Simulation Days – Working Files

When working on my 10 page comic Simulation Days – found in the Utensil Anthology, available here – I knew the subject was horror – and I wanted to approach the uncanny nature of medical horror with a touch of sly humor, which is what ended up being the main thrust of the piece.  In the story, the people inhabit a simulation where the Metaphor value of the simulation has gone haywire.

My working method was to focus on heavily referenced pencils on a free floating lap board at nights on my couch at home – and then to digitally ink over a scanned image file.  I worked in 2h or 3h pencils.  Each page took over the course of a few days, off and on.  In the end I had 16 pages to trim down from, and build a final product.  Not real efficient!

The featured image of this post is a pencilled page of a woodworker making a globe on a lathe.  My thought here is that the concept would veer away from the medical and eventually visit other parts of this world where Metaphor has run amok.  The lathe maker was to create a planet, then sand those inhabitants down, unwittingly.  Or maybe blow some sawdust, and create a Tsunami? 

I was attracted to the idea of Plato’s demiurge which features in the Timaeus and wanted to visit that imagery in my comic.  It definitely informed my inspiration for this portion. Needless to say I never found a home for that page.

The gallery below contains some JPGs I captured during the coloring process of Simulation Days.

Thats all for today.  Take care of yourself.

Max