If you’ve been tuning into my live streams (Saturdays at 3pm ET!) you’ll have seen that I’m in the process of redrawing A Friendly Game, a Boulder and Fleet story I created during October 2016. The original version was made within the constraints of Inktober (or Creative Challenge Season as my buddy Rob Stenzinger calls it). In order to meet my goal of finishing a 24-page comic within 31 days, I threw out the penciling stage and inked over my thumbnails. It was an early experiment in finding what I think of as my “deadline style.” It became a four-year journey to finding a sweet spot between efficiency and quality.
A Friendly Game Cover Sketches
The comic came together fairly well considering the constraints. The story explored some of my strong feelings about bullying and navigating conflict, and I got to invent a fun little game kids could play with whatever they find outside:
And the art was serviceable, at least for a minicomic. But I wanted the art to show the same love I had for the story, so I decided to re-draw the book. And I’d revise the layouts so it could match the aspect ratio of Boulder and Fleet: Mining for Trouble.
And in digging through the old materials for this story, I came across several cover sketches I did after wrapping up the minicomic:
For the minicomic I went with no. 4:
But maybe I can go with one of the other designs for the remastered edition!