Wheels Begin Turning

Recently, we've been showing the comic around to people in order to get some preliminary feedback (and also to prove that we were actually doing something and not just talking about it). It felt odd because we hadn't really shown anything until after Reading Week; we'd been creating in a vacuum the entire time, so it was very enlightening to see what people thought of our progress. Reactions on the whole have been impressed, and we got a lot of encouraging advice. People seem genuinely interested in the final product, which is good because it only gives us more of an incentive to finish the thing.

Aside from our friends, some of the people we showed were Mike's Illustration professor, Julia Breckenreid; a couple of fourth year animators of his acquaintance; and most of the leaders from the Sheridan Christian Fellowship who happened to be around at the time. Breckenreid is giving us some leads to follow in regards to our self-publishing plan, including talking to Kagan McLeod, creator of Infinite KungFu. We had a good discussion with the animators about comic books and the advantage of having two people working on the same project. Hopefully we'll get around to meeting with an Animation instructor, as well.

Ben Hu did a hilarious cold reading that I wished we had recorded; there's no text in the panels yet, so he was forced to make up the story as he went along (he was also good enough to point out some minor anatomical and transitional issues). To our surprise, his version followed our original script very closely. Obviously animators are going to be more well-versed in reading sequentially than others, but in fact most people don't seem to have trouble getting the gist of what's going on. We take that as a very positive indicator.

The original army of two.