The short story “Rogue” is the sequel to the short story “A Storm’s Coming” both from grydscaen: tribute.
I am in the process of working on a manga for Rogue as well as a manga called graphic noise. The interesting thing about Rogue is that the story is complete and I have the chapters done and the dialogue as well as character designs for Rom. I would still need to do character designs for the host in the story, Jester the leader of the hacker guild and Faid Callen the leader of the Packrat hackers. I am torn right now since I am still finishing the story for graphic noise but I am itching to get started drawing again. I am also working on some official stuff for grydscaen at this moment which will take some time so I want to be working on something in the grydscaen world especially because graphic noise is taking a little longer to write now that I am on chapter 7.
Since Rogue opens up the world of the Echelons in Haven 15, I would need to block backgrounds and get the logistics of the world down. I have a subway map which was published as part of grydscaen: beginnings and if I am correct was also in grydscaen: tribute. This is the basic layout of the City, the Echelons and the Zone and helped me to locate things in space during the writing of beginnings as there is a sophisticated subway system through the city and the adjoining locales.
The thing that causes me angst is that I can picture things is my head that I can not always execute. There was a scene in the manga for A Storm’s Coming where the Zone Police officer Xander Storm is beating the psychic who was trying to kill Rom and I just could not execute correctly what I had envisioned so I had to block the scene differently.
When I did the A Storm’s Coming manga I drew it fast. 48 pages took about 3 weeks to draw in pencil I did not ink it. The process of making the manga involved me going to Kinkos and photocopying the pages down from 11×14 to 8.5×11 and then scanning them into my computer and after that putting them in InDesign as a book and adding dialogue to the images using Photoshop to execute the PDF. It was a rambunctious affair and was a labour of love because I originally thought I could not execute.
I knew when I did A Storm’s Coming that I wanted to do Rogue as well. I just put it off due to all the effort that it would take. I am at the point that I am itching to start again and I am not done with the graphic noise story yet so I am thinking about starting this up.
I know backgrounds will be essential to a Rogue manga and it will require also the need to draw the Packrat Sprawl and fight scenes. I am a little wary about that because I may run into the same issue I had in A Storm’s Coming of not being able to execute on paper the vision in my head. I know that backgrounds will be hard because they were sparse in A Storm’s Coming. The most difficult part was making Rom look the same across panels. In Rogue since I will go slower this time and not rush I will take more care to be more static in Rom’s rendition.
I am torn right now because I have 3 novels half written and want to start another animation of A Storm’s Coming for youTube and start the two manga I have in the works. I have to make a decision. What do I work on next.
So many things to do. So little time. Hopefully we can come up with a solution.