A is for Army Ants Adventures

I'll be trying out this A to Z blog posting for April and see how I do... I haven't officially signed on with the various blogs participating, but I like it as a way to keep me focused for the next 30 days. I have been working diligently on Ants stuff, but I haven't been posting about it ('today I re-worked how to do tanks for the third time!' doesn't really lend itself to snappy updates) but I'm going to endeavor to be more on top of that... however, I'll start with a bit of an announcement that links to the letter A:

'Army Ant Adventures' the webcomic will launch June 1. I've worked out a format for the strip, written scripts for the first 8 strips, and drawn the first one. The plan is for this to be a weekly webcomic. I've been reading through classic Prince Valiant strips from the 40s, and have been inspired by the format/dedication/craftsmanship of the strip. I would like to emulate something on that order for Army Ants. I see the serialized stories covering small, medium and large chunks of story, with a series going anywhere from a handful of strips to a few hundred.

Out of the gate, I plan a series that will take several months to get through. I realized last night as I was inking the page that this was the first actual page of Army Ants comics I've done in over a decade. It was a little like riding a bike, and I lot not like riding a bike. I'm finding that I spend much more time on composition and organization that I used to - I revised the script for this one page a half dozen times, did a mockup, and then re-drew half of the panels on the page because I didn't like the layouts or flow of the narrative. It's definitely still a work in progress, and I have accepted that I am never going to 'master' storytelling in the comics medium, but it's a worthwhile goal. My plan was to spend about 2-3 hours per page, and I've already nearly doubled that (I'm somewhere near 4 hours on this one, and I still have about an hour left on it).

I'm off to keep working on specialties (where I ended my writing this morning) and to start thinking about what B stands for exactly... probably 'Big Enemies', but maybe something else will pop up in the next 24 hours...