PAINKILLER JANE AND A PROCESS PAGE

For years, I have worked on just about everyone else’s characters, from Punisher, Daredevil, Daughters of the dragon and so on with the creation of Marvel Knights at Marvel Comics to Harley Quinn, Powergirl and Jonah Hex at DC and so on. My job- in my head -was to always try harder than those before me and make the character better, the stories more exciting and to make the character always approachable to new readers. Not always an easy thing to do when you have an editor telling you what THEY want, but I have been lucky having people that understood what I can do and they let me have some room to explore my ideas. My most successful runs on books have always been under a confident editor that let me experiment and spread my wings, and the worst times of my work when editorial crushed me, like on the Countdown series at DC or a number of other projects I will respectfully not list. In the end, there were a lot of company books I shall forever be known for and consider myself lucky.

Moving forward, I have also been more involved in bring my own work to the page and over the years figured out how to make a living doing this and it involved a ton of hustle from me and my partner at Paperfilms, Patrick Wedge, the magician that brings you all the Zestworld content each week. Patrick has his hands filled dealing with Amanda and I for sure and honestly, I don’t know how he does it, but we thank God we have him on our side. Without him I would average about 1 Kickstarter a year and be homeless. Well, maybe not homeless, but certainly depressed and frustrated.

So, years ago, when Kickstarter was announced, I was one of the first professionals to use the site to crowd fund a little book called QUEEN CRAB- still available here from us:  https://www.paperfilms.com/product-category/print-copies/page/2/

Since them we have done twenty successful campaigns, but not one of them was easy and all were more work than expected, but all of them so damn satisfying. Being able to control all parts of the process is work, but at the same time the final product you all receive is exactly how I saw the book looking at, from the story to the final art all the way to picking the printer and the paper quality and packing. My only regret is we cannot somehow move this process to our Paperfilms.com site and cut out the middle man. One day we will figure that out for sure.

Right now, as we are speaking, the next campaign we are setting up for the end of February is a 2 issue PAINKILLER JANE book that I have been working on with my crew for the past year.  Jane is a character I keep coming back to that Joe Quesada and I created tougher in the mid 90’s and I have grown very attached to her and her supporting cast, evolving the character over the years has been a blast. This time around I am again working with one of my favorite collaborators, Juan Santacruz, an artist I have been lucky enough to be working with since 2001. Back then, Justin Gray and I worked with him on a title called THE RESISTANCE and it had a decent small run with DC’S creator imprint Wildstorm ,and I still thing the book was a bit ahead of its time, but that’s another story. Right now, we just finished a story called BEAUTIFUL KILLERS and it looks like it will be the last Painkiller Jane title for a while for me. I figured now was a good time to show a process of a page to those that are new to the business of making comics.

It’s funny, I was on a zoom call with an agent and pitched a new book to her and she told me that to make any impact in publishing, what I really needed was to have a character that people would identify with me and that was the only way I was going to have any success in the field. Yeah, I got the feeling she had no clue about my history, but I reminded her about Painkiller jane and how I have been working on the character for the past 28 years. I had a bit of silence and then she said I needed something for all ages, and I reminded her I am not really an all ages writer and she moved on quickly.

I find it fascinating how people’s perception of you is so different from how we see ourselves sometimes. Anyway, I thought it was odd but back to Painkiller Jane. She is one of my favorite characters and when Joe Q and I created her, I knew instantly she was unlike anything else out there and I still feel the same -but over the years I have seen a lot of people do their version of the character in comics and especially film and this always gives me fuel to take the character to other places. When we gave her super powers, I always felt it might be more interesting for her to lose them at one point and have the character stand on her own like a Jack Reacher type of thing and maybe in the future I will do just that, but for now, she stays a tiny bit invincible.

THE PROCESS

On this page below is a process pages from the Painkiller Jane Beautiful Killers book, one of the few pages  that does not have nudity or excessive violence but shows off a bit of storytelling. So, let us get into it.

First up is a page from the actual script, a description of what is on the page. Give it a read. Really simple but you would be surprised that if you gave this to 5 different artists, it would be completely different. Juan and I have an understanding together and I give him room to breathe a bit, but I like working full script mainly because I want the artist to read the dialogue and get the expressions and acting of the figure spot on and not have to rewrite the book around a drawing, which is more the Marvel way of scriptwriting. Less dialogue and a different kind of shorthand.

PAINKILLER JANE: BEAUTIFUL KILLERS - PAGE 4 SCRIPT

PANEL 1

Tony the girl in the elevator together, the tray of food sitting on the hotel cart between them. Tony has taken and is eating a drumstick off the now exposed chicken on the food tray. The girl is still holding the tray, smirking. Amused. It is after hours in the hotel. Night.

TONY: Chicken’s cold.

GIRL: I can heat it up if you wish. Would only take a minute.

TONY: No, cold is fine. Brings out the flavor.

TK CAP: No loose ends.

 

PANEL 2

Another angle, maybe from slightly above.

TONY: What’s your name?

GIRL: Giana.

TONY: Giana, I’m sorry.

 

PANEL 3

On the girl, beautiful and innocent. Big blue eyes. Northern Italian. Lighter features.

GIRL: About what?

 

PANEL 4

He takes out his gun and puts it against her head as he takes her chin with his other hand and pushes her head back a slight bit.

TONY: You and I are going to walk out of this elevator and head to the back entrance of the building. Move quietly and draw no attention, otherwise I’ll kill you.

GIANA: M-my husband’s the cook. He’ll know right away something’s wrong.

TONY: You’re right. Again, sorry.

 

PANEL 5

POV inside the elevator looking out as we see the elevator door open. We see Tony getting out of the elevator, the girl lying dead over the spilled food tray. He shot her in the head, stripes of projected blood ran to the back wall behind her. Tony walks out calmly- fixing his jacket.

SFX: Ding!

 

PANEL 6

We see the husband cooking in the foreground in a simple  well-stocked hotel kitchen, not noticing Tony leaving Because he’s deep in his cooking.

TK CAP: Focused on his craft.

TK CAP: I respect that.  

So, script wise, pretty to the point leaving Juan Sanatcruz to do his magic. We have worked together for so long he reads my mind –I am not kidding- he understands the pace I set. His attention to detail is just amazing. Now, this gets sent to Juan and he sends me a breakdown, a very rough one for me to look over and okay before he goes to finished pencils- rough below. Just enough for me to understand all the angles he worked out and the pacing of this page.

Now, this is all I really need, and looking at it rough I can see he left me enough room for word balloons, which I sometimes need a lot because I enjoy comics that take a while to read, honestly. So, once I approve this and tell him he is good to go to finish the page with the inks, a few days later I receive a jpeg of what you see below. His attention to detail is what makes his work so cool to me- my favorite panel being the last with all the kitchen backgrounds.

When this is all done and approved by me, a really quick same day process, I send the file over to the colorist in a drobox folder to the colorist.

This time it is Vittorio Astone who lives and works in Italy. I found Vittorio’s work online, hit him up and hired him. Since the book is set in Italy, I thought he would bring something extra to the book and he sure did. Vittorio then gets the page and being another artist, lights the page according to how he sees it and delivers me within a week a bunch of pages like the one below. To really appreciate what color can do to a book is to look at the details and where his decisions trains our eye to look at in each and every panel. On that last panel there is so much thought going on   his choices, it is a sign of a true artist at work. The push and the pull of colors for separation and storytelling is just beautiful.  

Last is the lettering placement by Dave Sharpe where he decides font size and look and how to approach even the smallest of sound effects like the elevator “DING”. Dave is a super professional and understands how important the placement of the balloons is to the story. No covering the action or characters and all about pacing, the right to left of reading things so the order of dialogue is set correctly. Again, working with professionals with pride is the best of all worlds.

How many times have we all just plowed through a comic not really looking deeper at the art? I would say most of the time, but it is always nice to have a reminder of just how many talented people work on the books you read and think to understand the process just makes us all appreciate the little artistic miracle you hold in your hand. I hope you enjoy this, and it does make you pause after reading a page in any book and give the art a bit of time to breathe in your mind.

Till next time.

 

Jimmy Palmiotti