Make Mine Indie Fall 2016

Hello all been too long since I updated, but I've been busy in the meantime, producing new content for this Holiday season and prepping for Agent Maya, Season Two (beginning in 2017!). My biggest news is that I'm once again featured in the Make Mine Indie comics catalog, Fall 2016 edition. Check it out and support hardworking indie comics creators!

Make Mine Indie

Just a quick update that Agent Maya Season One is featured in the inaugural quarterly Make Mine Indie independent comics catalog!

Available as a FREE PDF or CBZ, this is an awesome project for hardworking indie comic creators! Thanks to Alterna Comics and @makemineindie for this fantastic new venture!

All Comics Now On Sale At DriveThruComics

Now announcing all Agent Maya comics are now on sale at drivethrucomics! That's right, I've gone exclusive with drivethrucomics, the longest running digital comics webstore. It's a great site, you get front page exposure and you're alongside other indies and the big boys on the same site. It was an easy setup and I'm ready to enjoy many years selling my comics there.

Visit my page and enjoy!

Agent Maya in 2016

Okay, so I suppose I should've remembered to update the blog before New Year's Eve, but it will dovetail with a few things I want to mention. But first, some renders!

First, Issue Five is nearly complete! As usual for me, doing dialogue balloons is tedious work and I'm fighting the urge to procrastinate. I will persevere, though! Of course I'll update as soon as Issue Five is on sale.

Second, I'm working on a Season One collected graphic novel that I will release in print sometime in the first quarter of 2016. I've been looking forward to this for quite a while, as I decided not to go the expensive floppy route, as much as I wanted to. Details to come.

Third, I'm re-releasing Neptune's Deadliest Ring and Moons of Ice and Fire as a single trade sometime in the first half of the year, most likely to coincide with the Season One GN. Since the two stories are interstitial with the Season One issues, I felt it was finally time to dust them off and give them a shiny new cover, one that ties in with the comics completely. Not sure if I'll do any re-edits, but putting them together makes more sense, plus I can place a reading chronology inside.

Once these books are finally out of the gate, I'll be putting Agent Maya on hiatus for the year as I focus on a few other non-Maya projects I've been eager to tackle, which I'll post more about in the future. I have been writing scripts for Season Two in the past year, so when I do ramp up production I'll be ready to go.

Have a great 2016!

Issue 5.5 Production Post Two

Issue 5.5 has taken a bit longer to put into production, but I have two pages rendered and several sets waiting. The big hurdle has been the framing scenes, involving many characters that can bog down the whole works just by sheer file size and rendering requirements. A month from now I plan on completing production and getting into post.

Then the big one awaits…Issue 5. If you've bought Issue 4, Maya and the Don of Venus (and if you haven't, head over there now!) then you have an inkling of the dread our characters face: the Mercury Tower. This last issue in the first season of Agent Maya will pit our heroine against her greatest threat yet—Yukyo Kopek and the tortured souls entombed inside that ghostly building….

Agent Maya Issue Four On Sale Now!

A quick plug that Agent Maya Issue Four—Maya and the Don of Venus—is now available for sale at Sellfy! 99 cents and in a full color, 23-page downloadable PDF.

Maya and the Don of Venus

Photoshop Compositing from DAZ Studio

A few stream of consciousness tips for Photoshop compositing:
—Start with your render from DAZ Studio, which I do at mostly 9000 X 6000 DPI, saving as PNG (this will be at 72 DPI and consequently huge in dimensions, but that's okay as you'll reduce it later).



—PNG preserves transparencies (alpha channels), essential for compositing backgrounds, secondary images, etc., and is a lossless file format—never, EVER save as jpeg.

—Open image PNG in Photoshop, duplicate layer into new document, save as PSD at 72 DPI.

—Do all editing with multiple layers, never altering original layer; layers are your best friends.






















—Layer masks are your second-best friends; use the paint brush for opacity (white), transparency
(black) and shades of gray (semi-transparent) instead of the destructive usage of the eraser.

These are the basics for DAZ layers in Photoshop. I'll have more tips soon.

MAYA

Our protagonist, 25 years old (in 2156) born in 2131; height: 160 cms (5’ 3”); registry identification number: 5147-851-286135; unknown if Maya is her given name, or a surname, answers to it only; highly skilled with various weapons and defensive arts; wields her semi-sentient sidearm, Xibalba; her main transportation is Skeeto; works alone, disdaining a partner, much to her superiors’ chagrin; has a fairly good sense of humor; at 14 to 16 years old, Martian refugee from Syrtis Major, taken in by Gilmour Zeobarry, works as a disenfranchised shuttle pilot until gaining employment with the IPTP in mid-2155.

2015 Posting

Hello all. While I've busy working on Issue Four, my posts have been few and far between, unfortunately. The first two-thirds, about 16 pages, are roughly done, leaving the final third—nearly a complete issue in and of itself—still needing rendering. While work has been slow with a lot of tweaking to curtail post work, Issue Four is coming along and it's looking great, but it's busted the six months' time budget I allotted to it.

So, to keep from putting up a string of Slow-Work-Ahead posts, I thought I might try to post something new from me on a more timely basis, maybe once a week. I have a few digital comic production ideas sketched out, perhaps just to give other would-be artists starting off points for how I approach things. It'll be Mac-, DAZ Studio-, Photoshop- and InDesign-centric, since these are the apps I employ for Agent Maya. I'm not sure how much information I post here would not be available elsewhere, but it'll be an interesting side venture when I don't have teasers or announcements ready to go.

Thanks for reading and keep enjoying Agent Maya!

Agent Maya Issues Two and Three Available!

A quick plug that Agent Maya Issues Two and Three—Maya and the Vestal Doll and Maya and the Clash On Titan—are now available for sale at Sellfy! 99 cents each and full color, downloadable PDFs.

Maya and the Vestal Doll



Maya and the Clash on Titan


Thanks and enjoy.

Issue Four Production Post Two

Since my last post, Issue Four is chugging along. No renders right now—my energies are on the scene creation front. Hopefully within the next few weeks the scenes I've built will be ready to render and will give me some teasers I can post here.

On the digital comics end, ComiXology rejected Maya and the Outer Reaches. Can't say I'm totally surprised, and frankly I'm a bit relieved that the ComiXology saga is over, at least for now. Granted it would be great to be on the same site as the big leagues, but waiting nearly eight months (!) just to receive a rejection reply is a bit much for me to build my brand. I could pursue a further investigation as to why, but in the end I don't want to wait months just to get that rolling again, and who is to say the others wouldn't face the same fate? Which brings me to my next piece of news...

After some searching, I have found a couple of intriguing outlets for digital sales, the first of which I have actively joined! The site is Sellfy.com, which allows Paypal checkout for easy sales, and I'm all for that. Uploading of PDFs is painless, the process takes just a few minutes, and best of all, it's free to join! They provide a readymade url for your product; what else do you need? Sales, that's what. So check out Maya and the Outer Reaches. Maya's waiting.

Thanks, and enjoy!

And thanks to Ryan Estrada for this great post on digital comics and ComiXology Submit. He provides some great ideas, talks you through pros and cons, and introduces other comic creators to Sellfy and Gumroad, the two sites I've researched as alternatives. Thanks, Ryan!

Issue One Production Post 5

All right, number 5. Things are progressing well, but I still have one panel (yes, the same since my last post) that I've been procrastinating about. Yeah, I'll get it done. Soon. Okay, all pages are set, cropped, balloons (oops, one I have to add after some reviews) added and even a better idea for the cover, but the image is not quite there yet, but at least I'm heading in the right direction.

I've been researching the web for digital comics publishing, and one of the two I had in mind, ComiXology, seems to be a fairly good deal. Free uploads, no contract pitfall and a heavy hitter with the Big Two, the smaller guys and indies. That seems to be the way forward with small creators like me, but I still want to have at least a few print comics, because I'm old school. Ka-Blam is the only self-publisher with any sense of history that's still around from what I've read and prices for small (very small) runs probably aren't going to break the bank. I'm not under any illusions that I'll be swimming in cash from this endeavor—this is a labor of love and making comics is a childhood dream of mine.

Up next: News about Issue Two!