I like to do development/test pieces as I work on the outline of a story. It helps me learn whether or not the idea will be actually fun to draw (writer Jerzy might have a great idea that illustrator Jerzy will hate). Whether or not I’m excited to share the completed image is another emotional data point. And yes, I also watch the clock while I make these images to get a sense of how I’ll need to budget my time should I commit to finishing the story.
This piece represents a test of a short story idea that captured me back in October. I was listening to an episode of The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast when I heard this exchange:
For those of you who don’t have time/space to listen, they’re talking about the Victorians’ strange fascination with Egyptian mummies as medicine, curiosities, and pigments. There’s a moment where the hosts, telling the story The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, describe a scene in which crates of mummies are being delivered to a someone’s home.
Ghoulish, right?
But for those who have read my graphic novels Science Comics: Rockets (co-authored by my wife Anne Drozd) and The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue, you’ve probably noticed that one of my quirks is gently shining a light on difficult topics with a bouncy, almost absurdist humor.
This absurdity creates a friendly vessel to disarm the audience (wow, a chicken in a centrifuge is a funny image!) so the truth and sadness can sneak in (wait, Tsiolkovsky strapped unwilling creatures into a machine that frightened them if not harmed them?!).
In other words, reflecting on the image of wealthy Victorians inviting people over for a “Mummy Unboxing Video” is exactly my speed.
It wasn’t long before a premise formed of Doctor Baer and his friends having to protect a shipment of mummies from dangerous rich people. Would the mummies be shipped in some kind of fantasy Global Shipping Services truck? A FedEx plane full of mummies? Then I remembered hearing a story of some unhappy souls actually using mummy materials for fuel on trains, and I felt a bolt of energy go up my spine: A Great Train Robbery story where villains are after mummies and my heroes have to protect them long enough to get to sacred ground. I could do this in 20-30 pages and ship it as its own story, but it could also be the cold open for the next Doctor Baer long story, The Case of the Frozen Sailor.
But Illustrator Jerzy stepped in to drain the energy. I don’t want to draw a steam engine over and over again, he said. Okay, maybe it’s some kind of future bullet train. No, that won’t fit with the image of putting rich Victorian weirdos on blast. And while Taft is swift, it wouldn’t make sense for him to be running along side some slick future train. It has to be an old, plodding steam engine. And then, remembering what I said just a couple of paragraphs back, I could use the absurd image of the villain chucking mummies into the boiler fire to really underline things.
My first move was to start consuming information about trains. I wanted to hear from people who really, really love trains on why they’re so terrific. I know their perspectives will help generate story ideas. I was lucky to find this great audiobook by Tom Zoellner on Hoopla (thank you, Worthington Public Library!).
I’d listen to that while building a train model in Blender. If I have to draw a steam engine over and over I’m at least going to work with a 3d model in Clip Studio to ease the pain. How hard could it be? I’ve made a handful of things in Blender. But a few reference images put just enough fear of effort into me that I went to Turbosquid to see if I could find a pre-made model to purchase instead.
And I found some great ones! But then I ran into another problem. As awesome as Clip studio Paint’s 3d model capabilities are, positioning large/complex models can be laggy. And I might want to pencil some of the pages on my low-end iPad. The train had to be low-polygon, and I wasn’t finding what I wanted in the 3d model marketplaces. No, I had to build it.
So over the next handful of lunch breaks, I did:
It took less time and effort than I anticipated. It’s low-poly, and not 100% accurate to any of the reference images I used. But it’s just enough for my cartoony fantasy comic.
Oh, and I even created interiors for the engine and cars, where much of the action will be happening:
After “rigging” the model with bones (one bone per train car), I exported it as an .FBX file for importing to Clip Studio Paint. It worked! I could now pose my model within CSP, as opposed to posing the model in Blender, exporting the .OBJ file, and importing it into CSP per instance.
Now I could start penciling a test image of the train and heroes cruising along the Pierogi Mountains:
Which I then printed out onto watercolor paper for inking:
And, after having them flatted by my student Phoenix (y’all should hire her, she’s great), I painted it in Clip Studio Paint:
The test taught me that I would have fun drawing this story, and I was pretty excited to share this image with you after finishing it. The drawing took about 5 hours total, but a lot of that was in the penciling. I think I can take an even looser approach to penciling the train in future drawings, since much of the detail was lost when printed out on watercolor paper.
Next steps after this test is to thumbnail the short story. That, and the rest of the process for making this comic, will be shared on Patreon in The Case of the Frozen Sailor collection, available for Teams Pickles and Doctor Baer.
And of course I’ll serialize this publicly as a webcomic once final art is underway.