Episode 1: A Day at the Races

Thanks for visiting. Welcome to the archived First Episode of The Adventures of Wonder 'Zoi. If you're seeing this web site for the first time, I encourage you to take a moment to read these introductory notes before you get started. This episode is very much an evolved work, and an understanding of this evolution may help your appreciation of this piece.

Wonder 'Zoi had its beginnings early in 1995. It began as a few sketches and kind of grew from there. The first Wonder 'Zoi story hit the Internet beginning on June 30, 1995 and was posted in installments, in the order presented here. As the story progressed, the format, artistic style, finishing and presentation was continuously evolving, along with my own technical skills as a cartoonist. You will observe the character design shifting and changing throughout, and I think you'll agree that the characters and the style look much richer by the final pages. You may even notice that the font used changes about halfway through the story. If you care, this was because I bought a new computer at that point, and chose to use one of the new Windows 95 fonts instead of the old font I had been using on my Windows 3.1 machine.

Among the problems to solve was the transition from an inked page to the on-line product. There were about six steps between completion of a drawn page and its publication on-line, due to limitations in the scanning equipment and software available to me at the time. My goal was to produce images that were relatively quick to download. Looking back, I think the quality of the final product suffered unduly, and in subsequent work I've sacrificed the small file sizes for better image quality.

Another mistake I made in the development and publication of this episode was the media I chose to do the work. All of the final inked pages were done on drafting vellum, which is a medium I still use. My knowledge of drawing tools was limited to the tools I had previously used for cartooning and for architectural drawing up to that time. I had previously used technical pens and india ink for both, but it has been a long, long time since I owned a good set of technical pens, and these pens are extremely expensive, costing upwards of $150 for a full set. Moreover, if you don't have proper cleaning equipment they are very difficult to keep in good working order, and india ink tends to gum them up quickly. So, to save time and money I opted to work with standard felt-tip pens, and used Sharpie markers for fills. Now, apart from the killer headaches, I don't have anything against Sharpies, but they do have a tendency to bleed. I thought this wouldn't be a problem on the vellum because it's such a stable material and tends to hold ink on its surface rather than absorbing it like normal paper. Well, a couple of years later, I discovered that the Sharpie ink still managed to bleed out, and yellowed out a good portion of the pages where I had used it.

Throughout this work, I experimented with several technical approaches, in an effort to improve the quality of the work and save myself time. At the time I was working on Wonder 'Zoi I was finishing up my Master's Degree and working part-time, so I didn't have a lot of time to spend on the project. One experiment I tried was to skip the inking stage and publish rendered pencil drawings. The lesson I learned from this was that finished pencil drawings will take just as long as finished ink drawings, and that, as nice as pencil renderings look on paper, they don't scan well at any color depth below 24 bits (all the images are 8-bit color depth to speed download time). In all, I don't think that any of these pages, apart from perhaps the final page of this story, really begin to demonstrate my full capabilities as an artist or draftsman.

The plot is another curious matter. As a visually-oriented creative person, I find it relatively easy to come up with unique characters and objects, and fleshing them out with personal histories seems to come relatively easily. Plots and stories are another matter. The easy fallback is to have the personal history become the plot and hope that something else comes along to prop it up later. Or, I find myself creating plots that are so sweeping and obtuse that they'd confuse Tolkein. Comics, on the other hand, demand a shorter span for the plot, and not just because of the attention span of a comics reader. Wonder 'Zoi as it is manifested here was designed more as a comic strip than a comic book, published a page at a time. Consequently, the plot had to be advanced in little bites, six or eight panels at a time, and if I couldn't reach a satisfactory point after six or eight panels, the page stretched to the printed equivalent of a page and a half. I had outlined the plot prior to beginning the strip, but found by the end that I hadn't really followed the outline that closely. It's been said, I don't remember by whom, that outlines are the hallmark of desperate graduate thesis writers (or something like that) but when you're stitching together a string of images into a story it helps enormously to have something to go by. What I did not do, and to this day I still do not do this, is script out the story like they do in the typical writer/penciler/inker operations. The page-at-a-time approach helped me to develop a better feel for pacing, and taught me a few tricks about organizing things to help the panel layout tell the story. With the subsequent work I've done, I still have used an outline just to get the story plotted out. The actual writing occurs using thumbnail sketches on newsprint, and the story and dialog is fine-tuned (if you can call it that!) when the actual pages are pencilled out.

I think of Wonder 'Zoi #1 as a great learning experience. Even though I go back and look at the work and cringe, I'm still generally happy with it. This episode in the form presented here will never see the printed page. In addition to the quality issues I have with it, the facts that the originals are ruined and the page/panel layout won't translate well to a printed format preclude that possibility. At some point I may go back and "remaster" the story, but for now this episode stands as the cradle for an ongoing project that has been very rewarding to me.

'Nuff said. Enjoy The Adventures of Wonder 'Zoi: A Day at the Races, published 1995-1996.

Patrick M. Roach
August 24, 2002

Episode 1: A Day at the Races