It's the birthday of pioneering stop-motion animator, Willis O'Brien. Read more about him over at Making Visual Narratives.

Here's a rough layout sketch for the final two page spread in the Prologue:
I was still trying to make the comic autobiographical at this point, so I added the metafictional cartoonist painting the music balloons.

When I made the inked version for the first issue (with the purple cover), I changed the layout of the middle tier of panels to make it more symmetrical.  I like how the "camera" pulls in and then back out to show Tom in his mask totally wrapped up in playing guitar.
For the final version found in the second first issue (say that ten times fast) I digitally removed the cartoonist figure at the bottom:

You can see this page in context with the rest of the story here.

You can also purchase the original art to these two pages

Page 10- 11" x 11" blue pencil and india ink on bristol board $45 (includes shipping)

Page 11- 11" x 11" blue pencil and india ink on bristol board $45 (includes shipping)

I'm wrapping up My Life in Records #2.  Here's a sketchbook page from some of my work on My Life in Records #3.  Besides wrapping up issue #2, I'm busy scripting and sketching the 3rd issue.

More soon. . .

Please click the images to enlarge.

I really dig Paul Pope's comics.  Why hasn't he done anything except cover art recently?!  Sometimes I like to redraw parts of comics to see how they were made in hopes of picking up a few tricks from my favorite artists.  Its kind of my way of cutting open an artist's work to see how it all works.

Here's a couple of faces I sketched from Pope's Heavy Liquid:
 I've also been pretty busy roughing out stories.  Here's a little sequence of some band geeks flirting:


I tried to rework the oboe player's face in the margin, but I think I pretty much nailed it on in the first sketch.

For the next sketch, I settled on a strip across the top of tracks that I tried to learn to play interspersed with the play along CD from the Mel Bay How to Play Guitar book.  You can see at the bottom I was still going for the autobio/metafictional angle with the little cartoon Grant thinking as he drew the comic.

Here's the final page:
You can read the rest of this comic here.