WHO KNOWS HOW THIS HAPPENED

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?!

A jam cover from many angles. No angels. I can't speak from my brothers in thumbs, but we might've been drunk enough to see the genius. There are four lights.

PANEL 37

I know. It's confusing. You might've thought we stopped numbering the panels, but we didn't!

So, here's the weird thing. As I was inking this, Róisín Murphy's Off On It started playing on the ol' random setting. If you know the song, then you know it's all a game.

I forgot how this works

PANEL 35

Y not!

Fun with photoshop.

The beginning is coming.

Connect the dots

PANEL 34

A real quicky, once I actually sat down to do it. I've been thinking about Paul Grist, lately (the answer to the question: What if Alex Toth...). The anatomy basically went from bad to worse, but that's ok. SPEED before quality, I say sometimes.

PANEL 33

PANEL 32

It's been awhile but HDTH is back and headed toward the final stretch!

PANEL 31

Well, it only took 2+ months to finally get it up. Story of my life...

I DID promise that it would be extra huge though! And I finally delivered!!!!!!!

SORRY!

Well, I missed my deadline for last Monday. In a way, I'm glad that Marcos didn't pick up the slacks. And now I'm kinda happy that Kenny didn't pick them up afterwards.

It's Hiatus time again! There will be a post sometime after this week is behind us. I plan on making it extra-special, to make up for the laxity. You may need to set up multiple monitors just to see what happened just before Kenny's panel.

EXTRA MONITORS!!!!

PANEL 30

PANEL 29

Staying with the grunt-controlled rock 'em sock 'em robots theme.

PANEL 28

"UH! UH! GRRRRRRRRRRRR! UH! OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH YES!" You can quote me on that!

Panel 27

PANEL 26

I hate bad airbrush color, so i'm facing my fear. And I am not the better for it.

PANEL 25

An hour and a half from conception to posting. Not bad. I wish everything went this way. Bear done with a Pilot gel ink pen. Everything else with a #12 brush. Rough was done on a yellow legal pad. Final on Tracing vellum.

I'm thinking more and more about a theory of awesome panels. Going back and forth between my MoCCA books and Kirby/Ditko readings is making me think that all our mature "literary" comicking has over-corrected the super hero panel dynamic. We need to bring back the awesome.

Lucky for you, you have Cliff Face Comics. Aw, SNAP!

PANEL 24

PANEL 23

Of course, Panel Number 23 goes to me. It couldn't be any other way, really.

Unfortunately, I drew this panel before reading one of the greatest lines in comic book history:

"Come on, Mister Big! Don't rattle your gonads in my ears! Mama Nature doesn't give a damn!"
_Jack Kirby's Silver Star

If I had, I might have had to quote it in there somewhere.

Panel 22

PANEL 21

Making up for lost posts! And practicing InDesign! And killing time at work! There are dead birds all over the place with that stones throw!

Panel 20

PANEL 19

DIEEEEEEE!!!!!

PANEL 18

Culminating my weekend of still-unresolved computer may hams, I decided to put in 90 minutes of work. I think it shows!

Who's next? Who knows!

Panel 17

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Skipped Marcos, sorry!

Hiatus

How Did this Happen? will continue in July!

PANEL 16

Swipe! WWJKD? I wondered, What Would Jack Kirby Do if he were doing our little webcomic. So, I went to the man himself. I cracked my Fantastic Four Omnibus and found a panel of Captain America shield-punching the Hulk while Rick Jones stood dumb-struck in the background. The I did a quick modified study of it with a felt-tip on a yellow legal pad.

Then I traced that with a brush on tracing vellum. Then I free-handed a Kirby-lite close-up on another sheet of tracing vellum. Then I did the words underneath on the scraps I cropped off. Then I took a piece of paper with pen ink shakeoffs for the blood splatter.

Then I put it all together in photoshop for biggens.

Now, it's Kenny's turn!

PANEL 15

I love polaroid edges!

PANEL 14

My crappy attempt at gettimg a bit Kim Dietchy. My awesome attempt at killing any class left in this endeavor.

PANEL 13

Oy. I went back and forth and left and right trying to figure out what do do with Kenny's panel. Ultimately, I decided I had spent too much time not doing anything. So, BAM. Up.

PANEL 12

PANEL 11

I was going for a bit of a manga style here. A messy one. I just read Parasyte vol.1 and it has some of the best head exploding violence ever. No monkey dick though.

PANEL 10

A little tribute to the Barron Storey school of comics.

PANEL 9

You knock them down, I set them up!

PANEL 8

What is the secret history of soldier Manbrief!!??

PANEL 7

PANEL 6

PANEL 5

Color babes! Justin mentioned Art Adams on his blog so it got me thinking about him and New Mutants Special #1. Not like it shows...

PANEL 4

Keepin' it real...

PANEL 3

PANEL 2

English monkey victory!

PANEL 1

I thought of this at work, when we started talking about doing a reverse-order story. And I drew a quick pen sketch of it during my downtime. I took that sketch home and scanned it into my computer, blew it up and printed it out. Then I traced and slightly refined the image with a felt tip pen before scanning and uploading it.

The people are supposed to be Normans, bears' natural enemy.

THE RULES

Welcome to Cliff Face: How Did This Happen?

Marcos, Kenny and I have decided to do a jam comic. Hopefully, we will stick with it and make the beautiful love.

The concept is simple. Since blogger puts the most recent post above older ones, we'll be writing this story in reverse narrative order. So, the first panel will be the last in the story, and the last panel will be the first.

Here are the rules:

1. Look at the panel that's been posted most recently.

2. Make a panel to proceed it.

3. Your panel should in some way set up the panel posted before yours, beyond that there are no content restrictions.

4. Try not to take too long posting your panel, as someone else is waiting on the wings.
5. Panels can be of any size or shape. It's the web, feel free to take advantage of that. Also, use color if you want to.

6. Feel free to provide some commentary on your panel when you post it, but don't suggest any sort of instructions for the cartoonist following you in the order.

7. There's a possibility, however remote, that this could turn into something good that we might want to print. With that in mind, keep a 800 dpi file of your panel handy. Panels on the blog should be 72 dpi jpegs.

8. Don't talk about Fight Club.