Death Maze #1 Written by Keegan Shiner Art by Emanuel Gaggino Colors by Kassandra Grob Haas Letters by Antonio "ToTo" Esposito Cover design by Keegan Shiner Additional cover color by godwinking Based on the characters created by Alexander Woods and Keegan Shiner Copyright 2020 Keegan Shiner
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Computer says this is “The Mighty Gareth”. What’s this one’s name? Grade D superhero. Only skill listed is above average upper body strength. I don’t know Bert. I sure don’t think Someone got that intel wrong. Geez Ern, do you think you could ever be a superhero? I mean, if you were outside , not stuck in here? there’s much of a point to it. Nobody really likes a nice guy anymore What do you mean? Well, I just think everyone’s so selfI’ve never indulgent at this point that any attempt to help people is seen as an actual attack on their own abilities to help themselves. Look at doctors, people can’t wait to sue a doctor. Yeah. That’s why everyone is obsessed with anti-heroes. From corrupt politicians making money on the taxpayer’s dollar, to serial killers podcasts... They even like knowing their heroes are corrupt. Look at the new obsession with that “killer on the court” Michael Jordan. Punch in 3-2-v-b-7-9 - that ‘oughta be the liquidized atomic condenser solution. Ooh good idea. thought about that before I guess. F F F NY N EA N A A y E G H It’s just easier to work for evil corporations. Sure is. f f P f f F f f f f f f f f f
The Mighty Gareth... Will not be back. DEATH MAZE Will return! Will THE BOULDER smash his way through the DEATH MAZE in Issue #2?! Or will he also fall victim to the evil panda corporation? (Editors Note: it’s just “Panda Corp” but everyone knows it’s evil). Follow Dumb Comic Creators and stay tuned for the next issue! (And thanks for reading!)
The Making Of Death Maze #1 Variant Covers
Editors Note: This is a cell phone picture of a screen because I spent a few hours designing it and then decided to delete it and start over without saving a file anywhere, but I had sent a sample to a friend to get feedback (never got that feedback…).
The Making Of Death Maze #1 Original Artist Sketches
The Making Of Death Maze #1 Alternate Color
Editors Note: When I decided to make Death Maze, I also decided to keep track of the process of creating each book. For a two page comic, you’d be surprised at all of the hours of work that went into each page. writing, line art, inking, coloring, lettering, cover design, publishing - each required time and effort to complete. Both for the artists and also for me, the producer. If you listen to our dumb comic creator podcast, you know that I have also been producing a 37 page comic called “The Nefarious Mr. Green.” By some dumb luck, I found the perfect artist/colorer/letterer freelancer who liked my project and is wonderful to work with. If only every project were that easy… For Death maze, I wanted to branch out and work with a lot of different comic artists, explore the different stages of comic creation and really get a handle of working through the entire production process. I also wanted to write for different styles of comics and tones. And so…for this comic…as a learning tool…I hired three comic colorists to work on these pages and then compared their styles before deciding on a final version (listen to our discussion on episode 6 of our podcast or watch it on patreon.) The first colorist, Shahab Khan (sifar_art on fiverr), used very saturated tones. The background is just as bright as the foreground. It is reminiscent of 1990s x-men comics. The water effects and sludge was very interesting, but when showing a friend, he said it looked like fire not sludge. So for as happy as I was initially with the first rendition of color, I pressed on with the experiment. The next set of pages here are by colorist godwinking (fiverr account). He did a fantastic job as well, but as
you can see, very different. Godwinking used more natural colors, with less saturated areas of the page. The lighting effects of the sun in the first few panels really matched the descriptions of the scene in the script. On the other hand…The mighty gareth’s uniform is basically the same color as the guards (bert and ernie) which made them hard to tell apart (especailly when the background was close to the same color too). The other glaring issue is that the orange slime (as it is written in the script) that should be on Page 2 is nowhere to be found. These little lapses of judgement indicated to me that this colorist maybe did not read the script carefully. While I liked his intution and how he colored the panels, the fact remains that each part of the comic creating process must serve the story, even the colors. That’s not to say he is not a gifted colorist and I could have easily asked for revisions to get the pages to exactly what I was thinking. But for my experiment working with different colorists, I decided to leave the page as is and just acknoledge the parts of it that I would probably have wanted to change. If you go back and look at the final colors by kassandra grob haas, you will see what I think is a version that is directly in-between these two styles. She uses a lot of saturation, but also natural colors. The slime is orange but looks like sludge. She also passed the second-to-last-panel test, with the background of the snake eating the mighty gareth showing the actual environment (although motion blurred which is pretty cool too). Final thoughts - any of these three versions of the color could have been the final versions (with minor tweaks) but in the end, I decided to go with the version I liked best and followed the script the closest.
We’re not done! For more behind-the-scenes posts, pictures, scripts, and videos follow Dumb Comic Creators on Patreon. https://patreon.com/dumbcomiccreators Follow us @DumbComicCreators and @DeathMazeComics on Instagram Listen to our podcast on Spotify, Stitcher or Apple Podcasts!
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