Alex Heberling

Phew.  I’ve been working on this comic for 12 hours now, which is the halfway point.  I’m making surprisingly good progress, with 18 pages drawn and 15 inked.  And when I say inked, I mean the basic lines of everything.  Later, I’m going back to black in things that need to be black, add weight to some lines here and there, and perhaps add some interesting shading with colored pencil.

I had lots of ideas going into this thing, but lo and behold, at 11 this morning when I saw down to start, I could remember none of them.  So I hopped online and used an idea generator until I got an idea I liked.

So far, the comic is set in this cyberpunk-y distopian future.  I have no idea whether it’s Earth or not.  I’m literally making this up as I go along.  (Wheeheee!)  Anyways, there’s this caste of people called the Marked, and they are like… basically the slave caste.  Someone is marked when they’re born (by a biotech protein enzyme thing… biotech, yeah) and from there they are farmed until adulthood and then sorted into various jobs.

Mariah is a Marked woman who is an assassin.  She is assigned to kill another woman named Jana, who has been working and working to open a women’s bar in this city, and some crime people syndicate things have employed the assassin’s guild to remove her.  Trouble is–oh no!– Mariah and Jana are actually good friends.  So Mariah, knowing that she will be killed herself if she refuses the job, ‘takes’ the job in order to go warn Jana that she’s in danger.

Wackyness ensues!  I don’t want to give away the rest, since that would defeat the purpose of making it a comic, and plus it’s not all done yet.  I’m surprised that I came up with a story like this, over some of the other ideas I’ve been mulling over the past few weeks, but I’m really interested in where it’s going to go.

Also, I remember the real reason I don’t ink anymore: after 12 hours of alternating inking and drawing, MY HANDS REALLY HURT.  Oh god, my tendons.

I’ve been documenting this process with a video camera, so I’m vlogging this event, too.  Sometime next week I should actually be able to edit the video and throw it up on YouTube for the viewing.

I’m either going to call this comic Mariah, after the main character, or Pariah, since Mariah sounds like it, and it’s appropriate.  Though a bit pretentious.  Back to work!