Walters : the first 10 pages

As promised, here are the first 10 pages of Walters, my 40 page story in Flight 6.

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Next post : What I've been doing for the last couple weeks -- a lot of new work for Comic-Con!

Walters, writing the story visually

Once I had the story all scribbled and written out, I set to making my thumbnails and storyboards.







This was the part that was most important. I think I made it through this part in a week's worth of evenings. Originally Walters was a 60 page story. When I showed my first draft to Kazu, he suggested that I look for places I could condense the storytelling and combine pages. This turned out to be the best piece of advice I got for the project. Once I managed to get the story figured I got it down to the tightest 40 pages I could.

Truthfully, that was all the hardest part. Drawing is what comes most naturally to me so it was all down hill from there. Here's a shot of a several of the drawn spreads :


From there, as you might expect, I painted all the drawings. I watercolored pretty fast and loose. When I know that the final product is going to be digital I tend to only worry with color a little and just concentrate on getting the textures and values I want.



One a side note, I'll have several of the original watercolors (which will include a print of the final page or spread) available at our booth at Comic-Con.

From there I went to work on doing the finals. At this point it was early December. The work was due in the second week of January. I had gotten the first 30 pages completed when I decided (actually I think Erin suggested the idea -- this one's for you, sweetheart) to go to final. I knew I'd have at least a solid week over Christmas to finish drawing the last pages I needed to complete. I got the first 25 or 30 pages done when disaster struck in the form of shoulder dislocation. I knocked it right out which meant that I was out of commission over Christmas, I couldn't even move my arm until about a week and half afterwards. It was stupid.

In Spider-Man, Peter Parker calls his abilities his "blessing and his curse." This is exactly how I feel about my right arm. It's an essential component of how I do what I do; drawing is my great love. But my right shoulder is also the thing that keeps me sitting over in the corner for fear of dislocation. And I don't know what it'll be like when I'm 50. Will it even work then? I've had 2 surgeries and more ER visits than I can count.

Well. Determined to not not work I played Zelda all Christmas long. I played the original "Links Awankening" on the GameBoy. It was, in a single word, awesome.

When we got home I worked with sling-ed arm. I could make small movements so I worked all over the paper by moving myself around. Does that makes any sense? I couldn't reach my arm very far, either way. But, I say all that to say after a couple more weeks over very late nights I had the entire 40 page story of Larry Walters completed.


I was a little nervous about showing the final story to Flight veterans over on the Flight forum. I believed in the story, of course and I knew that I had done the best art I had ever done but I mean, these people are some of the greatest writers and artists working!

I received some incredibly kind words from people that I have enormous respect for. I was blown away by the supportive comments my story got and it was unbelievable to think that these artist and writers I admired so much enjoyed my story as much as they did. Once I knew everything was working I took my first night off in nearly 4 months and played Mario 3 the rest of the night. It was great.

All in all, making Walters has been a tremendously rewarding experience and I very much look forward to putting together my story for Flight 7. And I've got a ton of ideas.

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I'm not able to show you the entire story but tomorrow I'll post the first 10 pages for you see.

Thanks for stopping by!

Walters, writing the story

When I finally settled on the story of Larry Walters, I knew one thing for sure, in every possible way I meant this re-telling as a tribute to his life. It was a crazy idea, who would have ever thought something like this was possible? Yet Larry did. Is it cliché to say that Larry followed his dreams? He did, he followed his dreams, how else do you say it? -- He wanted to fly his whole life but couldn't be pilot (you'll see why below) but why is that cliché? Maybe the phrase is but certainly the actual act isn't. As Larry said when he was arrested, "A man can't just sit around." What on earth has to be cliché about going out there and doing something awesome? He had a dream and he made it happen. That's a million times over what most of us ever do. A few years later Larry was quoted as saying,

"It was something I had to do. I had this dream for twenty years, and if I hadn't done it, I think I would have ended up in the funny farm. I didn't think that by fulfilling my goal in life — my dream — that I would create such a stir and make people laugh."

There's nothing cliché about that. It's incredibly admirable.


Yes, I did a lot of research and tried to find the facts and yes, some of them are conflicting. Some say he soared to 11,000 feet, some 16,000. There aren't exactly any books about the event but there is some information to be found online. Those facts weren't as interesting to me, I don't care if it was 15,000 feet or 16,000. The complete story however is simply amazing.

Larry couldn't be a pilot due to his extremely poor eyesight but he always wanted to fly. He got the idea to fly when he was thirteen. He saw some weather balloons in an Army/Navy store and twenty years later he bought 45 weather balloons and tied them to a lawn chair. Larry intended to rise a hundred feet, hang out, and then shoot some balloons and sink gently back down. What actually happened was much more startling. Upon release, he climbed approximately 1,000 feet a minute; that's 16 feet a second. What really gets me is that this man who had very poor eyesight LOST HIS GLASSES almost instantly. That is terrifying to me. Larry reached an altitude of approximately 15,000 feet. He traveled from San Pedro to Long Beach airport and flew around 45 minutes before crash landing in some power lines near LAX. He was then arrested.

The thing that caught me instantly about Larry's story was losing the glasses. The glasses were the thing that kept him from what he wanted, to be a pilot. And to loose them so soon in his flight... What on earth must he have seen up there?

I wanted to use the skeleton of the story as a platform to springboard off and explore episodes Larry's youth, his relationship to the sky, and his relationship to his glasses.

Yes, Walters is about Larry's story but it's a fictional and fantastical retelling of the story. I've taken many liberties in the telling. It's meant to be a piece of period fiction, historical fiction, if you can count the 1980s as a "period." I mean it as an homage to an incredibly inspiring person (he even named his lawn chair "Inspiration I") and I hope you'll enjoy. The episodes told in flashbacks, and in the sky are completely fictional. The only real truths are that a man named Larry flew a lawn chair and what breaks my heart is that he killed himself several years later.

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When I write out a visual story, doing storyboards for animation or something like Walters, a graphic novel, I write everything out. I scribble this and that and walk my way through the story in sentences before I ever start to draw. I don't know how other people work but this is the best way for me.




The story I found after working for several evenings, put simply, is this : It's the morning of the flight, and Larry remembers pivotal moments in his childhood that have lead him here. He then takes off and confronts the sky.

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I knew two things for sure; I wanted the sky to be as much of a character as Larry and the glasses would be an incredibly important element. The glasses were (obviously) what kept Larry from his dream but when they were off what was it like?


I imagined it to be a violent and aggressive world without the protection of his glasses. This takes the form of the sky when Larry's glasses fall off in a moment in childhood (in my story.) As if his whole life the sky had been trying to catch him, allure him, and wanted to keep him.

There is something up in the sky, and we'll meet both sides of the sky a little more in depth in the next post.

Next post, writing the story in pictures / dislocative disaster strikes!

The True Story of Larry Walters, or How I came to make a 40 page graphic novel

This story begins way back in the summer of 2005. I just graduated and had started to work full time for Portland Studios. My first company trip was up to NYC to attend BookExpo. It was a massive convention of book sellers, authors, you name it. BookExpo was a lot of fun; we ran around NYC, threw portfolios at people, and got to meet Peter deSeve in his studio.

One of the most surreal experiences (outside of meeting Maurice Sendak) was walking on to one of three enormous show floors and coming face to face with a giant poster of book cover I had done.

While I was at BookExpo I met Kazu Kibuishi. We talked for a bit and he gave me a copy of Flight 2. I gave him a business card. One of my abiding memories of that summer was Kazu telling me then that if I had any stories to contribute to Flight, I should feel free. At the time I didn't feel I had anything to offer. In any case I figured he was just being nice. What I'd come to find out is that Kazu is not only nice, he's extremely generous and a very kind person.

Several years past and with the releases of Flight 3 and Flight 4, the books were just getting better and better. Still, I didn't feel like I had anything to offer, that and I taken the "invitation" as just something nice to say, more like an off handed comment. It was a nice thought though, that I could remind myself of whenever I was frustrated with my work.

That summer, the months of June and July, I set to work on what I think, outside of Le Cadaeu du Temps and possibly The Ruin of the Beast, was my most ambitious project, at very least my biggest personal project yet, Ticket.

As I was finishing up the work on Ticket something made me think about Flight and Kazu. I looked him up online and found his email. I also saw a little note on his site saying they don't accept unsolicited contributions to Flight.

I went back and forth about emailing. I knew how it might look, unprofessional, like, "Hey! Look what I did!" I wanted to show him Ticket, show him how I'd been inspired by his work and Flight but I really didn't want it to come off like I was submitting a story. Finally, I decided that I'd write. I sent him a few spreads and told him about Ticket and how we'd met a couple years before and explained that I wasn't submitting anything but just wanted to say hi. See, with Ticket I felt I had finally been able to make something. Come to find out he remembered me! And he even remembered the drawing on my business card. Also that the offer to contribute still stood.

We met up last summer at Comic-Con and as I tried to buy his book Amulet (he refused my cash and gave me a copy as a gift) he introduced me to a few people and said, "This is Cory, he'll be joining us in Flight 6."

Well, that was a mandate for me to come up with something greater than I had before, I was not about to let Kazu down. He'd been so kind as to invite me. There was no way I wasn't going to do my best to make something great and reach further than I thought I could.

The whole flight back to Greenville from San Diego I was thinking about what I would do. I ran through a lot of ideas. After several weeks of drawing and thinking and drawing and thinking I settled on an idea inspired by a song, Walters, by Pinback.



The song told the story of Larry Walters, you know the guy. He's the one who flew a lawn chair with weather balloons. He flew from San Pedro, CA to Long Beach (near the Los Angeles airport) and spent close to 45 minutes in the sky before he crash landed in a bunch of power lines and got arrested.

What I wanted to do was tell the story of what happened during those 45 minutes.

Next post : Writing the story

Return of the Jedi.

That is such a great movie. I love Star Wars and Return of the Jedi is just great.

I started writing the title for this blog post and couldn't think of a way to say, "Hey I'm back! No, for real, I am." -- somehow I wrote "return" and the next three logical words would be "of the Jedi" -- so, there you have a peek into the inner-workings of my mind : all roads lead to Star Wars, one way or another.

All that to say, I am back. For those of you who may not have known, the last few months I've spent most all of my free-time completing a story for Flight 6. If you're unfamiliar with the Flight anthologies, you can familiarize yourself with these amazing collection here.

I'm ridiculously honored to have been asked to contribute to this project and I did my best to throw everything I had into it.

I can't post too much about it but in the coming days I'll post a bit of my work, drawings, paintings, and such.

My story is an adaptation of the life of Larry Walters. I was so struck by Larry's story : Here was a man who wanted his whole life to fly. Walters was unable to be a pilot due to his poor eyesight so what does he do? He collects helium tanks and weather balloons, ties them to a lawn chair, and sets sail. That is amazing. Pure and simple, amazing invention. What gets me is that the first thing that happened as he roared upward (at about 1,000 feet a minute) is that he lost his glasses. So what did he see up there? That's what I wanted to explore.

My story takes you through the day of the flight, a couple childhood flashbacks, and what happens after take-off. I'm at liberty to post a little so here are some. The sky is very much an active character in my adaptation :


My story is 42 pages. I'll post more information about Flight 6 as it becomes available.

Also, thanks to those of you who have expressed concern about my shoulder -- it's a stupid thing. I dislocated it in a mildly aggressive fashion about five years and it's happened about once a year (sometimes, if I've been lucky -- once every six months) this past time I did it right before Christmas. It was great.

One final update, thanks to you who helped Erin out with a vote back a few weeks ago -- I'll be getting a drawing together in the next few days.

Cory

Illustration Friday : "Voices"

Wow, what a potentially creepy topic. I mean, voices, just voices? Like the disembodied sort?

Who knows.

I'm currently working hard on what is probably the largest personal project I've done so far. It's around 50 pages, told in a graphic novel format.

Back towards the end of summer I was invited to contribute to the new volume of Flight. I've been at it at nights since late September.

My story is about Larry Walters and it's a mostly fictional adaptation of his life, his childhood, travel with a weather balloon, and what happens in the sky. In a way, you could say that the way some people hear voices, Larry (in my version at least) sees things in the sky. But only when his glasses fall off.

I've begun piecing all the art together so most of them the edges aren't clean, and a few I've had to place into panels, but over all it's going very well and I'm pleased with the way it's turning out.

Below you'll find one finished page, a finished spread that comes a page or two after the first one, and the raw watercolor underpainting of the first page. Enjoy.

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Also! I'm doing a drawing to win a drawing!
Check out the details to enter and potentially win a drawing by me here.
Details towards the bottom of that post, in bold.

5 monsters, X, and moving on.

Just pulled all these together last night. Thought I'd share. The one in the top most left is as far as that one is getting. It wasn't so great an idea as much as I drew a head I liked and couldn't get the rest of it on par. But, here it is all the same.

These have been painted over last month. I started sometime in August and got all these together in about a month, month and a half.

It's fun for me to see the progression. I've learned a ton doing these last few ones. But now it's time to move on to my next personal project.

The idea for this next personal project was directly inspired by this song, "Walters."

Just a note, there's a little language at the beginning of the video but the song is what is amazing. In the coming weeks I'll begin posting progress. I hope you enjoy.