Part 6: Inky fingers last all summer long

What I hadn't counted on was that since I'd never penciled an entire comic book before, I'd never inked a whole book either and I had to come up with an inking style and stick with it so that the book will read consistently. I spent at least 2 months practicing inking until I felt I wouldn't screw it up, and I still changed inking approaches at least twice while inking it over that Summer and Fall. I was inking page 19 when the 2003 ComiCon came around and the work that really blew me away there was Craig Thompson's Blankets. Starting on page 19 you'll see less use of a Mike Mignolaish graphic kind of approach (with a brush instead of Mignola's tech pen) and increasingly more and more dry brush shading, something Thompson has shown he's brilliant at. I tried it a little at first, then got carried away with it toward the end, so in the future I'll probably use it sparingly from now on. I finished the inking in November 2003, but it wouldn't be until March of 2004 that I would finish the scanning, the cleaning up in Photoshop, figure out all the pre-press issues and basically teach myself how best to publish my own comic book. Perhaps one day I'll try to meet the 24-hour the challenge again, but as failures go, this one has been extremely beneficial to me and my understanding of the entire process of making comics.