Here come the layouts…

Mack’s playing with my mind. I just know he’s done more than just these two pages of layouts for the first issue. I’m sure we got all the way to page 10 when we met up at Xmas.

(BTW – great place to work on a comic and not look like a crazy person in Newcastle, the Intermezzo Coffee Bar at the Tyneside Cinema. It was full of media types, all raving about their latest project, but in a totally unassuming way, that you’d never find in Soho.)

Layouts pp.1&2

Mack’s a big fan of the process of making comics. Like anything in life, we’re all so used to seeing the finished product, we so rarely give much thought to the process. Have you ever watched a building being erected? I once lived in Manchester next to where they were building a multi-story car-park – perhaps the world’s least interesting piece of architecture, but watching it going up was strangely fascinating.

In the same vein, we’ve decided to show the process of building the comic from the ground-up. Sure, we’re not getting into the story-telling part just yet, but both me and Mack are the kind of guys who could spend hours in an art gallery, scrutinizing an artist’s preliminary sketches and largely ignoring the finished piece.

That’s not that weird, is it?

Is it..?

The second piece he’s sent me today is a little character study for The Corsican, who you won’t meet right until the end of Issue 1, so we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here, jumping from one end of the story to the other.

The Corsican

And the third piece he sent me today…

…well, that’s for our next project. Yeah, yeah – we haven’t even finished this one and we’re already talking about the next one. Hell, we’re talking about the next five projects. You didn’t think this was a one-shot deal, did you? No chance of that.

We’re thinking about posting some of our other work on a sister-site to this. URBN will stay our main focus for the time being but, whenever we’re working on a project, we always have a rush of other ideas – especially at this stage, where the initial story is written and I’ve got some time on my hands to work on other things while Mack perfects the character designs and before we launch headlong into the four full issues of SWRD’94.