Vacancy

Vacancy

by John Wigger on August 1, 2011

I’ve been meaning to get the explanation of why John and George were asked to move up to the fifth floor from their first floor apartment out there for a long while, I just didn’t like the joke when I initially tried and I just decided to back burner it for a while and move on with the Valerie leaving story arc instead.

I felt that if I didn’t address it soon, it would just be one of those things that didn’t really make sense.

The real reason was I wanted to have a more interesting environment and it was easier than having the guys redecorate/wallpaper/paint/etc. their apartment… but in story it’s because having a zombie on one floor and a ghost on another scared off the other tenants (or they were eaten) so the apartment management decided to consolidate the supernatural creatures to one floor.

It also lets me have more natural get togethers of various character groups that I’ll have happen from time to time… especially with Zoey and Lizzy being in the other apartment.

This strip also has redesigns for Sean and Drew, plus George’s hair. I had been drawing Sean with all manner of curls/shapes in his beard and I really didn’t like his “look” anymore so I reworked him and I wanted to make him look older than he had been as he’s supposed to be in his late 40′s early 50′s. Drew also was falling behind the look of the comic so I wanted to snazz him up a bit.

I’ve also been fighting with George’s hair for like ever… Over the weekend while I was in a character redesign phase I figured out a new/simplified version of his moppy ‘do that allows me to reclaim more of his eyebrows. It’s still not 100% perfect but I’m a lot happier with it than I have been with his hair lately.

In procedural news, I started “inking” in Adobe Illustrator. Ever since I started drawing my comic digitally I’ve been doing the black lines in Photoshop and I have always thought my “inks” have been pretty weak. I did some practice with the blob brush in Illustrator and I was pleasantly surprised at how natural it was and I was able to get crisper lines and the points on the ends are solid and actually pointy. It’s an added step to my process, but one that I think is worth it.

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Special Editions

by John Wigger on May 11, 2012

I’ve been working on a project for a little while… I have been quietly editing the earliest strips in the archive to get the fonts/word balloons up to a look closer to the current quality/standard. Each update day for the last week I’ve not only been putting out a new comic… I’ve also put up an edited version of one of the earliest strips in the Zombie Roomie archive.

I have wanted to go back and update the font for a long while… as you see, I have changed fonts and moved to an all UPPER CASED font for the comic’s dialogue. Back when I started I used the Mixed case of a different font. I also had word balloons that left a lot to be desired.

While I’m doing this editing, in very rare cases I’m changing a little (and I do mean little) of the art. The biggest thing I’ve changed can be seen in the above image where I changed the door’s location in panel one. When I had started Zombie Roomie, I had thought about giving the guys a door that was on the outside of their apartment… like they had a duplex or something. But I quickly changed my mind to have them live in a multiple story apartment building.

More frequently than that style of art change is when I change some small color issue. For the first few weeks of comics I had John wearing almost turquoise jeans… I changed to a more denim blue and now all of his jeans will be the same color. I’m also fixing Zoey’s eyes, almost all of Jamal’s colors in his early strips, etc. I want to make sure the early comics reflect the colors that I’ve settled on as I’ve gotten into a groove with Zombie Roomie.

There’s also a bit of recompositing going on. I originally had really tall and skinny panels, but just before the one year anniversary I changed to the current panel ratio. I want to have the comics all fit in the same size so I’m taking the art from the comics and repositioning it into the new size.

That also allows me to make the comics all the new size of 1000 pixels wide. The very first comics were around 935 pixels and after the first year I moved to 970. In the last few weeks I’ve moved up to 1000 pixels and all the edited comics will end up being that as well… when I get to them.

Other than a strange George Lucas like desire to go back and edit my old work… there is an actual reason for this. I’m getting the files ready for the first book of Zombie Roomie. I want the reading experience to be consistent. The less than stellar word balloons, the changing fonts and cases, and the colors changing during the course of the book would be far more noticeable than they were if you were reading the comic as the strips were going up each update. The art changes are to keep things consistent.

I’m not doing the totally insane thing of redrawing the old strips… I’m just tweaking them.

I just wanted to let you guys know what was going on in case you were interested and/or you were going through the archives and noticed the drastic change when you got to the old strips after the updated ones.