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Drawing
Inspiration from Hopelessness
by John Lustig
February 21, 2005
On Friday, Jan
21st, Cartoonists Northwest members
welcomed
Liriel McMahon, creator/writer/artist
of the online comic Bad
Blood. Liriel explained how she'd
discovered web comics in 2001, and
only two years later launched her
own feature.
Bad Blood
takes place in Seattle, but has more
readers in Australia than local ones.
The internet opens up an audience
like no other. Hometown readers probably
enjoy recognizing local landmarks
such as Dick's
Drive-In on Capitol Hill as they
follow the "vampire conspiracy"
storyline.
Liriel uploads
a new page of her story every Thursday.
She spends three days on each page:
day one scripting and doing thumbnails;
day two transferring her thumbnails
to the pencil stage using a lightboard
and doing backgrounds; day three scanning,
lettering, inking and shading.
Everyone was
impressed with her art. Her shading,
facial expressions, her backgrounds...
are all great. Liriel told us that
she had liked to draw from a young
age, but only recently bought herself
a how-to-draw book and developed her
style with no formal training.
Her online comic
readership has grown steadily, due
to all of her hard work to reach the
greatest possible audience. She stressed
the importance of keeping to a regular
schedule of updates and making your
site's navigation tools familiar,
functional and user-friendly.
Bad Blood
was ranked #6 on the Top 100 List
at Top
Web Comics the night of our meeting.
Thousands of online comics compete
with Liriel, but the online community
of readers is huge. Participating
in the "community is the best
resource," she said about networking
with other online creators and checking
out their projects.
Liriel said you
first need to have a dependable host.
She keeps
a mirror site up just in case of problems
with hers. Ask others how happy they
are with their hosts. There's nothing
worse than having readers get "wanged"
when your site is too busy to handle
traffic—a good way to lose readers.
Bad Blood
was conceived by Liriel as she watched
the news of the Iraq war; the looting,
stealing, "hopelessness of it
all" inspired her to change a
short story she had been working on
into the vampire conspiracy tale of
Bad Blood. Her vampires
have a specifically unique aspect,
which will come out in later chapters
of her story.
contact: John Lustig
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