LILY OF THE VALLEY WINS DC COMICS' COMIC COMPETITION AT ZUDACOMICS.COM!

DC COMICS' May webcomic competition at Zuda.com has ended and LILY OF THE VALLEY took first place!

Thanks to everyone who voted and supported the comic throughout the month. It was with all your support that Lily of the Valley won.

There is a Lily of the Valley group on facebook that will be updated with details and information about new pages as well as extra artwork and other things like wallpapers, avatars, articles, etc. Please become a member and grab a free Lily avatar from the photo album to use on Zuda. Add some fanart or start a discussion topic.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=71143685849&ref=ts

If anyone has any friends or knows anyone else who they think would be interested in Lily of the Valley send them an invite to the facebook group. Ask them to become a member on Zuda.com and rate and add Lily of the Valley to their favourites if they can!

Thanks again everyone. Your help was much appreciated and I hope you all stick around to see where the story goes! :)

Adam

LILY OF THE VALLEY on facebook!

You're invited to join this world of emotional turbulence on facebook at:

http://tinyurl.com/Lilycomic .

Interactive features and wallpapers and avatars will be added there in time. Please check it out and join in, start a discussion, etc.

This is where you belong.

Thanks!
Adam

LILY OF THE VALLEY update

Lily of the Valley: A love story for the over and under medicated, the disenchanted, the excessively violent, and the soft spoken.

I am currently fleshing out the rest of the story and doing more character designs for characters who appear beyond the eight page intro.

This is an image designed to express the violence and romance themes of the comic as well as introduce Sheriff Bellows. The appearance for Bellows was inspired alot by Johnny Cash although in this image it isn't quite as obvious.


Also for anyone interested in discussing Lily of the Valley with other fans or with me, or if you'd like to access the official Lily of the Valley avatars when they are made available, or if you'd like to know of other bonus material or interactive events please join the facebook group and feel like you belong somewhere in this world.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=71143685849

LILY OF THE VALLEY is coming...

The first 8 pages of my comic LILY OF THE VALLEY are completed and will hopefully be available to be seen within a month or two.

LILY OF THE VALLEY is a love story for the over and under medicated, the disenchanted, the excessively violent and the soft spoken.

LILY OF THE VALLEY INTRO IS FINISHED

The first bunch of pages to introduce my comic project LILY OF THE VALLEY is now complete!

I'm really excited about the opportunity to display this comic publicly because it's my most ambitious work to date and I really feel it is something original which no one has seen before. I can't wait for people to see it.

In the mean time though, here is an image drawn by a friend of mine and inked and coloured by me.

LILY OF THE VALLEY is in production!!

The wheels are turning on LILY OF THE VALLEY!

Here are some production sketches, a teaser page, and a preview panel from page 1!



LILY



THOMAS THE WHITE GHOST OF ELMWOOD




And some random stuff:

My friend Annie


BRUSH AND INK


LOGAN'S RUN

Lily of the Valley

My next comic to work on, tentatively titled Lily of the Valley ,is in early development. The outline is being worked on and I'll hopefully have concept work to display soon.

I will also have some sketches from a comic I'm doing for iVerse Media to show in the near future.

For the time being, some commissioned work:

Done entirely with ink and brush and a very small amount of gouche.


Maps.


Bleed Kei.

Original BLEED Pages

Here are the original pages of BLEED (originally titled BLOOD) so far in 11x17 page format. More will come.

Click on images to see in larger size.

-Adam

Christmas Interviews

Merry Christmas everyone!

BLEED is currently in third place with over 300 favourites and over 14500 page views, which is incredible to me. But BLEED still needs more votes to win the DC contract and continue as an ongoing series on Zudacomics.com!

Keep spreading the word and bringing in new fans to vote, rate, and favourite it at:

www.zudacomics.com/node/945 !

The largest horror comics website on the internet took some time earlier this week to interview me about my comic BLEED. If you have a few minutes to check it out, you can read it at:

www.comicmonsters.com/features-966-Adam_Atherton_talks_BLEED.html

Thanks again everyone.

Adam Atherton

Update on the Zuda race!

Hey everyone!

Thanks again to everyone for the extremely generous support for my comic BLEED on Zudacomics.com!

Here are some recent interviews and blog entries related to BLEED! Enjoy, and please leave your feedback!

First is an interview on "The Lefty's Film Blog" which you can find here: http://leftyfilmsblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/interview-adam-atherton.html.

Second is a promotional entry by a very passionate blogger named Robert McLeod. Check it out here: http://www.danrudy.com/wordpress/?p=196.

Third, an interview should be posted shortly on the "Zuda Fan" blog site at: http://zudafan.blogspot.com.

Thanks again to everyone who has been supporting my comic and spreading the word. I value your support more than anything and if I am granted with the opportunity to continue on Zudacomics.com then I owe you all big time. You're wonderful people with great taste and you're all friends of mine all the way. I love this comic and the world I've created with it more than anything I've done before and I can't wait to share more of it with you. There's many surprises and things I know you will love, and I have plugged my heart and soul into it and every experience of my life has influenced the work as well as my favourite entertainment, from Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Murder Ballads album, to teen slasher films. It's all in there; my entire soul.

Thanks for reading and please continue to spread the word and bring in new fans and readers to support it if you're as passionate about it as I am.

Bleed Behind the Scenes

Since my comic started competing this month on Zudacomics.com (www.zudacomics.com/node/945) I've been getting some questions about the process of making the comic, what inspired it, how the competition works, etc. So this post I'm going to just talk about these things so anyone interested can read it.

ZUDA COMICS

Zuda comics is the newly grown webcomics appendage of the largest comic and graphic novel publisher in North America, DC Comics. It was created in an effort to find and publish the most unqiue and interesting stories of all genres within the evolving format of webcomics.

Aspiring Zuda creators submit 8 page samples of their stories and each month 10 are selected by the editorial staff and displayed on the website. Readers and fans are able to read each potential comic and rate it what they believe it to be valued at out of 5, add it to their list of favourite comics on the site, discuss it below the comic on a wall of comments, and vote for which they would ultimately like to see become an ongoing series on Zuda Comics.

At the end of the month, the comic with the most points (determined by number of votes, favourites, ratings, page views, and possibly even comments) is announced as the winner and is added to Zuda's line-up of continuing comics. I'm rather new to Zuda, but I believe they aim for 1 new page a week for each comic with a year long contract with the possibility of renewal.

I find the concept of Zuda Comics to be brilliant. In the future I could see it becoming the one stop shop for online comics; the cyber version of running to the comic shop once a week to get your fix. I believe the website will constantly and consistantly grow because of how the competitions are designed. With each new competition and each new ongoing series, new readers will join and become regulars. The rate of increase will only snowball consistenly until it becomes a dominating force in the comics industry. And I'm just a snowflake looking to cling on for dear life and roll with it.

HOW BLEED JOINED THE ZUDA COMPETITION

A few aspiring creators have asked me about my experience with the Zuda team and what the process of getting Bleed into the race was like. First I read through the information provided on the site about submitting work, right here: http://zudacomics.com/submit_instructions. This page offers step by step instructions on how to prepare your pages for the submission and how to submit.

I recieved a response about a month later from the very friendly, helpful, and patient editorial assistant which basically said they didn't receive my response and were wondering if I was still interested in competing in the competition with Bleed (which at the time was called Blood). Apparently I had overlooked their first attempt at contact in my junk mail folder and deleted it. So at this time there was roughly a week before the competition would be beginning. I sent larger files of the pages, I provided them with my contact information and copyright information and was on my way.

At the time the comic was called Blood but about 3 or 4 days before the start of December, I was told that there were copyright concerns about the title, since theirs a similar comic owned by Dark Horse comics called Blood+ (A vampire manga comic which you read about here: http://www.darkhorse.com/Books/15-112/Blood-Volume-1-TPB). Luiza and I liked the idea of a one-word title so we decided to simply change it to Bleed. This required little editing to the logo which we had already developed so it worked out well. So the name was changed and everything was ready to go. We just had a few days left before we could see our comic on Zuda's homepage.



THE CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

Bleed developed as a simple little story. I was looking to exercise my sequential art abilities before making some serious portfolio pages. I just wanted something simple and fun to work on for practice. I wanted it to be enjoyable for me to draw and something personal to me. I don't consider myself an artist-for-hire who just draws the pages and panels as he's told. I consider myself more a creator. I want the artwork to reflect myself and my world view and perspective on things. I wanted readers to look at it and learn some things about me. I thought about how one looks at a famous painter's artwork and analyses the artist themself by looking through the window into their mind that is the painting. I wanted to do a comic that would be similar to this. A personal story with personal imagery and artistic style. I decided the best way to do this would be to literally illustrate my feelings for my hometown of Woodstock New Brunswick and my emotions related to growing up there. I wanted the artwork to describe how I feel about this place.

I wanted Bleed to be both a love letter to my hometown and at the same time a death threat. Afterall it was the home to my greatest friends and my greatest foes who combined to make it the greatest place on earth for me to live and at the same time the most miserable and angering. I wanted the art style to reflect this contradiction which is why it's a mix of cartoonish imagery and realistic. I received a few comments below the comic on Zuda saying the art style was wrong for the story to which I completely disagree; it is perfect for the story. It is both inviting and friendly and creepy and intimidating; exactly how my hometown has been seen through my eyes for a long time.

For me to be interested and passionate about illustrating the pages to this story I had to have the characters reflect myself. This may explain the George Moore quote to some who know me. I moved away from my hometown in the rural maritimes of Canada when I was 18. I moved to the biggest city in the country which is Toronto Ontario. It was a huge change and the differences between rural small towns and the city is quite drastic. The comic insults both places as much as it praises them. Once I decided on the plot of the story, which I can't speak too much about without spoiling things, I wrote out the major plot points and the story arc and everything as if it were a film script cause my major in University was film studies and scriptwriting was something I had experience in. I enjoy writing alot and am confident with it, but I'd much rather focus on producing page art, so I decided to bring my awesome girlfriend of 6 years Luiza onboard to help with the writing. Luiza also studied at York University majoring in film studies. She graduted with straight As, and maybe one B somewhere, and was placed on the Dean's Honour List for her graduating year.

With my outline for the story, Luiza wrote out the first draft of the script. She thought of great ideas that I never would have, and we both offered new ideas back and forth and watched it get better and better. She writes in paragraph form detailing scenes and sequences rather than breaking it into page and panel counts, so that I still have the freedom to direct the story how I choose.

Luiza came up with the introductory sequence with the truck driver, as a prelude to the story, like a quick scene you would see before the title credits in a film. I thought it was fantastic and agreed to work it in. She also worked an incredible amount of social commentary on Canadian life in small towns versuses the large cities; the stigmas, the misbeliefs, the fears, etc. The 8 pages seen on Zuda were actually done after about 5 pages of page art. It truly is a prelude.

HOW I CREATED THE PAGES

I drew each page on Windpower Smooth Bristol at a scale of 11 by 17 inches. Originally I was just drawing these pages for my own amusement and hadn't really thought about where I would attempt to display them for others to see so the Zuda page dimensions weren't on my mind.
I drew each page with a Pentel .5mm lead mechanical pencil and tuff stuff eraser. I did the ink work with Fabre Castell brush tip markers (and pages further along with Winsor and Newton brushes and acrylic ink and some white designer gouche and a toothbrush for snow effects). I'm still exploring inking methods that will preserve the freedom of the initial pencil lines as much as possible. I'm trying different sized brushes of different kinds. For the technical lines like borders and technical objects I used Staedler's drafting ink pens.
I work part time at one of the DeSerres art supply stores for their generous discount on supplies to feed my craft while working on character designs for animation studios and commercial logos and illustrations. DeSerres is a Canada owned chain of art supply stores, with their headquarters in Montreal Quebec (I think).

After the pages are drawn and inked, I scan them into my computer in two parts (because my scanner base is very small) and piece them together in Photoshop. In photoshop I adjust the levels and contrast on the linework and clean up any leftover pencil lines with the eraser tool. Then I add grayscaling layer by layer until it's completed.

CANADIAN MARITIME REFERENCES

I wanted to work my love for Canada and the east coast into this comic as much as I could. If you are familar with Canadian life you will likely appreciate this effort more than anyone else. The truck driver's speech is patterned after the stereotypical New Brunswick slur. I'm of strong belief that every element of any artist's work should mean something to the artist. I'll point out some meaning in these pages to me.

On the first page you can see a Tim Horton's "roll up the rim to win" cup (www.timhortons.com)and Humpty Dumpty chips (www.humptydumpty.com) which are both Canadian products. The expiry date on the chip bag is actually my Birthday (December 5,1983) and of course the sign hints that the city the trucker is leaving is Toronto, where I currently reside. Even the truck is designed after a Canadian trucking service called Day&Ross (www.dayross.ca) which ships from Ontario to the east coast (knowing this will help any reader pick up on some things later in the story even). The driver's shirt says McCain, the "most famous Canadian brand name in the world" according to their website at www.mccain.com.
And of course the town of Woodstock is based off of my hometown. Everything seen actually does exist in the real town, except where I took liberties (Andy's house doesn't actually have a garage for example, but it is there in town). The wal-mart-like building under construction works into the symbolism and commentary in the story, which will be revealed as the story unfolds. There is a Wal-Mart there now which opened about 4 years ago.

BEYOND ZUDA

I really believe in this comic Luiza and I created and am honoured to see it compete on Zudacomics.com and flattered to see it currently ranking first. At the end of the month if this becomes an ongoing series for Zuda, I will work extremely hard to bring the best quality of artwork and story to the readers and will strive to steadily improve and impress.

Before Bleed, I was working with two fantastically talented writers named Joshua O'Neil and Justin Hughes on their brilliant story titled TIme Traveling Allstar Volleyball Babes: JV. I went on a hiatus on the project for months and would like to see it finally stir again so I hope to work with them again on that project.

I also have another story idea for an ongoing comic series that I'd like to write a first draft for and then maybe get another talented writer onboard to perfect it.


A TASTE OF THINGS TO COME






THE END

Thanks for reading, and if you like Bleed and want to see it succeed be sure to vote for it, rate it, favourite it, and write some encouraging comments, at Zudacomics.com.

Thanks everyone for your support. Check it out here: www.zudacomics.com/node/945

Adam Atherton

AND THE TOOLS WHICH GET ME THROUGH THE WORK

Blog Entries on Bleed!

Word is spreading... or BLEEDing... ... ... yeah I did it.




Jason Wilson, a gifted writer and journalist who I've happened to know for long enough to witness his writing progress to where it's at now, has taken the time to write a blurb about Bleed on his blog In the Mind of Madness.
If you have a few minutes, head on over and check it out! If you have a few MORE minutes and are a cinephile or just a general fan of films and cinema, take a look around at some of his other posts which include insightful film reviews and other observations on the world and pop culture.

You can reach this blog by clicking on Jason's name in my friends list on the right or using this address: www.ratedargh-jcw.blogspot.com


Doug Dickinson, another good friend of mine who also happens to be a huge film buff with a film commentary blog, has taken the time to comment on Bleed as well. You might ask me if all my friends are lost in the world of cinema and my answer would be yes, because it's the same space I occupy. Doug's blog offers his thoughts on films, the Oscars, prominent Hollywood careers, and basically any interesting information related to film. If you have the time, take a look around.

You can reach this blog by clicking on Doug's name in my friends list on the right or using this address: www.bullshish.com/doug

Help my comic become an ongoing series by voting for it on Zudacomics.com

My comic, Bleed, has been selected by Zudacomics.com to compete throughout December to become an ongoing series.
It takes aloooooot of votes to win and has tough competition, so if you like what you see in my comic at www.zudacomics.com/node/945 , I would be eternally thankful if you signed in to vote on my comic, rate it, favourite it, comment on it, etc.
It would mean a heck of a lot to me. If you do be sure to let me know, so I can thank you myself!

DECEMBER 1 to DECEMBER 26

BLEED; a comic created by Adam Atherton and Luiza Dragonescu is competing on Zudacomics.com throughout December and needs your help to win!

SOME INFO
Zudacomics.com was created by DC Comics to find new creator-owned ongoing series by letting readers chose from 10 potentials a month.
The series with the most VOTES, highest RATING, most FAVOURITES, and most PAGE VIEWS is declared the winner at the end of each month.
That comic then becomes an ongoing series and is published on Zudacomics.com and in print.

HOW YOU CAN HELP
1. The best way is by VOTING for it! (The vote button is on the Competition Page and on the Comic Information drop-down on the Comic Page itself.) All you gotta do is quickly register and sign in.

2. You can also make it one of your FAVORITES or give it a high RATING. (The favorites button and a five-star rating scale are in the Comic Information section of the Comic Page.) Even VIEWING and COMMENTING helps determine which comic is ultimately number one!

3. You can even download a banner from the Support Page to post on your web page. Nothing helps like bringing in more people to favorite, rate, comment and especially VOTE!

Thanks so much for your help and support!

Adam and Luiza

BLEED: A comic for the disenchanted

Bleed is my comic inspired by teen slasher horror flicks, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, teen dramas, music by Nick cave and the Bad Seeds, Scott Pilgrim, Paul Pope, existentialism, isolation, and beautiful girls doing the funny things they do.

I am attempting a very cinematic approach to the storytelling and am trying to tell it from the perspective of a film director. The small town in the comic I am basing off of my hometown of Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada. This way, I know the locations much better and hopefully this knowledge will give the town more personality in the book and feel much more real.


by Adam Atherton and Luiza Dragonescu

Faces!

Here are some recent warm up portrait sketches of some people I know.

Progress

I don't want to talk too much about this project just yet, but it's written by a team of great writers you may be familar with, Joshua O'Neil and Justin Hughes, and illustrated by myself. Dialogue and colour to come soon.

Until the Moon meets the Earth

This is an album cover design done for a Toronto band called ADA.
The logo is intended to go on the blank sheet. The small ADA on this is my signature, which just happens to be the same as the band's name.

To check them out their music go to www.myspace.com/ADAnoise

*Click images to enlarge*

Time Travelling All Star Volleyball Babes: JV (Page 3)

A few pages of a comic I'm currently doing pencils and inks for.

Slow Day

More Girls!

A few new girlie drawings to get back into things:






And a page from Sunday Morning, a Paul Pope inspired short story I wrote and illustrated.

New sketch

and a caricature:

Strip Collection to Date

Harold (1)


Harold (2)


Erika, Tammy, and Jenn (1)


Erika, Tammy, and Jenn (2)


Harold (3)


Erika, Tammy, and Jenn (a sequence from a larger comic)


Harold (4)


Harold (5)


Erika, Tammy, and Jenn (3)

Ghost

Here's the beginning of an 8 page story based on a Darkhorse script for the comic Ghost. I don't know if I will finish the whole thing yet or not.

Harold! 4 and 5

Here are two new Harold strips. They both work together.

Girls

I like them.