Ex Astris Artist Celebrates Moon Landings

Mike Nicoll has just sent me this fab piece of art to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first human moon landing, which forms part of a gallery of art marking the event over on thedownthetubes forum.

Several artists have contributed images so far, including Doctor Who illustrator Colin Howard, Space Age Magazine editor Bob Bello and the Etherington Brothers.

More contributions are welcome.

If you're a fan of Mike's art, you may be interested to know we have four Ex Astris wallpapers for PCs available as free downloads over on the revamped web site: www.exastris.co.uk. After being a simple "redirect" for a couple of years, we've just launched the site proper and more on the strip and regularly updated strip posts are to feature soon.

Ex Astris: Homecoming Story Online

After discussion between myself and Mike, we've decided to publish a web version Ex: Astris Homecoming, which first appeared in Bulletproof Comics #2, using the myebook platform. Click on the image on the right to view the comic or follow this link.

This standalone story is set in 2511, and links in with the strips published on ROK Comics and Clickwheel.net.

Included in this myebook is a one page article with some background on the origins of the strip.

This is our first use of myebook, so please leave comments and let us know what you think!

myebook aims to revolutionise the way you can create, publish and share ebook content online. Built on a feature-rich social platform, complete with free-to-use powerful, browser-based, builder software, and a slick reader environment, it's an easy way for anyone and everyone to 'get it out there', and several independent publishers are using the platform to promote their projects. You'll find books such as new Garth by Huw-J, The Fat Man by Thomas Cochrane, previews of Marksoia titles, and comics from Orang Utan Comics, Insomnia Unico Comics and many others.

If you want to read Ex Astris: Homecoming in print, then head over to the Bulletproof web site and order a copy of #2, an 80-page anthology which also features strips such as Slumbertown by Rik Hoskin & Thomas Crielly, Simba Khan by Paul Birch & Jon Haward, Love Hurts by David Hailwood & Stuart Giddings, Sideburns by Jim Alexander & Jon Haward and Redstitch by Lee Langford & Klaus Belarski.

• Bulletproof Comics: www.bulletproofcomics.co.uk

• Read Ex Astris: Homecoming on myebook.com

Ex Astris To Return to Spaceship Away

We're pleased to report that although the upcoming issue of Spaceship Away, on sale soon, brings the first Ex Astris 'prequel' story to a close, the strip will return to the Magazine next year - and this time, it will be for an ongoing run.

"We'll be back with Issue 21," says writer John Freeman. "We're delighted the editors of Spaceship Away have committed to a further series of stories: it's a testament to Mike Nicoll's creation and his stunning work that the strip has proved a success in the Magazine."

It looks like it's going to be an interesting year ahead for the SF comic magazine: in addition to continuing Dan Dare stories and more, Issue 19 will see the arrival of the Daily Mirror's classic strip Garth, coloured by John Ridgway - a story that has never been reprinted in the UK.

Talks are also going on with Sydney Jordan about completing the Dan Dare story he started
in the Planet on Sunday.

• Spaceship Away Part 18 is being distributed to existing subscribers. For more about the issue, click here
• To order Spaceship Away, click here

Creating Crowd Scene in CGI

Over on the downthetubes forum, Ex Astris creator Mike Nicoll has been talking about creating crowd scenes in CGI, responding to comments from veteran artist John Ridgway that the medium isn't really good for such things.

Mike's response was pretty interesting, so I thought I'd re-post them in an edited form here.

"The problem with CGI work is the characters," argues John Ridgway. "In order to produce the necessary pictures, characters have to be created, posed, lit and their expressions arranged to suit the story. All this takes time. Mike Nicoll, on Ex Astris, manages this exceptionally well. But the number of characters in their scenes are limited. Imagine producing a number of crowd scenes...

"My solution to this is to draw the characters and use cgi for the backgrounds and spacecraft," says John. "It's then up to the individual reader and being given the time for this mixture to be accepted. No-one objected to the use of flat coloured line drawings against fully-painted backgrounds in the old Disney films, and apparently didn't even notice that the ballroom in Disney's Beauty and the Beast was CGI work."

Mike thinks John Makes a good point about crowd scenes although so far as Ex Astris is concerned the reason for a lack of major crowd scenes is simply down to the fact that the script(s) as written haven't actually called for any - yet.

"We did create a one-pager called Ex Astris: Floods [which was adapted for mobile for ROK Comics] which had a crowd storming an escaping space ship," he points out, "and the EA: Homecoming 10 pager we did for Bulletproof Comics had between four and seven characters in many panels and the main storyline which we're working on at present will have a mob of townspeople attacking our heroes which will be fun to do (memo to John Freeman - let's have lots of close-ups!).

"The problem may be simply that much CGI work is, as pointed out elsewhere, created by technicians who may be adept at computer skills but not in the art of comic creation," Mike argues. "That's not to denegrate the creators, it's simply that as someone who is as happy hand-drawing a page as CGI-ing it I have an extra batch of creative skills which many CGI artists lack.

"When I create a CGI scene there is frankly as much Photoshop and hand-rendered post-production work as there is pure CGI rendering. I almost never render a complete scene and pop it into place (if only it were that easy!!). Instead, I sketch the image first then render each element separately via the alpha channel, then compose the panel with every item on a separate layer.

"It may seem like a lot of extra work but it gives me maximum control over lighting, colour balance, contrast etc., but the point I'm trying rather laboriously to make is that it's just as easy for me to make a scene with two people as 22 people in CGI. All it costs you is a little extra time but if I were to hand-draw the crowd then I'm taking extra time as well but in the long run I'm saving time by not having to ink and colour the panels.

"That said, I feel the ideal way to go about solving the problem is, as John says, to hand-draw the characters but use CGI backgrounds in the same way as actors are shot against greenscreen in the movies. However, as shown to great effect in the movie Titan AE, this can result in a bit of a mess because the line art and flat colour jars terribly against the rendered backgrounds.

"My solution is to hand-paint the characters with no line-art involved - at least no black line-art which I feel is the main problem. Fully painted characters against CGI backgrounds (which also have no line art of course) blend in better and make a much more satifsying composite I feel.

"I'll be using this technique on a Dan Dare wallpaper which I'm doing for fun and if it gives satifactory results I'll be using it for my forthcoming Saffyre Blue graphic novel so I'll pop up some sample art a bit later for some constructive criticism."

• Read the whole discussion on the downthetubes forum

Mike Nicoll: From behind the drawing board...

... or perhaps that should be the computer screen, this being a "CGI strip". Have to say that I'm not normally one for blogging as I never seem to have enough time to devote to it but, for obvious reasons, I'll try to keep this one up to date!

The question I get asked most often is: "why use CGI for the strip instead of drawing it in the traditional way? Does that mean you can't draw very well?"

Well, the second part of that I will leave for others to judge as there are a few hand-drawn projects of mine due to see the light of day quite soon and you can decide for yourself.
As for the "why...?", I had taught myself how to use CGI software and was very impressed with the results - but they weren't exactly what I hoped for. I have to say right away that I don't profess to be an expert in the area and I know that I use certain software in ways that it wasn't meant to be used but what the hell - it's my party. Also, if you look closely, the strip is not all CGI - there is a hell of a lot of Photoshop/Painter and scanned hand-drawn art in there as well.

Thing is, CGI is far from being the "magic bullet" that popular mythology would have us believe and it's not possible to simply click a few buttons and create an image that looks the way it's meant to - or at least the way I meant it to - so I take the base render and fiddle about with it, adding colour layers, smoothing edges, overlaying cutouts from other renders etc. and that's the way I like to work.

To call Ex Astris a CGI or 3d strip is only half the story - it's a pastiche strip inasmuch as I will use any and all available material to create the look I want. For example, starfields never look very good when I render them - probably my fault for not using the software correctly but if I spent all my time reading "How to..." manuals I'd never get anything done - so I painted a piece of card pure black and spattered white paint across it from a toothbrush which gives a truly random effect, scanned it, knocked out the black and overlaid the remaining white dots on the image - instant starfield! I then add "blobs" of virtual paint, blur, distort and generally mess about with them using filters and add some photo's I took of sunsets/rises (and the odd section of a pic I nicked fron NASA, but please don't tell them!!), merge the whole shebang together and use the resulting image.

I've never created a CGI render which I felt was good enough to use without doing some post-production work and to that extent there's as much hand-created art as there is CGI in Ex Astris.

Why use CGI at all? There are two main reasons:

Firstly it's a matter of speed. I create the art for Ex Astris alone, so if I had to hand-draw a complicated design such as the Armstrong every time it appears in the strip It would take forever. (Before I discovered CGI, I actually built a metre-long model of the ship to photograph and draw from, so I know what I'm talkin' bout dude!)

This way, I have to spend some time creating the original mesh but after that's done I can relax and let the computer do the work whilst I work on the next panel.

Speed is of the essence in strip creation - you can look at magazines like Imagine FX and see pages of CGI-created artwork which looks much better than mine but if you look at the amount of time these artists take to create one single image, albeit a bloody brilliant one, it would take years to create a single comic.

Second reason - because it's there. I'm not being flippant - it's just that if artists only ever used the materials available at the time them we'd still be painting in cow's blood on cave walls. I see the potential in CGI to create a new style of art which I personally like the look of - and at the end of the day that's all I care about because I didn't create Ex Astris as a commercial venture - it was just a hobby that I would work on when I had the time and it wasn't until John Freeman said that he felt it had some potential that I even thought about it that way.

I know there are problems with CGI in creating traditional comic style exaggerated expressions and poses - they just don't look right in CGI -- so if I want that style of strip, I revert to hand-drawn. Ex Astris isn't meant to be a superhero strip, it's more like an adaptation of work by Arthur C. Clarke or Greg Bear, and so far, touch wood, people seem to like the way it looks. Long may it last!!

Okay - out of time as usual - see you in the funny pages!!!

Mike Nicoll

Ex Astris Part Four

Trouble below decks aboard the spaceship Armstrong...

Secrets of Ceres: Character Design

Here's one of Mike's early designs for Sarah Blake, a major character in our three-part story Secrets of Ceres, which will be published later in the year in the brilliant SF comic magazine, Spaceship Away.

The story is set in an earlier time period than the main story running on ROK Comics and as featured in the Homecoming story that will run in Bulletproof #2. Here's the promotional copy for the tale...

By the mid 21st Century, the race to space has been rekindled, borne from both the need for raw materials and a desire to explore. With bases on the Moon, Mars and the asteroids, humankind has truly expanded beyond the confines of home planet Earth... but is this fast expansion driven by other needs, unknown to the general public at large?

By 2040, the major asteroid Ceres had been selected as staging post for the mineral exploitation of the Asteroid Belt, with big corporations paying for the base in return for property rights. By 2050, Ceres base is fully up and running -- moved using giant ram jets into Mars orbit to better exploit its resources.

But beneath the surface of Ceres secrets are about to be uncovered - secrets investigator Sarah Blake may not live to reveal!

John Freeman (writer of The Science Service, and once group editor at Marvel UK) and Mike Nicoll (artist of top adult comic Saffyre Blue) bring their space odyssey Ex Astris to the pages of Spaceship Away, with a tale that sets the scene for a story that spans not just space - but centuries!

Ex Astris Part Three

Ex Astris Part One

• More information on this strip at www.exastris.co.uk