#88: The Quantum Tower

Since my visit to the Forbidden Future, I swore off any form of transportation that was faster-than-light let alone temporal or dimensional, and decided to fly myself to New York as Ms. Megaton Man. So, one morning I suited up, with the class ring my father had bought me for graduation snugly under my yellow glove. Kozmik Kat, who could probably fly but was too chicken to try, had to settle for being uncomfortably crammed into my backpack. The digital readouts on my visor kept me out of the air lanes—it even provided me a good public domain book to read, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White—and we made it in a couple of hours, although Koz clawed me once or twice when I wasn’t paying attention and we hit turbulence.

World of Tiers: From Pencil to Ink

Here is the evolution of a tier of artwork involving Ms. Megaton Man, Preston Percy, Yarn Man, Rex Rigid, and Megaton Man himself. It began in April as a blue pencil sketch in my sketchbook, subsequently tightened with graphite pencil, then expanded with the addition of another panel, then inked and composited digitally. Each step is explained in the images below:

Blue Col-Erase pencil version in my 11" x 14" sketchbook (bonus: the scanner caught a stray piece of paper on Ms. Megaton Man's left lower leg!). Dialogue is added in pencil. In a flashback sequence, Ms. Megaton Man is being tested in the Megatropolis Quartet's laboratory. Judging from Preston Percy's hair, this probably takes place not long after the events depicted in Pteranoman #1 (1989).

Here the blue pencil is tightened with an H or HB graphite pencil.

The figure of Rex Rigid seemed somewhat cramped in the original composition, so I used tracing paper to draw the character independently, and inked it on Clearprint Design Vellum using a Hunt #102 crowquill and India ink.

Here I've lettered (using a 2.5 and 3.5 Rapidograph) and inked the rest of the composition, virtually unchanged from the original sketchbook layout, on Clearprint Design Vellum (actually, I scanned the sketchbook and printed it out at the same size). I used a repositionable gluestick (Elmer's) to adhere the vellum to the printout as I inked, later removing the adhesive with a rubber cement pick-up.

An additional panel suggested itself with Megaton Man entering the scene. Here are the pencil and inked versions.

The final tier is composited digitally. What will the remaining 2/3 of the page look like? Stay tuned!