Welding a story together
Ok, back to it. The story of the Landscaper was developed due to the fact that our new studio demanded me to take two trains and embark on a 20 min walk to reach our new destination. It was on these walks to the university drama work shop where the story began to form. I’ve always believed walking creates some of the best ideas, especially when you make that same trip over…and over..and over again. So here I was walking from the train station to the university, listening to music and playing the LS movie in my head.
Whenever I had a visual, which would basically be a freeze frame from said head movie, I would quickly write it down, so I was ready to illustrate it when I got into work the next day. I saw the whole of issue 1 like this. A movie, always playing in my mind. Each time the scene of the movie would change or if I had a better idea, this would be edited into the movie which would be set up in my head for the next private screening. As I walked, listening to music and playing out this comic book in my mind, I would start to act out certain scenes from the comic. Ok, yes I was probably one of those people you see on the side of the road talking to themselves, but I’m a visual person, and sometimes you just need to act it out. The only good thing was. Our classes didn’t meet until 7:30pm, so by this time it was dark, and the only time people could see me was when a car passed and lit me up with their head lights. Plus, this would make me less attractive to potential muggers, as they probably didn’t want to get mixed up with the crazy guy talking to himself in the dark.
I had the first couple pages laid out at this stage and had drawn the panels for the basic opening to the comic. I knew I wanted a teenage gang in there as our villains, basically a group that would be responsible of the rise of crime in Krillion. (Side note: Carillon City is the name of shopping center in the Perth CBD.) I really thought it had a cool vibe, so I changed it to Krillion City, but it’s probably more of an inside joke to those here in Perth. I had the idea of calling the group the Untouchables, which is what Lydia refers them to in the open of the book. Although this idea didn’t really get much further than the first issue.
This first page of issue 1 seems to be the make or break point for readers. I have an analytics program running on the site, so I can see where people come in, what pages they read - and so forth. This is really helpful for me to get a better understanding of reader’s trends on the site. Also to see if people are reading the comic at all…which I’ve noticed they are, and I thank you all for that :). I’ve noticed that if I can get people past the first page - then it’s pretty smooth sailing from there. They usually will venture on and continue to issue 2, where the fun really begins. Some people will come into the comic, read the first page - and then leave the site. Now I know the idea of teenage gangs is a little out there, and I know this concept of an adult vigilante going after a group of youths would probably turn people away from wanting to read further. The interesting thing is - it began with one premise, and continued to mutate into something completely different but still holding true to the original idea. There was a time where I wasn’t going to go down the youth gangs angle out of fear it wouldn’t be well received, but then I thought….this is what I want to say, these were the feeling I was going through at the time and I need to be true to myself - or what’s the point. So, to those of you, who have started reading the LS, don’t let the first page put you off. It’s all an exaggeration. Of course the police are more than capable with handling a similar situation, and the courts do have laws in place to deal with youth offenders, but this was the story I wanted to tell.
So I say - soldier on my first page readers, you may like where the comic goes from here.
Issue 3 update
Just a quick update on issue 3. We are currently setting up our first major brainstorming session in the next week or so. Myself, Iskandar and other members of the LS trust will have our much anticipated “beer night.” This night will consist of (you guessed it) beer, as well as hashing out the 3rd installment of LS series. We already have some basic idea of directions we would like the story to go, but we find when you bring a bunch of people together to discuss the comic - you usually find new and exciting developments will come out of such talks. I’ve also began working on concept art for the 3rd issues cover, which will be posted on the issues page soon. I will do my best to continue with the blog postings for the first two issues, hopefully some of our readers are finding some interest in these posts. I’ve found for myself, it’s interesting to go back and write about some of the first developments of the Landscaper, and how it all came to be. It’s also great to see the progression between issue 1 & 2. Not only in the art and style, but in the story arc and character development as well. It only leads me to believe that the 3rd issue will continue this progression. Ok - that’s it for now. keep checking back for new updates, and please continue to send us your feedback.
Thanks again,
c-
In order of appearance
I can’t remember exactly in what order things started to come together, but it all just started falling into place. I began doing little storyboard panels as I saw them in my head - sometimes out of order or not relevant to the previous panel. Looking back, this was probably not the best way to approach the comic, but it was all still pretty new to me and I was learning as a went. Each time I had an idea, I would quickly sketch out the panel then move onto the next one. Before I knew it, I would have all these different illustrations in little boxes, basically with no rhyme or reason - but began to tell some kind of visual story.
I knew I wanted to begin the comic with the main character sleeping. I liked the idea of starting off the comic in a place of calm, and then quickly escalating it to world of chaos as the issue rolled out. A little side note, Daniel’s room was based on my bedroom apartment in Boston. I liked the idea of putting Daniel in a bedroom with bared windows. It created the atmosphere of almost being in a cell, which is how I felt sometimes in my little bedroom apartment in the city. There would be this orange light that would spill in from the streetlights above, that would create a barred effect of light across the wall.
Capo is of course based on my own little black cat, Neo. In the third panel Capo is licking Daniel awake, which is something Neo just began to do on a consistent basis in the mornings before I went to work - I figured it would be a cute little addition to the comic. I really wanted Dan to have a cat. I thought it would be interesting to have a person with no real friends, lives alone, and only has his cat to confide in. I think isolation can be a very dangerous thing mentally, which made Daniel the perfect candidate to become the Landscaper.
I didn’t have an dialogue at this stage, and the story wasn’t really flushed out yet, but I knew the images I wanted to get across - so I continued to draw individual panels. I wanted the character to watch the morning news and to hear about an attack that had taken place the night before. This news broadcast would foreshadow events to come in the issue, but also would give Daniel a particular mind set for the rest of the day. Of course I wanted an attractive news reader - Lydia, which was initially supposed to be a potential love interest for the character of Dan, but it never came to fruition in this issue.
Here’s an example of some of the first panels I drew for the LS issue 1.
Putting the pieces together
So, now that we have his outfit and his motives somewhat structured, we now needed a basic character profile. Who was the Landscaper? We didn’t have a name, an occupation, and cast of characters just yet. In a way, this is the fun part of creating a story, you have free range to do pretty much anything you want. It’s also the hardest part of creating a story, as you don’t really have anything solid to work with yet. Again, I tried to look around me. I tried to look at things in my life that I could pull from to help develop this character. I remember doing very rough sketches of this LS walking up and down the aisles of a hardware store, removing items from the shelves, but this just didn’t feel right. I decided in the end to make him a more hands on person, a welder/engineer. My wife, as well as running the drama school, also works at her parents factory. They build farming equipment. It’s a family run business, so everyone barring myself works at this factory. This was the main influence for Cage Engineering. They manufacture and sell farming augers. They roll large sheets of metal into a barrel which then has a spiral drill, a.k.a (flighting) inserted into the center. It always intrigued me when I went down there at how they made these things from just random sheets of steel. I would watch them weld the tubes, rig up the massive motors to the frames and before you knew it - you would have this monster piece of equipment.
It then hit me, this was who I wanted the Landscaper to be. The main thing about the Landscaper was that I wanted him to be a normal guy. He didn’t have a lot of money, was a hard worker but spent a lot of time by himself. He liked to watch DVD’s on the weekend and play video games, and have a few drinks with his friend Brian, who I will talk more about in the future. He was pretty content in his simple life, and really wasn’t looking for anything more.
Making him a welder -or - a person who could make things from simple items you would find in your shed or hardware store, gave me new breath in terms of what was capable with this character. I like to think of him as the MAcGyver of the vigilantes. I always saw the image in my head of this character sliding open his work shed door, covered in blood, and in a rage begins making things on his work bench. In the dark their would be fire sparks from the welding torch which would reflect off his welding helmet. He would rip off his sweat shirt, tear the lid off a white paint can, and replicate his symbol on his hoodie with his painted hands. It was as if his mind was on auto-pilot, and he was running purely on rage.
A man with no voice
I figured the best way to approach this was to step back and remember who this character was, or better yet, why he was. In the beginning I played around with the idea of keeping the comic based on the 4 or so characters from the drama school. The problem was, the more I wrote and sketched out concepts the more complicated the comic became. I also didn’t want it to become just another group vigilante story. I was already skating on thin ice trying to create a unique individual vigilante story, which in the end would probably just be considered a rip off of Batman or the Punisher. I knew no matter what I did with the story, there would be comparisons to the other vigilante characters. In the end I figured, a vigilante is a vigilante, the only thing I could do was to make this character and his origin a little different from the rest. So once I decided to not go down the group story line of the Landscapers, I was a little stuck. If this story wasn’t going to be based on actors from a drama school being harassed by teenage gangs, then what was this Landscaper story going to be?
Ok, so we have one person, The Landscaper. A man who carries two nail guns and has this weird symbol on a hooded sweatshirt. I absolutely knew one thing, I wanted to keep to the original idea of underage gangs driving a person to want to take law into their own hands. I got a little flack from people around me for this. The idea of writing a comic book basically advocating this type of violence against children. The thing was, unless you were there, or had similar things happen to you, you really wouldn’t understand where I was coming from. This book was in a way a therapy session for me to create a visual scenario of what I wanted to do when these events were taking place. So I really wanted to stay true to reason The Landscaper was created in my head, even though I knew it would turn some people off from wanting to read past the first page of the comic. I believe some of the more interesting stories are created by taking things from your own life and trying to incorporate them in a way that would be interesting to a reader.
So now we have one concept, the character is created to take on underage gangs, because of his own frustrations with these particular groups. Now - why the outfit? Well, that’s what I would do. I always tried to put myself in the shoes of the Landscaper, which wasn’t really all that difficult for me. I think he wears the hooded sweatshirt to in a way mock these kids. The majority of the kids that gave us trouble at the studio would wear these hooded sweatshits and beanies. I thought it was interesting how their faces were always cast in shadow. It kind of made them look more menacing, even though they were just 15 or 16 years old. I liked the idea of the Landscaper wearing something similar. This is also why I put Caleb in a similar outfit. I felt the LS and Caleb mirrored each other. I also wanted the Landscapers outfit to be the same one he was wearing the night he was attacked in the first issue. I thought it would be more symbolic to have the blood and mud stains still visible from the night he was created, when he was coming back for his revenge.
The Man In the Hoodie
Continued on from It Begins…
Fast forward about 6 months. I’m sitting at my work desk at lunch time. I didn’t really want to go play my usual game of Halo 3 today, and couldn’t really be stuffed watching day time TV – or – episodes of Family Guy. My desk is basically covered from edge to edge with action figures and models of anything from comic book heroes to movie characters and cult classic figurines. Imagine what you see in the special features of a Pixar movie, when they show you around the animator’s desks, that might give you an good idea. I remember looking at all these different action figures in front of me. There was Marv from Sin City pointing his gun at me like he always does. Wolverine, The Crow, Spiderman, The Hulk, multiple Batman’s and The Punisher. Here I was, sitting back, scanning my desk of all these action heroes, each with their own stories and origins. I think it was here where I realized just how tired I was of looking at all these characters someone else had created. I recalled an image in my head of a man in a hooded sweatshirt, dust mask and safety glasses, wielding two nail guns standing in the middle of the street, defending a neighborhood against the aggressions of teenage gangs. It was still a rough idea, but it was an idea none the less. My friends and I always tossed up the idea of doing a comic book someday. It seemed like everyone had a concept for a comic book story somewhere, scrawled away in some old notebook with tones of chicken scratched notes and sketches.
I fired up Adobe Illustrator, one of the tools at my disposal here at work, and began sketching out a rough illustration of what I saw in my head that night. That man holding two nail guns, in a dark gray hooded sweatshirt with the safety glasses and a dust mask. I began to add items to his costume, such as O2 tanks and a backpack harness, as I’d initially forgot that in order to operate these nail guns, he was going to need some heavy duty air pressure.
As you can see, in my first version of the Landscaper, he didn’t have the nail clip cuffs, and the symbol on his hoodie is slightly modified. A few of these final items were added while I was storyboarding for issue 1. I also didn’t have the original logo symbol with me, as it was still buried in the Back burner folder somewhere on my home computer collecting cyber dust. Although looking at the first image now as I write this post, I can say wasn’t too far off from the final symbol. Soon, on the screen in front of me was this rough illustration of this character - The Landscaper. Ok! Great! Now we have our comic book hero, well sort of. Only problem now is …we don’t have a story.
It begins…
Hey guys, please bear with me on these blog posts, as it’s all still pretty new to me - and I’m really not much of a blogging person as you will soon discover. However, I’m sure I have a fair bit to talk about in terms of the development of the LS comic, which some of you might find interesting. If not, I apologize in advance…but here we go anyway.
What began as a possible desktop wallpaper image for my computer, has now developed into a full two issue online comic book. To be honest, I never imagined it would get this far. As I mentioned in my bio, the Landscaper concept spawned out of kind of a joke between myself and a couple friends, mainly through my frustration during a certain series of events. It all begins with a hall. My wife runs a drama school/theater company, which I’m involved in as both a set designer & actor. The school was run out of an old converted church reception hall, which was a great venue for both classes and productions. She bought and converted the hall into a fully functioning drama studio, which she ran with her sister. We had an adult class which would meet every Tuesday night at the studio, that was located at the end of the street in a neighborhood that didn’t have the best reputation, but prior to these events, wasn’t too bad.
The problems first began when a house up the street took on new occupants, who had just moved from another location and into “government founded housing.” It began simple enough. We would pull into the parking lot of the hall, and notice that someone had put some graffiti on the main wall that faces the street. A bit frustrating to have to call to have the front face of building re-painted, but we couldn’t be blinded to the fact that this wasn’t a possibility based on the neighborhood. Although, we hadn’t had any real trouble up until now. It seemed like the neighborhood was actually getting better, with the addition of some new developments including a new primary school which opened up across the street.
Soon we started dealing with these events on a more consistent basis. Each week we would pull into the hall to find windows broken, doors would appear to have marks on them, as if someone tried to jimmy them open with a screwdriver. Graffiti would start showing up in different places around the building. We soon became a lot more vigilant, and started to notice a group of kids around the ages of 13 -16 riding their bikes around the area during the day. We didn’t really think much of it at first, but noticed them riding by the hall almost looking as if they were scoping out the building. We also notice they would hang out at night in an old playground, a few houses up from our building. We saw them sometimes when we would drive past after class. Weeks went by and the events become more intense. There would be times we would all be sitting in the main hall during class and would hear the sound of breaking glass in the foyer. We ran out only to find a brick had been thrown through the window from the parking lot. No one ever seemed to be around except for that same group of kids riding their bikes up and down the street, who would of course deny it. Graffiti was one thing, but now having to replace these windows was becoming very costly, and not to mention really pissing me off. We spoke to security, and asked them to drive by more often during our night classes , but this didn’t deter these acts from taking place.
We had a gate which we close each night during classes, as we the majority of our students were adults and drove their cars to the hall. It wasn’t a very high gate, but would stop people from using the parking lot once classes began. However, it was pretty easy for some to jump over and this became a major problem as the saga continued. Not only did we have to worry about the building being vandalized whist in class, but now we had our cars on the hit list. Multiple times we would hear the sound of breaking glass, but this time it would be muffled, as if originating from outside the building. We would open the doors only find the back window of one of our student’s car had been smashed out. Also some nights we would come out to find our tires flatted due to punctures.
I started playing stake out, and began hiding out in one of the rooms overlooking the parking lot with all the lights out. A bit silly I know, but I was getting so frustrated, it was as if we were being personally attacked and there was nothing we could do. On one of my routine stakeouts I discovered what I always assumed. Sure enough I saw one of those kids hop the fence while the others stood watch on their bikes on the side walk. I would run out to try to confront them, but before I got the door open they would quickly hop back over the fence and head off on their bikes towards the playground. We felt we had a little more information now to be able to approach security and police, but to our surprise, security said they really couldn’t do anything about it. Unless they caught them in the act, they really had no authority to help us. To make matters worse they said - We know who these kids are, but there’s really nothing we can do. This floored me. I couldn’t believe we were totally defenceless to conduct our classes without having our cars or our building attacked.
There was one night where I did confront them. I saw them riding their bikes across our parking lot and told them this was private property, and asked them to leave. They had a few choice words for me, and then stopped outside in front of the building. I told them that I knew they were the ones who had been causing the damage to our building, and that we have gotten the police involved. I remember them yelling at me. “You can’t prove anything” – and one of them threatened under their breath to burn the hall down. The conversation turned into a shouting match between myself and four of these little punks on bikes, basically In the middle of street. I couldn’t believe I was doing this, but I didn’t know what else to do. I figure If I told them I knew it was them, that maybe that would deter them from continuing their nightly assaults.
I know this was probably fun for them. A way to escape the boredom of whatever it is they did during the night, as I’m sure their parents we’re not concerned in where they were and what they were getting into. However this was not fun for my wife and I – and definitely not fun for our students, as this was starting to deter them from coming to our night classes. I was getting sick of coming there every night and wondering what was going to happen next. Soon, other people in the neighborhood were finding windows broken, things stolen from cars and more B&E were reported. I remember one of our neighbors told me ; that during the day he saw a few kids jump the fence and try to break into the our building. He yelled at them to get away and that he called security. They left, and soon returned with about 20 more kids. They then began jumping his fence and throwing rocks at his house. All this because he told them to get off our property. In some kind of twisted metaphor this area became like a war zone. It was kind of like us against them. People began talking in whispers about forming vigilante groups and dealing with these kids in their own way. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this, it was like something you would see in the movies, not real life. People were getting so frustrated that this one group of kids were disrupting their way of life. They were afraid to leave their homes at night, not knowing that when they got home whether or not their house would be broken into or their property would be damaged. The police seemed to turn a blind eye to this situation, as more and more people of that area reported similar events.
The problem was they were kids, and unless they were caught doing something, the police and security really couldn’t do much about it - or so we were told. This group would ride by and basically mock us, knowing that we were pretty much defenceless. They knew they were untouchable, and this gave them more power. I stated hearing things on the news about random attacks involving kids of similar ages. An elderly couple was attacked in a park by a group of teenagers. I woman out jogging in the morning was attacked by a group of kids no older them 15. She was robbed and bashed. Three teens, aged 13-14-15 attacked a man on a bus with a machete, then smashed out all the windows of the bus. What the hell was the world coming to? I mean what do you do, they were just kids, but as violent and aggressive as adults. It was such a blurry line.
One night we were sitting in the middle of hall right after one of them had put a brick through one of the windows. We had just come back from chasing them down the street. When we got back we called security, which seemed to be our routine of the night. The majority of the actors at our studio are comic book fanatics, so of course the topic of vigilante would come up from time to time. We were all sitting discussing our frustrations, when I piped up and said. “I’m just going to go down to the damn hardware store, strap two nail guns to my back, wear a hooded sweatshirt, safety glasses and a dust mask. No. Even better, we should form a group and call ourselves the Landscapers: re-shaping/changing/cleaning up this neighborhood. There it was. The beginning of what would become The Landscaper comic book. It’s strange how these things come about, but this was seed that created the idea.
Of course I wasn’t serious, well maybe just a little, but I was so frustrated that these kids had no deterrent. Nothing to make them say - Um… maybe we shouldn’t go out tonight and cause trouble because *insert deterrent here* choose from - Robot monster zombies -or Hell Hounds - or – Robo Cop - or - The Landscapers are out there. This sparked a few of the others to come up with similar hardware store based weapons and costumes. Each of us had our own names and special weapons. We would joke about what we would do, and how the neighborhood would be a better place because of us. Ok, I know a bit silly, but it kind of made us feel better about it all. That night I went home and designed the Landscaper logo. I thought it would be fun to make tee-shirts to hand out to the group, kind of like our own little inside joke Unfortunately, like most things, it got forgotten after a while. I never made the tee-shirts and the idea kind of disappeared. I put the logo in a folder on my desktop labeled “Back burner” and there it sat.
We ended up selling the hall and moving to a new location. I know, it’s almost like they won, but in the end we just couldn’t deal with it anymore.
Issue 2 Page 40
Issue 2 for June 10, 2009 - Issue 2 Page 40
Issue 2 Page 39
Issue 2 for June 4, 2009 - Issue 2 Page 39
Issue 2 Page 39
Issue 2 for June 4, 2009 - Issue 2 Page 39