Bonus sketch of one of my protagonists!

I'm working on creating my protagonists, which is both tougher and more fun than I expected.  I'm discovering that creating how a new race looks is a lot more complicated than I expected.  I'll get a post on that posted in the next couple of days.

Until then, I've been practicing, here's a bunch of guys with beards!

Inspired by pictures from this awesome Blog.

Trying to write, draw and publish your own comic book turns out to be a rather complicated little project (Who would'a thought?!)... so each time I try to take a step, I discover that there were 3 steps before it that I didn't know I needed to take... 

And I'm learning to draw, which isn't easy either.

Anyway, I do have some stuff to document my process that I think is kind of interesting, so here goes:

Here's my first attempt at drawing my protagonist.  

My comic is set in a very-alternate universe America, and for the first story arc the main character is wandering around the Old West, so she's kind of in cowboy mode.

There are some thing I like about it... the basic costuming is coming along, and I like the overall build, but I'm not nearly satisfied with my drawing skills.  I'm sure I'll look back at this soon and laugh at it.

And here's a second picture of the protagonist... I like this one a little better, but I still hate it. 

And here's the first page of the comic... that I decide that I hate and have completely thrown out and rewritten.. there's no real spoilers here, and again I hate the art.

I actually like this, well, at least it highly amuses me, and I'm not completely offended by the art... My little comic is set in the 1850s and I plan on it rolling into the American Civil War (Cassandra up there is supposed to be wearing a civil war admiral's jacket), so I wanted to study up on the uniforms and styles of the period... so courtesy of google images and my pencil, here's a random assortment of civil war generals. 

Some things I've learned about writing and drawing a comic book.

1)  It takes about 10,000 times more research than I expected.  Everything from "What did civil war generals wear?" to "Er, what the hell does a 9 year old girl look like anyway?"

2)  Photo references are your friend, and enemy.  I have about a zillion of these too, now.  They're super handy in figuring out what things look like from different perspectives, but the danger is that it can become reproduction rather than a fresh creation.  Also, comic book art needs to be a little exaggerated to look and feel alive, so if you draw strictly from reference things look stiff and boring.