Love is not for sale?

So here we go with a look at the top most panel here - the actual focus of the entire two page spread...

Where we have a man who is quite clearly assaulting a woman, seriously enough to get the police outside - You have to look closely (and this a fairly important plot point) but the man is actually holding a knife.

There are quite a number of statements made here and possibly the most tangible reason for the perpetual shadow seen to date, there is no love in Outland (only by remote video call) - but sex is for sale

And not just casual sex, but sex of all kinds of varieties, the video screen behind the man showing for all the depth of depravity available and possibly even acceptable within the shadow soaked corridors...

Which almost makes one wonder quite how things had to get out of order before the alarm went off.. remember Shepherds earlier "they work hard and they play hard.."statement?

The layout of the two pages designed to instantly draw the eye towards the twisted embrace between the "couple" in question...

Now hold for a moment - and look at the movie, This does not go as far as the drawing, the movie clearly shows a naked prostitute but the entire scene is made by the acting of Steven Berkoff who plays it completely crazed...

and the woman just moans to herself in the corner (mostly)...

Apart from making a much more overt statement about the disposability of sex in Outland, Steranko possibly goes a bit further as the guy in the drawing does not even look vaguely like Berkoff  - which is one thing - but then gives him a moustache which is quite another...

With the shadow and the cut angular style it could almost be mistaken for Monotone - except the trademark cigar is missing - and Monotone is elsewhere in this scene...

Doing what? Find out tomorrow

Contains items of a sexually explicit nature

Well, depending on your point of view - this page does, so I have kept it small:-

This page also presented itself with a dilemma - should I just put it up here or not and if so how?

By keeping it small and making the subject a warning I am making a statement regarding censorship, be it right or wrong

From what I remember (and I could be wrong) Frank Miller would most definitely say I was wrong doing anything other than just presenting the page as it was intended....

And possibly not quite so nicely either..!

The main problem with offence is there is no realistic way to judge it, unless your the person who has been offended.

I personally think it a lot more than reasonable to say the picture is not suitable for children - hence the warning...

Anyway having set that precedent - where to go to next, as I have obviously been leading up to a study of this page... hmmm find out starting tomorrow...

A shot in the dark?

Well, let's face it - everything's "in the dark here" - I think I will invoke a Pet Shop Boys song next time around... anyway

The shot in question, is part of the 5 small panels, which I haven't focused on so far...

As these give more of a clue as to what might await us in the next page - The most interesting thing about the top panel taken on its own its is complete dichotomy with its other half on the next page, There is not very much overlapping here at all, so again a whole panel making a purely stylistic point about darkness and duct filled compartments.

But in the 5 panels below we have by stark contrast almost a full on action sequence - which ends in a shot being fired - but why

Find out - on the next page 

"which actually makes absolutely no sense"...

That's what I said yesterday about the inclusion of the large emergency sign in the large top panel on the page I am working on..

But in hindsight was I right?

Well - Let's look at why I thought that..

It can't really be the oversized nature of the sign (on it's own) as there have been a few examples of those before , though its worth noting the size of the clock or the words above the time (if you can see them) by comparison

It's more that I wondered if the absolute last place you would have a flashing emergency sign flashing is right inside the compartment where the emergency is happening - I mean its a fairly safe bet the person inside the compartment either already knows they are in a predicament (take the guy from the airlock) or in this case would actually be pushed into more of a panicked frenzy knowing that the "police" are on their way..

As the sign is inside a room which has a hostage situation - anyone will tell you it takes delicate handling and consideration in those situations not huge great big red flashing signs in your face... but hey, what do I know?

The thing that occurred to me is that Steranko is using this as a story telling device, but that only makes sense if he was expecting the reader to assume that the one page splash was the end of the scene in question..?

Maybe having a complete scene per two page spread and no further beforehand made this go in?

You tell me!

Best get on with blacking this all in... tomorrow

Just another Bedroom?

So here we go with the next page, which as normal is half of a two page spread:-

At first glance there is not much to overly differentiate the big panel from a similar drawing of O'neil's room as featured earlier - a page devoted to a bed, and various room features.. the only clue in this panel is the admittedly large emergency sign shown... which actually makes absolutely no sense

Why? Find out tomorrow

A page a day?

I am going to try an experiment today, as it's a day off work..

So I thought I would try and pretend for just one day that I was a illustrator and had to do one page a day..

To get a feel what doing this as a paying career would be like

So that's what I have been doing so far - Its taken about 3 hours to get the fine line into place on top of the pencils…

But the amount of blacking in to do is rather large, so let's get on and see how far I can get!

UPDATE:- I now only have another 2 of the 8 hours I allocated to draw a page and it looks like I will be lucky to do all the black in - so I best get drawing..!

FINAL UPDATE:- I went way over the 2 hours to finish the blacking in, no time left to pencil the next page, so I did not complete a entire page from scratch in a day

Lessons Learned:-

1. I seem to get slower and slower as the day went on, this is the longest amount of time I have spent consecutively drawing, even though I had a break once every two hours to try and pace myself and reduce the offset of cramp. It's a bit like just deciding to run a Marathon without any training or preparation - or gradual warm up to the ultimate destination.  What I should I have done is built up the amount of time I draw over a period of time, however this was not possible, as all I had was one day - but a word to the wise I would never just work through, It's difficult to type right now!
2. The axiom of "first you get good, then you get fast" obviously applies in spades to yours truly - I have not got good yet, so I can hardly expect to be fast - and yes I am still on my 2000 bad drawings!

Tomorrow we are back to normal and about 3-4 hours a day spent on drawing..!

"We can still work it out"?

Let's start 2011 off with a bang, straight onto the first page of the 2nd instalment of Outland

And it's a rather jarring bang as well…

For starters a whole 2-3 minutes have just been lost from the movie with no explanation, There was a entire scene where Montone tries to console O'Neil following the departure of his wife and child gone…

But more telling is that in this one page there is probably more story packed in than any two page spread to date 

The speed and action pace this page sets up, definitely drops off as soon as the two page spreads are returned to on the next page

A lot of urgency and even fluidity in terms of standard comic book story telling happens on this page, but there is still half a page dedicated to locked in cold hard master shot as Steranko seems to be the absolute master of, you can almost imagine a poster book of each of these big panels without any dialogue..

Well the balloons are still there I guess...

But the coldness and the commodity of the io is about to be put into very sharp relief, we have already seen that the air and food is recycled (probably endlessly) and that the whole place is a contusion of a ducting nightmare almost on the level of Terry Gilliam's Brazil and we have just seen the only expression of love seen by the person its supposed to be effecting at such a distance that it makes no discernible impact at all, completely lost within a stylistic statement of utter form over function

So if there is no real love on io (only via video message after leaving it behind) what is left?…

stay tuned to find out...