It’s fairly obvious by now, but Point of Contact has stalled. I hit a few weeks when I didn’t have the time to get a page done. Then those weeks became a month and on it went. It’s a shame, because I did some pages I was really proud of on the story. (I did some other pages which just make me wince, but we won’t mention those.)

Hopefully the story will return, but when it does I’ll have to back track a few pages. The action had shifted to Afghanistan, and that just wasn’t working. Add the fact that the situation in Afghanistan is pretty fluid and, at the rate I was drawing pages, events were likely to overtake the story before I’d even finished an issue’s worth of art. I shall go away and, should Point of Contact return, come back with a better first outing for the kids in their power suits.

I still want to do some sequential art storytelling, but future projects will have to be handled differently. It’s unlikely, next time I draw any comics, that I’ll publish any stuff here until after I’ve finished drawing it. I’d like to do some shorter tales, and possibly something similar to the old style newspaper strips. I’m thinking of dividing the comic pages into three horizontally and treating each of those tiers as a day’s strip, with occasional full page spreads to break up the rhythm. However, I only have some very rough ideas of what sort of stories to do. Keep coming back to find out where I end up going with this one.

This page took a lot longer than I’d planned, given that it was over half inked when I started on it this morning. I think I need to change my workflow.

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Something’s not right about the shading in this one. I shall endeavour to change it later.

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I’m sure the language used to describe the hostiles would be much more colourful, but I’m trying to keep this the equivalent of a 12A. So occasional swearing, some violence, but not too graphic, and some talk about sex but no on page nudity. I have some ideas for a 15 equivalent tale, and some more adult stuff, but that’s for another day.

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After a month long lay off, Point of Contact returns with a change of location. With luck and a little bit of effort I should be back on a weekly footing. The next two days will be dedicated to drawing pages, which should get me two or three weeks ahead again.

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Stroking the robot isn’t meant to be a euphemism. Sally doesn’t try to take in stray puppies and lambs, but she did once want to adopt a rusty old tractor and restore it.

I’m not very happy with how Alice has come out in this page. And my own experiments with beard growing haven’t helped me make Dan’s any better.

After several false starts trying to get the perspective right, with construction lines criss-crossing the page and confusing me, I decided to cheat and do most of the work in Photoshop. Below is what I actually drew. There was a fair amount of copying, resizing, mirroring and pasting done to get the final image.

No new Point of Contact page this week. With the last two pages it’s been obvious that I didn’t put enough work into designing the aliens before I dropped them into the story. So before I introduced the next big element in the story I thought it would be best to sit down and work out what they look like. The Extra Vehicular Activity suits are going to be iuntroduced in the next page and see action over several following pages. The rough designs, and a bunch of notes, were put together over coffee and hot chocolate on Wednesday. Some of the key elements occured to me as I was drifting off to sleep on Tuesday night, but I was too tired to even think of making notes. Luckily the ideas were still there when I woke up.

That was a little more wordy than I’d originally planned. I’ve started using Manga Studio Debut 4 for the lettering and it’s obvious I have to find a way to make the balloons more interesting. I’ve also detoured slightly from the original thumbnailed page pacing, which makes this one a little stilted. A bunch of big action pages start soon. I should be able to get the pacing back on track with those.

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I cut it a little close with this page. Not last minute, but close. I had a three page buffer going on for a while, but life and distractions ate into it. I’ll see if I can get a couple of pages done in the next week and get ahead again.

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It's so hard to tell without the lines drawn on it.

Big brothers can be mean some times. And is George Dorothy, or a friend of Dorothy?

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What has Sally seen? What is so beautiful? Find out next week.

You may notice that the panel sizes in this page are different from previous pages. This is because I crop the web comic pages to (or very close to) the edge of the art. Most of the previous pages have been full bleed, extending not just to, but beyond, the edge of the printed page at the size I plan to publish it. (More or less, I’m drawing Point of Contact to the dimensions suitable for a US comic, but I plan to publish it through Lulu, and their comic pages seem to have different dimensions again. This is something which has elicited much swearing from me and will no doubt elicit much more.) This page none of the art escaped the panels. There didn’t seem much point in reproducing the white space of the border.

You’ll also note a change in the lettering size and the use of bubbles. I think the text may still be too large, I shall be playing around with font sizes over the next few pages until I’m happy then going back and re-lettering all the previous pages for the print edition.

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This page has been through a number of changes from the original planned layout. Originally it and the next page were going to be a cut away to reactions in the White House to stuff dropping out of the sky. However that was going to mess with the flow of the two pages after that, spoiling what will be a big reveal in the printed version. So it became our heroes being tossed about as the spaceship hits. The hit was originally going to need art only in the top left and bottom right corners, with a fade from white to black and back again in between. Eventually I ended up with this page.

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A big, big spaceship bearing down on our heroes. How will they get out of this?

A continuity note- I was making a complete hash for drawing George’s stripey top, so I’m going to stop. I’ll remove the stripes in all the previous pages when I redo some of the art for the print version.

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I’m not sure whether the ship swooping out of the pack, approaching and becoming increasingly ominous works. Every page involves learning a bit more, and then applying that to future pages. I’m going to try to get the production rate above one page a week, so that I have more of a buffer of finished pages. 3 of the next 4 pages are splashes, so that ought to help.

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I’m not completely happy with this page, though it gives a good impression of what’s going on. I may redraw it one day.

I did a lot of shading for this one in Photoshop because I wanted to use all the gradient fill options.

Sally lights the rocket. This should almost work as a double page spread when placed next to page 3, as it will be when published.

I think I’ve managed to name all but one of the six characters I’ve just introduced, and it’s only the second page. Good going.