The following is the first page of the script for The Big Crunch, the prelude chapter. The prelude will be a little over 20 pages. I’m about halfway through the second draft, and I don’t think there’ll be too many edits after this. That means, my friends, I can start drawing soon. Look for a new website, character designs and maybe some teasers in the near future.

Page 1

Panel 1

Nothing but pitch black ink, borderless and infinite, bleeding into every gutter of the page. Moscrelle, a sergeant of the deposed Vos Grepsa planetary army, speaks off-panel.

MOSCRELLE: Monsieur?

Panel 2

Zoom out to reveal the Void, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, lumbering before a thick cloud of stars and debris. Moscrelle speaks off-panel again.

MOSCRELLE: Monsieur le génerál?

Panel 3

Zoom out again to reveal the Void reflected in the goggled eyes of General Blastich val Greletch. Moscrelle and Yakins, a Harkwelder mercenary, speak off-panel once more.

YAKINS: Oi, what’s he lookin’ at over there?

MOSCRELLE: Je ne sais pas, madame. Monsieur, can you hear me?

Panel 4

Zoom out once more to reveal the Void reflected in the circular window of a Taladec pleasure cruiser, behind which is Blastich with the silhouettes of Moscrelle, Yakins and Blastich’s lieutenant general Crusseaud. Yakins gestures emphatically, while Moscrelle reaches for Blastich’s shoulder.

YAKINS: Alright, get ‘im away from that window, like, right now!

MOSCRELLE: General Blastich!

Panel 5

Blastich glances over his shoulder with his abysmal, charcoal eyes. His face is serene, as if awoken from a daydream.

BLASTICH: Oui?

Ink sketch in response to Reddit post

I’ve been listening to Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack” all afternoon, and I don’t know why.

I have to go back and watch Sherlock again. I watched all six episodes in the couple of days after I ran my half-marathon, and I was so delirious and exhausted that I’m sure I missed a glut of details.

Anyway, I loved Andrew Scott in the role of Moriarty. Unsettling, unpredictable, and humorous in a terrifying way. I was thinking about this, too, after I watched the series: is the benevolent sociopath versus the malevolent psychopath a frequent archetype? I can think of Sherlock and Moriarty, Batman and the Joker. I imagine there are others that qualify. What do you think?

Portsmouth Restaurant Week is over. The Seacoast Half Marathon is done as well. And somehow, I survived both. Way to go, me. Now I’m getting back to the business of drawing.

I haven’t had a regular drawing discipline for six months, and reinstating it is tough. I’m not drawing much of The Big Crunch, since the first issue is still in scripting phase. So I’m having to scrounge for inspiration. I’ve decided to go with my Reddit subscriptions, which include photo feeds, sketch prompts and drawing requests from other users. The goal is to fill a page every day. Today was the first day. Lemurs and mermaids.

I don’t know why I lost confidence these last six months. I don’t care why. When you lose confidence in your craft, the only solution is to keep practicing until you gain it back again. Anything else is defeat, and I will not accept that. Yeah, improving your skills is difficult, and maintaining your discipline requires you to scale mountains of apathy, procrastination and discouragement. But nothing is more repugnant than someone belching the words “I give up,” so I intend to swallow them and smoke them out through my pores.

An excerpt from the preface of the history I’m writing for The Big Crunch:

At the center of our galaxy is a black hole four million times the mass of our sun. I It has a diameter of over 27 million miles and is surrounded by a thick, luminescent cloud of stars and debris, like krill in the maw of a lumbering whale. It regurgitates nothing of what it consumes — no light, no sound, no hope. It is death made perfect by its simplicity. It is the period at the end of the galactic sentence.

Astronomers on Earth, a comfortable 28,000 light years away, have given it the sterile monicker Sagittarius A*. But on the planet Obescuron, which knows the black hole as its native star, astronomers and laypeople alike use a more colloquial term.

They call it the Void.

I’m still not sure if this history will be for anyone’s eyes but mine, but in the meantime, it feels good to keep laying the groundwork for TBC issues.