Roughing It Out Part Two

Enter: The Savage Smallwood

Hi folks,

Previously I’d shown some rough pages from Pepe Larraz’s Planet Size X-Men # 1 and Walter Simonson’s Fantastic Four # 337. I think roughs are the skeleton key to understanding how comic book collaborations come together.

To kick this week off, I wanted to show you another master’s thumbnail pages, and these are right on my script that Greg Smallwood printed out. That’s very much how it was done back in the day. He gifted it back to me after we wrapped, and I scanned it for posterity.

In July of 2018 I was writing a script for a Defenders project that Tom Brevoort & Alanna Smith were putting together, and it ended up being a really cool little series. The five one shots feature a murderer’s row of talent and yours truly.

The idea was to give each Defender a thirty page comic that would tie together in unexpected ways. I was once again very lucky to be with Greg Smallwood. Greg and I had already worked on a couple of banger comics and we both share a love of both Ditko and Dr. Strange. Our story was about death, dying and reincarnation and it hetook on a bittersweet note during production with Mr. Ditko’s passing, and the finished comic is dedicated to him. I owe it to my partners to present full scripts, and they’re all free to tweak what they’d like - I always rewrite the script when the art is complete. Hope you enjoy a look behind the curtain of The Best Defense: Dr. Strange.

And the pages as printed. Note the improvements in my work from script for Greg, to the polish I do pre-letters…

This script had a nearly complete and full draft that went to Greg in part because I had the time and because it was a tie-in. Chip Zdarsky, Al Ewing and Jason Latour all needed to have optics on where Greg and I were going in our story. Here’s an example of a placeholder from later in the script that sadly, didn’t make the cut.

Hope you enjoyed more process, I’m lettering new comics that are completely inked and colored that will debut on Substack —- more on that very soon.

All the best,

GD