on either side (too lonely for names) until they had approached the forties and then ended abruptly, leaving only the empty straight blacktop and the frostbit fields on either side. I yanked the Bronco across the gravel and brought it to a stop in front of the office. OPEN ALL NITE the sign said. A bug light near the door buzzed blue, victimless. It was January, and there was an unseasonal freeze, a newsworthy one that plunged temperatures to near zero and turned the promise of California to a chill lie. We'd stopped talking, Nick and I, an hour ago. We both got out, our heavy barn coats barely enough to fend off the chill. The air slipped into my lungs and tried to freeze me from the inside.
"I guess we can just stay here tonight." Nick said. "I don't think we should try and drive all the way back. We can leave early, make L.A. in the morning. Couldn't be more than four or five hours away."
I nodded. I wasn't liking him much. He'd bitched me out all day in explosive intervals as we passed increasingly empty white and brown spaces in the valley. He never offered to take the wheel. I would just as soon have driven all night--the hotel was a dump, and I fully expected to see a cockroach crawling in languid circles in the sink when we entered our room. I glanced at my watch. It was 12:45.
"We can get a map here," shot Nick.
"Fuck off."
The office was a shabby little room, with handwritten notes on the walls about smoking (none in the rooms) and checkout times, and dusty posters of desert island vistas and palm trees on beaches-neither of which were anywhere near this place. There was no-one behind the counter, but we could hear the TV playing in the back room. We rang the bell.
I remember the feeling that hit me when she walked out. Her face was like a painting I had seen once and stared at wondering. Nick started in on her instantly--I recognized that look; his face went a little white, and his smile came out, wolfish, charming.
"Hi."
She smiled at us. She was short, with black hair, pale skin, her face a little round. She had glasses on with thick frames that made her look young, poor, and smart all at the same time. She was pretty, but not in a California way. She was wearing a blue knee-length dress and a black faux-fur coat.
"Hi," Nick drawled. "We need a room and some gas." He leaned over the counter and nudged me in the shin (my signal). I walked out of the little office and over to the Coke machine, which stood near the IN door to the coffee-shop. The freeze was showing no sign of letting up--the night was at least as cold as the night before, if not colder. My breath clouded in the air. Very far off I could hear the hollow sound of a train whistle in the frozen air. The stars were invisible behind a layer of low-lying clouds, and the moon, now clear, now obscured, was a boring ovoid 3/4 full disc in the sky. I pushed a couple quarters in the slot and leaned against the wall sipping my Coke and watching Nick in the office. I could see him still leaning across the counter, and the girl laughing up at him. Now he was taking her hand, and talking about something on her finger. A ring, I supposed. That was a good trick. I hadn't seen him do it before--maybe it was a new one. Inside the coffee shop, there was a jukebox playing at low volume, and the tinny sound of "Mammy!" filtered under the door. Interwoven with the music was another sound which I finally identified as laughter--a woman, probably heavy. A young man's voice answered her. And then another voice could be picked out, a childlike one talking very slowly and deliberately. The woman kept laughing, and her voice, high but with the full sound of weight behind it, gave me chills.
I decided I was going to get the key from Nick before I lost my room rights--I was too tired to put up with his knocking around in the middle of the night tonight.
Nick was walking out of the office toward me. He had a big shit-eating grin on his face, and he was holding up two sets of keys.
"Separate rooms," he said. 'You're in number nine. I'm in number ten. Queen sized beds. Color television. Free HBO."
"You paying?"
"Sure . . . for mine."
"And half of mine." I was fishing through my pockets for a cigarette, glaring up at him.
'Fuck that."
"Pay for half of mine. I need to explain it to you? To spell it out? What?"
He stood there with the keys in his hand, weighing his options. I had the cigarette in my mouth and was trying for a lighter now.
"Fine. Whatever," he said finally. "I'll have enough to pay you back after L.A."
He tossed me my keys and walked with a slow swagger back to the office. I gave him enough money for my whole room, since he was short. I knew I'd never see the half he owed me. But I'd won anyway. It was the principal of the thing that mattered. Not that he wouldn't have enough after L.A.; he'd have plenty. Plenty for the rest of his life.
I went over and took a look into the coffee-shop through the smudged plate glass. They didn't look like they expected much business. There was a man in a chef's hat dancing with a heavy woman. The man looked twenty or so. His black hair came out in greasy curls from under the short order cook hat, and his eyes didn't line up right on anything, like he was looking at two things at once. He had a big white grin on his face, and he could move. He had his greasy hands on the woman's hips and they were dancing something between a twist and a lambada--and he almost made it work. But the woman . . . she just stood there while he moved all over and laughed with her small lipless mouth hanging open. She had a very large pink uniform on, and I could see that her collar was sweat-yellowed even from through the window. She looked like a luckless forty or so, and her knees were being pulled down toward her calves by gravity. But maybe she'd been pretty once--when she was the man's age.
A kid sat in one of the booths, watching them. He was seventeenish, and his head was much too big for his body, so that it lolled always from one side to the other. His eyes were occluded behind glasses that told me he was near blind, but he watched them anyway, with his head lolling back and forth, and a thin line of drool hanging pendulously from his lower lip.
The man growled something at the woman, and sank his fingers into her expansive buttocks, which made her stop laughing long enough to slap at him playfully and say "Oh, sto-op!" This got the kid's attention and he started laughing too, real deep and slow like a steam train chugging up a hill. It was the laugh of a lobotomy case, and as he laughed he nodded his head up and down in time, and his mouth broke into an open-mouthed grin like a jack-o-lantern.
For some reason, the kid's laugh set the man off, and he stopped dancing. "Shaddap!" he yelled. His eyes flashed. "Shaddap, retard!" He turned to the woman. "Emma, Shut up your retard son."
She smiled over at the table. "Go put some more songs on, Frankie. "Her eyes were sad. The man watched the boy get up. You could see in his eyes he hated the kid. The woman was ashamed, but she said, sharp and low to the man "Don't you tell him to shut up. He's a good boy."
They stood there and looked at each other for a while like a couple of wrestlers across a mat. I'd had enough of their show. I went to leaning against the wall again, smoking real slow. I disliked the cook very much. I have a kid brother who spends his time in a class with other kids like him. Some of them are in wheelchairs, or have braces on their legs. My kid brother just can't learn. Kids at school push him around. Once they got him to take a bath in the big sink in the locker room, and brought in the girls and stood around and laughed. Then when he got out crying and swung at one of them, they blacked his eye and busted his lip. The cook reminded me of those kids.