Welcome to The Emerald City (Part 2 of 2)

Now to give you a quick set up of these next few pages; as we saw in the first set the detectives and Officer McMillan have just started their investigation. We left off with Detective Head giving Detective Yamamoto his feelings about Officer McMillan. Officer McMillan was unfortunate enough to catch a piece of Head’s editorial as he hustled up the tapes from the SPD parking garage. This natural lead to a very uncomfortable situation, but there still is a murder to solve and the investigation must go on.

As McMillan explained in the last page of the last set, he got the boys to edit the tapes into one continuous feed. Now our detectives get to sit down and see the grisly murder that happened hours before in their own parking garage.

We are pleased to show you this preview of book 1. Please write us some comments and tell your thoughts, the feedback means so much to us.

-Kevin M. Jones

Welcome to The Emerald City (Part 1 of 2 cont.)

I am pretty excited we got these pages worded and up here for you guys to take a look at! This book/dream is something Kevin and I have worked so long and hard to create. Even though we had so much going on in our lives we have always worked on the book and kept grindin. This is the next best thing to having a printed copy in my hands. Seeing the pages worded and the book nearly complete is hella exciting. I am pretty proud of both of us, and I am proud to be able to present to ya’ll to read, I think you’ll dig it.

The pages you see up here are kinda experimental in the wording, but we wanted to get them up. So if ya want to comment on them that would really be cool. Other than that we just kinda want to put em out there, have ya’ll take a look, and hear what ya think.

So I am back to the board to finish up pencils and inks on the third book. As you fellow artists know it takes a buttload of time to get a page turned out. So enjoy these pages and I look forward to hearing about what ya think of the story, the art, and the wording. We will put the next series up after the first 3 pages had time to marinate, then we will say some things about the scenes after hearing what ya ‘ll think. As always, thanks a lot for visiting and reading. We really appreciate it.

Jason

Welcome to The Emerald City (Part 1 of 2)

Here is the first set of pages that we promised! We are quite excited to present these pages to you. We have done some tooling around with the fonts and the general presentation (read as: sitting around and cursing at our computers), but they are not entirely set in stone. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! From the blog all you need to do is click on the page to make it bigger. For a quick rundown on what content you will be seeing on these pages check out my last entry to the blog. So really it is our pleasure to give you the first worldwide glimpse of the Emerald City.

-Kevin M. Jones

Pages Coming Soon

But before we get these pages up; I thought I’d take the chance to kind of layout what you are going to be seeing from these pages. We are going to put up 6 pages in total in two sets of threes from issue 1. These pages are going to focus on the characters that we introduced earlier (check out their bios if you haven’t yet): Detective Ai Yamamoto, Detective Richard Head, and Officer McMillan.

Basically these six pages are what get our police involved with the main storyline. What you get to see in the first part is shadowy murder about to take place in the parking garage of the downtown Seattle Police Department. Following that you will get to see homicide detectives starting their investigation of the bizarre and grisly murder.

The detectives quickly discover that this is not your usual murder case as they are sifting through the evidence. What they keep coming up with seems to be impossible. One person manhandled their way into the police parking garage and proceeded to murder a police officer with their bare hands. Something about the evidence tickles the brain of veteran police officer McMillan. He predicts that this is just the very beginning of something really bad; something he has already been through once.

A few of my personal thoughts on why we decided on these pages out of 30 page comic:

For myself I thought these pages were important to show not only because the police play such a big role throughout the story, but because they are one of the few mundane characters in the story. We have a few more “everyday Joes” who play pretty big roles in the story, but none as big as the police. I really like this aspect of writing for them because they are finding stuff that is really abnormal and really frightening. It is true that they are homicide police and have seen some really bad stuff, but as the story goes on you get to see how the “normal” people react to and handle these situations. Also I love the art in these scenes it makes me so happy to see some of my ideas ripped from my mind and put on paper without a misstep. Everything to how the characters interact with each other has been captured beautifully by Jason. Speaking of which, these scenes also really show off the working relationships and personalities of our police officers. The first set should be up here shortly; sadly regular life has slowed us down a bit, but they are coming real soon. Thanks!

-Kevin M. Jones

Rest In Peace Robert Jordan

I know that this is a comic blog about a comic book that Jason and I have been making, but today one of my real life heroes passed away. I have always been interested in being creative, but never really knew which direction to channel my creativity to. I started reading the Wheel of Time series when I was 14 years old. Before that I had hardly touched a fantasy novel, and because of my “troubled youth” reading wasn’t high on my priority list. But his series pulled me in, and I can really say was something that kept me from falling all the way into the abyss. He made that much of an impact on me and I never met him. His writing style was exciting, and dynamic; something I do my best to emulate within my own writings. In our series we use a number of characters to tell a story, something I really got from Robert Jordan’s writing style. I wish I could have told him in my own words how much his writing meant to me and millions of other people. Today I felt like I lost a childhood friend and mentor.

I would like to extend my condolences to his family and close friends.

Thank you for everything

Rest in peace

-Kevin M. Jones

The Art of Kurt McMillan

I remember when Kevin first brought me his idea of McMillan and told me about him and what he was thinking. At first this character idea of someone like Ving Rhames popped into my head. I did up some drawings but it didn’t fit at all. We talked more and McMillan’s Irish roots really accentuated his character and personality. After Kevin ripped up the rejected cop’s character and power bombed me I stared seeing things his way｡｡｡ and things seemed to write themselves. McMillan’s’ character was pretty unchanging. After that power bomb incident, the drawings of McMillan and his personality stayed pretty much the same. He has become one of my favorite characters both to read and to draw. He’s a bad MoFo. Why he isn’t always a major character and is often pushed outta scenes by a certain officer, we’ll call him Head, he is very important to the police and their investigation in the city. Even Head knows that. Kevin does a great job with his character and his dialogue, and I want do his boy justice with the art.
What I like drawing about McMillan, ya know beside that whole being a bad ass with a bad temper thing, is that he not a hero type character. He is always doing is job, his police work behind the scenes, not aspiring to be a lead detective or some glory cop. He has been in Seattle for along time and has seen things that others couldn’t begin to fathom, yet that doesn’t hang off his neck like some special medal or trophy. He has nothing to prove to anybody yet it seems everyone wants to learn from him….if it wasn’t for that reputation of his. So when drawing him it’s a bit different because he is this cop who is this fantastic character- yet I have to draw him buried into the background to make room for lesser characters who think they are important. That is challenging for sure. Besides that, McMillan is a cool looking dude and I like drawing his temper, his reactions with people he respects and those he doesn’t much or not at all. And like Kevin said before, McMillan fits in perfectly with the other two detectives, Ai, and Head.
I really enjoy reading their story and of course drawing them, so I hope you will as well. We will be putting up an actual scene from the first book focused on these three characters so that you can get a chance to form your own opinion, and hopefully tell us what ya think! Thanks a lot for being on our site and revisiting.
Jason

Reflection on Head

Richard Head is a pretty cool character to draw, because it gives me a chance to work on his smug facial expressions and his sometimes childish body language, but at the same time drawing him as an overall confident and intelligent man in his actions. Richard Head’s original drawings aren’t too much different to what he has become today. He went through some massive overhauls in his character. I think Kevin said in his earlier post that originally, Head was supposed to be this jerk, but that’s changed, and one of those major changes is that I wanted to add this sort of uniqueness to his face that portrayed his now cunning personality and ability. I didn’t want him to be that TV pretty boy cop…cause he ain’t -but he is a veteran and he is hard, and I want his face to reflect the times he has seen(see his bio), hence that mugging look he’s always sporting.
What also is interesting is drawing the interactions with him, and the other cops (Ai, and McMillian). It’s a lot of fun and very challenging to draw his traits. Kevin has done a great job in creating these different personalities through his writing, and the interactions change depending on the situation and/or when talking with different characters. So I wanted to capture it with the art. Trying to bring out the tension, or trust or whatever happens to be going on in the scene or with whom. With the police a lot of time might be spent in discussing the crime scene or trying to figure out what the hell is actually happening in this city, and its crucial to draw to fit this dialogue, and present it in a way that’s both, of course, compatible with the scene and character personality, but also to create an incredibly interesting panel to look at. It might not be an action scene, fight scene , or one of those scenes where everybody is standin’ around flexing in ridiculous poses talking about fighting。。。。 I want to present this dynamic activity that pulls the reader into the story, because you never know when there might be clues or crucial scenes that let the reader join in the police story, and help to give each reader a different take on what is indeed happening. Sorry but we wants to make ya’ll think! Hell, that’s important in any great story, or movie, and I think comic books need to recapture that once again. These cops are great tools in that sense. Shit, their characters aren’t perfect, but like with officer Head here you can see they are true to who they are. Richard Head gives a cool perspective to the story, and while being a bastard he really works well with Ai’s style of police work.
Jason