What I'm doing:
Scriptwriting, plotline/storyline, hosting, update script, and all of those other details.
What I need from you, the prospective applicant:
- Willingness to commit to a schedule. This is flexible (as mentioned, depending on your schedule this could be anywhere from a three-a-week to a once-a-week), and while I'd like to avoid it I can deal with the occasional late strip or similar or, if prearranged, missed week, but I'd like to have a fairly dependable schedule.
- Must be comfortable or willing to become comfortable drawing mechanical bits (vehicles, drones, cyberlimbs, so on and soforth). There will be a lot of these.
- Willingness to commit for a sustained duration. While the storyline I have in mind has a definite ending, I can't at this point say how long it will take to reach that ending—a few years at least, especially on a one-a-week schedule. That doesn't mean you'll be stuck 'till the end, but if you eventually decide to leave the project I'd greatly appreciate at least a few months notice to arrange a replacement.
- Willingness to redo scenes as necessary. I'll do my best to outline what's necessary so that we can avoid this, but especially early on while we're getting used to each other's styles this may become necessary.
- A drawing of one or both of the sample pages below.
- Scripts well in advance. I'm planning on trying to stay at least six scripts ahead of the current comic, more if possible, and will also try to stay at least a script or two ahead of you if you overflow the buffer above.
- Creative direction to suit your working style. If a visual detail is important to the comic I'll make it explicit, and I'll provide general direction, but beyond that it's your call. Take drawing a city: if you want me to give you descriptions down to the building, complete with pictures of similar-looking buildings, I can do that. If you'd prefer I just say "It's a city" and let you do the rest, I can do that too. If you've got all the Shadowrun material at your command and can pull descriptions of canon buildings on request, I can work that way. If you'll need pictures of three different angles of the Renraku Arcology or the Seattle Space Needle when it shows up in a comic, I can provide them.
- Freedom from site maintenance, hosting, etc. issues.
- Of course, full intellectual property rights to your creative work.
- Personal satisfaction?
Sample pages:
If you're interested, draw up one or both of the pages described below and send to my username at kanshishakage.net . The image can be in any common format for purposes of this sample (TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, etc. etc. etc.)—resolution is not terribly important at the moment except insofar as it should show off your work and scale to a browser-viewable resolution without losing important information (no giant resolutions with tiny words that will be lost if the image is prepared for web delivery, for example). Other than that, feel free to ask for more detail about any part of the samples.
You'll notice that the title is not set in stone yet. Make sure to leave someplace to put the title, whether superimposed over an area of the picture without anything important or in a box below or above the main picture. Feel free to put in a placeholder, but make sure it's something that can be removed.
Page One:
Scene, full-page: Seattle, view slightly below isometric, sunset, office parks in the foreground with fountains and fake hills and soforth, downtown skyscrapers in the background, maybe the Renraku Arcology somewhere in the distance. Space Needle if necessary, I don't know the city geography that well. Miscellaneous background drone or air traffic as desired. Foreground, a Strato-9 winging its way across the office parks.
Title. Need to think this up.
Page Two:
Slightly less than Page-width, third-height panel floating on top of main panel: Boardroom, somewhere in one of the office parks of page 1. Shot from outside the window, a number of people in suits. One man is standing, leaning over the table, apparently shouting at another man—optionally, one of them (but not both) could be an Elf. A younger-looking man stares out the window somewhere just to the side of the "camera".
Main panel, spanning the entire page: shot of the building from the same side as the above panel, Strato-9 visible some distance away from the building but approaching. Style of building something like a less wide, taller version of this or a more angular version of this. Not much in terms of people around—it's summertime, and at sundown most employees are long gone.
Smaller panel floating towards bottom center of page: dim view of the interior of a van with no windows (no need to make it clear to the viewer that that's what it is at this point), with a bucket seat and a woman with a cable running to her head—metatype and perhaps even gender should be mostly concealed by lighting. Text associated with this panel: dialogue, transduced: "Ready when you are." Dialogue, transduced: "Almost."
Smaller panel floating towards bottom right of page, slightly below previous panel and similarly sized: same view as top panel on this page, tightened significantly on the young man looking out the window. Should be clearly identifiable as some form of targeting mechanism—not necessarily crosshairs, but a circular view with perhaps a circular reticle. Text above reticle: ACQUIRING (in small caps, probably monospaced), other text nearby including details like range (something in the 80-meter range), wind speed (~3 kilometers per hour), rounds remaining (500), so on and soforth—this panel should be extremely information-dense, though there's no need for any of these items to be spelled out as such. We'll be using this format again for vehicle gunnery, so make sure you've got an explanation for what each piece of data is so it can change appropriately (if you add stuff beyond what I've outlined). Do what you can to keep the center uncluttered.
~J