Sushu's Sketchblog

I watched a lot of Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, and naturally wanted to draw Batman. But then I started thinking about how much cooler it’d be if what happened to Bruce Wayne happened to a girl. What if the Waynes had a daughter instead of a son? Let’s call her Brienne Wayne. Parental tragedy, determination and business acumen, busy socialite, fearsome caped crusader, and at the end of the day, a lonely person with issues — all of these transfer over just fine. I think it’d be pretty cool … why let guys have all the fun and hero stuff?


(view image to embiggen)

She is crossdressing as a guy for Batman (to be scarier), and who’d suspect her? A lot of Batman fighting is about wile and strategy anyway. (She’d need some pretty immense shoulder pads, though, and no one can match Bruce Wayne's jawline.) The bigger challenge turns out to be coming up with a “playboy socialite” outfit that would keep her battle scars covered. Bruce Wayne doesn't have that problem because (a) guys are expected to be both athletic and clumsy, both excellent excuses for bruises and scars, and (b) guys' "dressy" is just ye olde tailored suit, which, while uncomfortably hot for summer weddings, provides ample body coverage.

But still, I rather like the idea of a strong female character who can context-switch between managing a company to beating criminals to socializing. I feel like women are more socially trained to compartmentalize anyway, and Batman is the ultimate multi-tasker/mask-wearer. I'd especially want to explore how hard that actually is -- yes, we squee when Batman handles difficult situations with ease and panache, but for me it's always been the quiet moments just before or after that I gravitate to, when you see the strain take its toll. So here's a quiet moment for Brienne.



And what about the social scene, the height of the false, cultivated persona? Here is Brienne Wayne, the socialite.


Possible conversations they might be having:

"Would you date that Batman guy?"
"I don’t know… he *is* a vigilante… Besides, he might be horribly deformed under his mask, like Two-Face or something."
"Who do you suppose he is?"
"Probably some cop who got tired of the justice system, or a martial arts teacher for all I know."

"By the way, what happened to your arm?"
"Oh, that? It got a little rough last night with the two boys I took home… Paul or Greg or something. Don’t worry, they have quite a few bruises of their own. ;)"

I’ve also found a semi-solution to the visible bruising problem (the ideal solution being that society stops expecting women to be blemish-free). Brienne Wayne is known to be pretty into the BDSM scene. Not only is the BDSM stuff a chance to show Brienne getting into/out of tight bondage and just being a switch, but it also helps explain some of those bruises. Plus you can do cool things juxtaposing what she’s saying with the action that actually went down. The downside, of course, is that she might be in the middle of something when she needs to suddenly depart for her Batman activities, and also that might be more intimacy and honest communication than she's ready for.

At this point in time, I've fully supplanted Bruce Wayne with Brienne Wayne in my mind, which has changed how I see any Batman scene. Now whenever I see Batman, I imagine her behind the mask, and whenever I see Bruce Wayne, I think of how much more kick-ass Brienne would be in that same scene. Below is an example, a slight re-interpretation from this scene from Starcrossed Pt 2 from Justice League.





Brienne Wayne can hold her own, thanks. Note to Clark: she is no Lois Lane -- doesn't need your constant saving. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if Lois needs your constant saving, either.

I sorted through some of my miscellaneous pictures folders today, and found these figure drawings that are done digitally? I'm guess this was from 2007 when I was pretty exclusively using a tablet pc and ArtRage.

Anyway, here they are!

A good friend is getting married soon, and asked me to do art for their invites. Here's a low-res screen cap with the words removed.

In the front of the invite the couple is dressed fancy.


In the back, their geekiness shows through...

(I'm absurdly proud of the dalek and the tights.)

And the rsvp is in the style of Battlestar Galactica. I threw an image on the back. (They met at a BSG game where she played Gaius Baltar and he played Cylon 6.)

I spent the last 2 weeks drawing 5 comics for the new Chinese School textbook. It was really good practice for making comics "full digital"! I figured out how to make panels and speech bubbles using Photoshop. (I have Manga Studio, but found that I spend more time figuring out the obtuse interface than actually drawing.) Here are 2 of them. Quite different from 2007, eh?

This is that famous Confucius analect where he describes his life.


This is the famous Zen story about not needing to be literate in order to understand Zen.

Wooo! It took me all day, but I wrote, penciled, inked, shaded, and scanned the Epilogue! :D

So here it is:


( 3 more pages, and a discussion of differences from the original story )

Well, after the 2-month interlude that is known as "The Holidays", I'm back with a few more pages! These I started on Sunday, and finished today, so I'm definitely getting faster at it. Only 4 pages, though.

I'm glad that I made the character sheet way back when because I had forgotten much of the details of the characters -- whether they were left or right-handed, which direction the sword insignia faced, and most problematically, the proportion of facial features and the size of the face. Thus, there are some awkward faces here.

On the other hand, I feel like I'm getting better at backgrounds -- both the shading type and the specific background image type. (This being set out in the nature helped, but designing a simple background also helped.)

I tried to be more serious about considering light sources when doing the shading this time ... with varying degrees of effectiveness. Basically, it looks all right from a distance, but weird in close-ups. :/

Next part is going to be a narrative and artistic challenge as (a) things actually start happening, and (b) I deviate ever farther from the original story. (Or at least what I remember from the original story)


( and 3 more after the cut )

So one of the reasons why I ended China Comics, was that I wanted to try my hand at drawing comics with actual plot. When I started China Comics, I didn't feel very confident about my ability to tell stories and write dialogue and convey information, so I just picked one: I conveyed information, from my point of view, in single pages. But as I worked on my China comic, I realized that even though I got pretty good at drawing lots of people very quickly, I wasn't actually practicing any of the other skills needed to tell a good story in comic form. For example, panel layout and pacing is a completely different beast in a story comic vs. a China comic.

So, first I tried writing my own script for a short comic (24 pages) about graduates from "superhero college" having to reconcile their youthful idealism with the realities of getting a job and settling down. I got through character design and even as far as laying out the first 4 pages, when I realized that the story structure was really weak -- no real antagonists or challenges, no real character changes. In short, I realized that telling a good story and drawing a good story are two different skills that I would need to work on.

I decided to work on the latter first: drawing a good story. I took a martial arts short story that I read back in 2007, and wrote out a script for it. Back when I first read the story, I had actually started trying to convert the short story into a comic, but back then I was too close to the original story -- I tried too hard to preserve the original language, and immediately ran into problems, because the first scene involved a Chinese song that was a play on the main character's name. This time, 4 years later, I just went by my memory of the main themes and the general outline of the plot, and the script worked out much better. Then I did some character design, and then drew Act I.

The goal of this comic is not to present a finished piece, but rather, practice the skill of telling a story. So I just used a ball point pen and a blue pencil, and I haven't done any touch-ups. The scanner has also been bugging out, which explains the fuzziness. :/

Even though I was using someone else's story, I got to practice a lot of different things. Here are some lessons and observations:

- There's a reason comic names are generally short: to conserve space!
- Not quite sure what to do with backgrounds in close-up shots of characters. I tried a variety of shading/spotlights, textures, etc. I think it's pretty jarring, but on the other hand, blank white space would have been too empty, and actual background would have made the panel too busy. Suggestions?
- Fighting is hard to draw! Motion lines are even harder!
- Getting better at character design (assigning a specific "shape" and a distincting outfit "style" to each person helps!)
- Still bad at drawing characters consistently. I think the key is to keep the proportions consistent: eye to face, head to body, etc.
- I had to keep re-working the dialogue. I wrote it once, then revised it before pencilling to make it shorter, then revised it while pencilling to make it fit into speech bubbles, then revised it one last time while inking to take out more of the awkwardness.
- Scene to scene transitions are hard! I feel like I'm okay at doing panels that transition from moment to moment, but whenever I have to jump more than 5 minutes in space/time, the panel transition falters. The change is too small for a caption, but seems too big for a panel gutter....

Anyway, without further ado:

( It's called 'Sixteen', and there are 4 more pages here )

Four days in Brazil. We had horrible camera luck, so this is basically the only visual documentation we have.

I finished this on the train from Chicago to New York back around Christmas-time, but January was too busy with moving house to post this. (You may have noticed that I have a thing for trains.) This comic is pretty self-explanatory, so there's really no need to blather, except to say that when searching for train ticket information, there are about 10 different Yahoo! Answers style websites that provide the information in a far clearer way than the official Chinese rail website.

Thank you for reading China comics! Now we will be back to our regularly scheduled doodles.

As usual, comments should go here: http://sushux.net/chinacomic/?p=230

The original post from 7/4: "Moscow Night"
Met up with the Lemur and CS Bear downstairs from our apartment at 6pm Moscow time. Apparently the street downstairs from the apartment is a pedestrian way filled with cafes. We're also about 5 minutes walking distance from a Kremlin and a 24 hour supermarket that turned out last night to not be 24-hour. I got a nice cold soup at the cafe, and then after briefly unpacking at the apartment, we headed out to buy train tickets and then find a restaurant that Joanne saw on the guidebook as having Central Asian food and on the river.

Train tickets were relatively painless, despite the fact that no one spoke English. CS Bear had a whole dictionary in his shorts pocket, so we looked up the word for "tomorrow", and the rest worked out. What was more complicated was figuring out the subway. It took us a while to realize that standard subway signs are in blue, and are not related to the color of the metro line, despite there being a light blue and a dark blue metro line. Also, exits are not always entrances. So we totally took the wrong line, but it was all right, because the subway stops are breathtaking -- wrought-iron chandeliers, arches with filigrees, mosaics of Lenin leading the Revolution, etc. I didn't bring my camera last night, but what I loved were the small details. Even the lamps on the escalator were beautiful and stylistically in tune with the rest of the station. The metro trains come once every 3 minutes or so, so we never had to wait long, and they went super-fast, so going on the wrong line wasn't too bad. Tickets were about 25py, which is a little less than $1. The trains themselves aren't high-tech or jazzed up with lots of ads or monitors, but they were super-functional and clean. They were also designed for tall people -- not many low hand-holds.

The restaurant we went to was called "1001 Nights", and it was actually on the river, but tied to the river's edge -- it bobbed whenever a riverboat went by. I got horse meat with noodles. The horsemeat was very tender, and its juices drenched the large flat noodles under it, making it very tasty indeed. I also got a salad. Salads here are mostly composed of 3 or more of the following: cucumber, tomato, radishes, eggs, meat, potato. I sense that this isn't a very leaf-based society. Every half hour or so, they would crank up the music and a bellydancer would make her way around the tables.

After the restaurant, we walked the 3 miles home along the river, encountering an amusement park with a mock Space Shuttle, and a large statue in the river that seems to be Peter the Great standing on a ship that's on a wave that has lots of little ships in it. It was bizarrely awesome. (Our first view was head-on, like this, so it was hard to figure out what it actually was as we slowly walked towards it. (Here's some better views) Next to the statue, on what the map said was a chocolate museum, was a roof-top rave.

We stopped by McDonald's for ice creams and water at midnight, and made it home shortly thereafter. It didn't feel that late, thought, since the sun had set at around 11pm. I woke up at 4:40am and the sun was up again. Yay Northern Hemisphere in the summer!