Monday Blues

[Suuper-san]

This is a manga story that I am working on with a writer as a collab project. The story is already mostly worked out as his project, so it's more like I'm his artist, although I am making contributions to the script. He's allowed me to post here, for feedback and attention.

It's a slice of life and romance, with a fair bit of angst in it which isn't what I'd write myself personally but so far I like the story. You start to feel the characters coming alive when you put a lot of time into thinking about them, which is a first for me as I've probably spent more time on this already than any other manga project.

So far the story has had quite a few major hacks to it in making it a manageable length to complete within a year, and we've managed to resolve it to 3 10 chapter books, each book being a different romance but with the same overall cast (each romance is a different pair of characters). So it's 3 romance stories in the same timeline, with a slight overlap in each book as they all appear in each other's stories.
I think I made it sound more complicated than it is :P

We're only planning to finish the first book and then take a break to do other projects and stuff. I'm personally hoping to multitask my own manga at the same time (because when have I ever taken the easy route ahaha)

So here is the first draft of the first set of pages. I'll be posting sketches of all levels here but I'll try and keep it organised. Especially since to some extent I'll be working on different sets of pages simultaneously to make the collaboration more efficient (otherwise I'm waiting for feedback from the writer or he is waiting for feedback from me and we can't do anything else while we wait), there'll be quite a bit of posting I think. I'll probably only break radio silence on MR for this, we'll see if it's too distracting XD

The only other thing to note is that the pacing is quite fast compared to what I would like, but I think I am a slow paced writer, so maybe you guys will have a different opinion.

Feedback is very welcome on anything, we're giving this quite a good shot so we want a good result.

This is the primary draft so chaos reigns everywhere but the script is pretty stable now after previous alterations. I doubt there's anywhere to actually give feedback on at this stage tbh but I wanted to post it :P

First page is kinda character introductions.

Oh and it reads right to left because I can't draft left to right ahaha

Spoiler

The main cast:
left to right:Luna, Diana, Mercy, Mio, Roman, Tobi, Dominic
It's meant to be a height chart and quick character ref but ended up looking bizarrely mugshot-esque.

[legomaestro]

That is what we call a beech move Diana whyyyy

Could you try for blue/red/orange word text by the way? It's funking with the lines for some reason so I couldn't read the dialogue.

Dominic is my spirit animal, Lunas' first words are me-irl

It reads a bit old-school and religious-pamphlety for my tastes -w hich normally would work with retro-colouring and 90s western comic book style but from manga I expect more pauses, more moments, more close ups and the typical emotions (The slap page was great by the way!)

It does a good job packing a romance story into a few pages and I definitely didn't expect Diana to do that so props on the plot and conflict!

Great that you're collabing with writers suuper. Looking forward to this and whatever you come up with.

As always, take all commentary with a healthy bit of scepticism

[Suuper-san]

thanks and amazed you could follow it tbh :P
ikr about Diana >_<;
I've switched to black for the text colour already. I used green previously for reasons which aren't relevant for this project and just did it out of habit. It'll be a different font and size in the final version anyway which is why it's a bit randomly placed too, it's just draft for the text as well.

old-school and religious-pamphlety

Lol
I have literally no idea what that means :P

My writer is indeed influenced by comic books (possibly more) than manga I think which is probably why you think that about the pacing, amazing that you pinned it down so well. I don't read comics at all as opposed to manga so my own writing influence is a lot stronger manga.

stay tuned for quality improvements and new pages!
hopefully we'll settle into a weekly production after a while, so I'm hoping it stays quite bustling :P

PS added the main cast reference sheet to the top post.

[Suuper-san]

Did a page of expressions for the characters, very good practise for keeping consistent character design and making the characters recognisable from different angles.
It's a lot easier than the last time I did it years ago but here's so many details to consider it's still easy to miss stuff.

I did discuss this with my writer and warned him that I probably wont be able to draw the characters the same each time, and so it's likely readers will recognise the characters by their hairstyle and clothing rather than their actual face. Not unlike real life in that sence :P

[legomaestro]

Monday Blues

Oh this sheet turned out great. The clean lineart and toning will be a life-saver for when you draw the manga.

Haha for some reason it feels like they're in a jacuzzi that is either too hot or too cold or laughing at jokes. I can imagine them all having a conversation together

[Suuper-san]

ahaha I get the jacuzzi thing, probably because they have no clothing, like around the neck or shoulders :P

I'm not sure about the quality I will produce the manga to be honest. I dont like working with neat linearts because of the time investment, and I much prefer skill levelling than project-doing for at least the next year or so.

unfortunately my writer is still "working on the story", much like me he has a bunch of projects he's working on and so he's not putting 100% into this project, so it's taking its time. I jibe him every now and then that I've done 40+ chapters for 4 stories, from scratch, and he's not even given me a script for 8 chapters yet, in the same timespan :P