People of the Pit progress report

Among other things, I’ve been working on my ‘People of the Pit’ graphic novel comic book (‘People of the Pit’ is a novel originally published in 1918 by A. E. Merritt). I’m still working on page 17 — which is (spoiler alert!) the page where Staunton, the man captured by the ‘pit people,’ describes how they forced him to worship their unknown god in their temple. Here is the current version of the page (still a work in progress, but I like where it is going):

The above version replaces the one below — it isn’t finished either, but I just felt like I got started on the wrong foot with the ‘black’ version and much prefer the version above.

Both illustrations owe a heavy debt to this version that illustrated the original story by one of the greatest American illustrators ever, Virgil Finlay:

Of course, as should be obvious from the pictures, the ‘people’ of the pit are not people at all — they are a race of ghostly evil semi-material slugs with mind control abilities. Yuck.

“People of the Pit” follows “Dagon” in my adapting of public domain classic horror and weird fantasy literature to a comic book. In the future, I think I want to ditch the graphics tablet in favor of pen and ink on paper, maybe adding the text via the magic of digital wizardry. I like the digital workflow (being able to just ‘redo’ a whole page right on top of the old version or move stuff around is great), but pen and ink on paper often gives a character to the line and drawing that the slick surface of the digital tablet can’t replicate. And drawing on the tablet with a stylus just seems to make my wrist and arm more sore than drawing on paper (I think its the repetitive motions of my wrist and hand when drawing on the smaller tablet and I tend to clench my hand because the glassy tablet offers less resistance than the pencil on paper).