Metal Pedal is my latest comic project. It's a combination of a lot of ideas I had at some points in my life. Some far in the past and others more recent. One of the ideas was to do a silent comic. Comics don't need text to tell the story. It can all be done with pictures and the occasional sound effect: pow! Another idea is to embrace the possibilities of creating a comic digitally. Sure, I can copy and paste a lot of elements, but where is the fun in that? But... I can use one drawing of a tree as a template and create multiple versions of that. It gives backgrounds something familiar, yet unique at the same time. Or I could use exact copies of the same element, either for comical effect or perhaps to indicate that hey! our hero has been here before. It all depends on what the story needs.
Time is a precious thing. While the day job is good and a necessity to get by in life, there is the ever hungry desire to create. Most of the time I spend on the train to and from the office is dedicated to drawing. It started with ballpoint sketches, just to draw for the sake of drawing. As time went by opportunities came up and I wanted to spend this precious time on projects.
It was a gradual thing, just writing, sketching and thumbnailing at first, but at some point I started to draw, ink and colour the actual work. Working on Metal Pedal is the next step. Taking my laptop with me on the train and to the draw club for the purpose of making the actual comic pages. And it's great!
Most of my comic work has been in black and white. With this comic I feel I'm exploring my sense of colour use and it's been fun so far. While I've gotten praise for my black and white work, I do feel it wouldn't work for this project. For this one, the story really comes alive in colour!
Another experiment is how the comic must be read. The key is to look at the page numbers and the arrow signs, especially for stories that have more than one page.
So how to present this new project to the world? The first thing I can reveal is that I'll be attinding at least two comic events in the Netherlands this year. The first one is the Oost Nederlandse Stripboekenbeurs on the 6th of April 2019. The second one is Brabants Stripspektakel on the 18th and 19th of May 2019 (together with Tosca Hamel). The idea is to sell A4 posters with each poster being a one page comic of Metal Pedal.
Let's pedal along and see where we go... ;-)
Feroz
