I think the ‘because’ had something to do with pixels.

Now I don’t care much for art that doesn’t look interesting – I’ve often fallen back to a tequila-laced argument I came up with when I was seventeen… it is thus: the world’s most caring, thoughtful and deep person could be in the same bar as you, but if they don’t look (at the least) interesting, you probably won’t go and introduce yourself and find this out.

I have the same Shallow-Hal approach to art galleries. If a piece of art doesn’t grab my aesthetic interest from across the room I’m sure as hell not going to read the little tag telling me why it’s important.

Have I missed out on some amazingly complex pieces of art and thinking? Probably.

Can I ‘case’ an exhibition in moments and hone in on the stuff I like (or alternatively, leave and get a coffee down the road) quick-smart? Hell yeah, I can.

BUT – when it comes to games, and when it comes to comics (ie storytelling) while the art may pull me to a work, it’s the writing that keeps me there. In other words, grab me with the look, keep me with the depth. You could progressively devolve the graphics or the art in my favourite games and comics as I’m experiencing them, and I wouldn’t care.

Which puts me in a weird position. I love Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staple’s comic Saga. It’s got eye poppingly amazing art (I would give both my tequila-soaked kidneys to have Staples on Moth City art in place of me) and a great story. That team-up drew me into a world that is developed with both keyboard and brush – its lush, deep and atmospheric.

And at this point I’m so invested that it could transition into the simplified style exemplified by Rich Burlew of ‘Order of the Stick’ and I’d still love it. Of course, Burlew has a good eye for expression and emotive poses, so I’m hardly going to the opposite end of the spectrum here… I love me some ‘Order o’ Stick.’ I’m sure seventeen-year-old Tim would have bothered Order at the bar.

(I probably should have picked an artist whose work I don’t admire to take Burlew’s place in this little hypothetical, but that’d just be mean).

That said, and in a complete contradiction, I am spending progressively longer periods on my Moth City comic art than I did when I started. The problem is that I as a reader of Moth City, probably wouldn’t even notice…

Anyway, here is some fanart I’ve done for two very different, but very good artists.

Make sure you check out:
Fiona Staples’ fine work at her tumblr
Rich Burlew’s mega-webcomic Order of the Stick

He responded with nice comments almost immediately. It took a little longer to get him to drop an F-Bomb but it was all worthwhile (Note if you leave me alone with anyone for long enough I will be able to get them to do such, it’s a kiwi skill).

So now Moth City has two online homes, here on Moth City and starting today on www.thrillbent.com It will start from the beginning of Season 1, and have releases every Tuesday.

I’m super happy about it. Not just because it puts me alongside a fantastic and humbling bunch of thrillbent creators, but because it gives me the opportunity to introduce new readers to my stories. Welcome, welcome, there’s lots of room around the fire.

And what does this mean for you www.Mothcity.com readers who have stuck with me so far? We’re going to keep trucking with our current schedule at this end, groups of pages going up every Monday (US) and blogs every Wednesday, I’ll keep posting the occasional video, you’ll still be able to download comics from my store, as well as via comixology, and people who sign up here will still receive a free copy of The Reservoir comic if they sign up to my newsletter via this site. So, everything you like about www.mothcity.com will continues as you like it.

Wicked, thanks everybody. I wouldn’t be in this position without your help, readership and support.

Tim

Watch this video on YouTube.

And in the physical realm, I am jet setting my way up to Auckland for my first (official) con appearance at Chromacon (Sunday May 12th, 9-5pm, Aotea Center, Free Entry).

I will be selling physical goods and ware not yet seen by the eyes or man. Come and ogle them. It is going to be a great day, head-honcho Allan has put together a sweet line up of talent – dare I say the best group of working kiwi illustrators and artists in one room – ever. Nice one.

I’ll also be joining a panel with the tall Dylan Horrocks, the funny Gregor Czaykowski and the talented Li Chen on the topic of Webcomics. It’s at 3:15>4:15. I will try not to make a poop joke. I may make a poop joke… but it won’t be at poop’s expense.

Still not sold?! Just look at the group of talented bastardos that are coming in this mega-splash image of talentedness below…

Chromacon

Sunday May 12th
9-5pm
Air NZ Foyer, Aotea Center, Auckland, NZ
FREE 

Each store is doing something a little different, but the following stores are all giving away cards that grant the holders a free download of the first issue of Moth City. Of course, this is only a small part of what they’re doing for FCBD so have a look below, and visit one of them this weekend.

Arkham City Comics [http://www.arkham.co.nz/]
Upstairs in the Royal Oak Mall, Manukau Rd, Royal Oak, Auckland

This place is brand new and spanking fresh, so they’re having a special ‘Grand Opening’ party this FCBD so make sure you visit the inmates and grab some free stuff from the Michel, Jerry and the team.

Graphic Novel Cafe (GNC) [http://www.graphicnovelcafe.co.nz/]
Top of Shortland St, Central Auckland

Offer a great collection of Manga and Anime as well as all the great stuff you’d expect (art books, figurines etc). They are also running a comic-art competition as part of Overload, check that out here - you can win a sweet wacom tablet similar to the one I use to create my comics.

Retrospace [http://www.retrospace.co.nz/]
112 Hurstmere Rd, Takapuna

This place is crammed full of collectible goodness (toys, plushies, figures and books), and is run by the lovely Rochelle, make sure you stop in for a chat and grabs some goodies.

Mark 1 Comics and Games (MK1) [http://www.mk1.co.nz/]
551 Victoria St, Hamilton Central

MK1 is hosting a major sale (24% off everything instore!) on Saturday to celebrate 24 years in Hamilton. You can also grab any three free FBCD books, so it’s a good change to try some new titles. You can learn more about their special plans for the day here.

Graphic [http://www.graphiccomics.co.nz/]
106 Cuba Mall, Wellington

My local, these guys have been happily taking my money for years and giving me paneled goodness in exchange. I’m not entirely sure what they’re offering this year, but ask the friendly staff.

Thanks to all the stores and staff for helping out with spreading the Moth City story to new Kiwi readers. It’s great to be able to partner digital goods and physical stores under the banner of comics, there’s way to much friction and fear in some circles about digital. But man, there’s nothing like visiting your local and buying some goodies!

PS
Cheers to everyone who left a review of ‘Season 1 Part 1′ on Comixology – we’ve got over 40 reviews now which is fantastic, hopefully this it’ll help newbs to give it a shot.

UPDATE

So doing my obligatory ego-search revealed that the first issue was up on free-download sites within 24 hours of my last post. The idea of someone pirating a digital comic that is only .99c and is already available online for free is pretty funny – I mean, I considered torrenting this thing myself at some point, but thought it’d take some time to figure it all out and upload it.

I sure as hell would have valued the effort to do it at more than .99c

Maybe they were attracted to the book, maybe they just liked that I got Mark Waid to say “F@#k” in the intro, maybe they just have a program the scraps everything as it’s launched, I’m not sure. I am sure it’s not comixology’s fault.

If I sound flippant about it all, I guess that’s cause right now in my ‘career’ (my career comes with quotation marks which tells you something) I’m trying to reach as many readers as possible. The problem for new creators isn’t lost earnings, it’s obscurity. My opinion may change on that in the future, and I don’t begrudge creators who want their work paid for every time.

But I mean, I’m giving this stuff away for free (or damn cheap HD versions) anyway, and trying to get people to link to it and spread the word etc. This persons doing all that for me. I hope he/she has lots of friends.

There is something in the degrading of work, in our desperate need to be read, something a little ‘town-bike’ in the approach a lot of us webcomic people take. I can imagine the old newspaper cartoonists clustering around cake and coffee and talking about how we don’t ‘respect ourselves’ and that we will regret it all in later years. They might be right.

Or not.

I’m am a believer in the expanding-pie school of business. I would rather have a slice of a bigger pie and share it with others, than control 100% of my own pie that doesn’t make any money. I don’t think these metaphors are mixing well…

Anyway, if you wanna read Moth City you can do so here at my site, for free, if you wanna read it in HD with some extra content you can do that at comixology, and if you wanna download it from some other guy that link is here. (Warning some of these sites also have NSFW ads and are really hard to use for noobs without getting viruses etc)

END UPDATE

I’m bringing you this post a little later than normal, because I spent my morning chatting their awesome podcasting team of Jake and Slim. I was a little nervous. I may have sworn, I definitely called Peter Jackson’s ‘Bad Taste,’ ‘Evil Dead’ which was a double fail, and I auto-corrected Slim when he said I was from Australia.

Other than that, it went great and I really enjoyed it. Heh.

The issue is the first half of season one, it’s about 30 pages of traditional comic or 168 of digital comic, and it looks gorgeous  You can buy it via your android or iOS comixology app or via their site here.

Here’s the link to listen to the podcast:
The Comixologist – 128 Tim Gibson on Moth City

Ladies and gentlemen, some sweet pictures from some talented fellows.

First up is Mr Paul Tobin, amazing concept artist and illustrator from Weta Workshop, he not only designed a some beautiful stuff for the Narnia films, he co-wrote the art of books. You can check out some of his awesome fantasy illustrations here, and have a look at his publishing project White Cloud Worlds.

Below is his painting of Miss Glitter McCaw.

Tom Robinson is a super talented, super-humble fellow who works in Wellington’s games industry. If you’ve played any of the great Pik Pok games on ios (Birdstrike is my fav) you’ve seen his work. Dude is a boss illustrator too, and you can see some of his wicked art at his blog.

Below is his great Dr Boyes sketch he did in front of my White Clouds Worlds book while we were signing them at a con.

Christian Pearce is possibly the most under appreciated lover in the modern world. He is also a great conceptual designer and tall person. He draws tank crabs, fighting bears and robots. If you have any sense of fun you should go to his blog and grin at his sweet doodles. I used to steal some of my best stuff from Christian when we worked together, but he’s also one of the reasons that I don’t really draw robots, I mean, why bother when he’s already cornered the market.

Here is his hilarious sketch of Governor McCaw.

And here it is after I’ve coloured it.

If you’d like to send in any MC related art, it would be my pleasure to recive them! Just contact me via Facebook, twitter or use the contact mail form at the bottom of every page.

It’s good news for you, and it’s also good news for me.  You’ll be able to read Moth City in glorious HD and read a bit of bonus waffle from me for ridiculously good price, and I’ll be able to take all those multiples of good prices and invest them is something like Moth City Limited Edition screen prints or beer (in no particular order).

Will you still be able to read MC for free? Of course (just keep checking www.mothcity.com). Do also I need a new pair of Air Jordans? Yeah. Can these things co-exist? I hope so. Note: Substitute ‘Air Jordans’ for your own worthy cause (website hosting, food, medicine).

Even more exciting than penicillin, though? HD MC… Yeah I said it, this resolution is awesome. Here’s a little comparison of the difference.

The artist in me loves to be able to present Moth City like this, all f&#king big and stuff. Loves it. And actually, the art is not HD, it’s bigger than HD at 2047 x 1536 (your Full HD tv or monitor is only 1920 x 1080)

These HD+ options will be rolling out over the next little while, so keep an eye out on the Facebook page or the twitter feed for instant updates about such things. Meantime, you keep reading and I’ll keep posting.

Tim

Having learnt my lesson from trying to be creative after working 50 hours on other people’s projects I decided that I needed to give Freelance design and illustration a go instead. Perhaps I would be able to completely redesign Moth City to reflect both the darker tone of the story and the new medium I had intended for it… well, kinda.

Click for larger image.

Turns out grabbing a few hours here and there is harder than it looks from the outside. I slowly slogged my way through the redesign process, focusing on taking the characters I had and changing the style they were drawn in, without changing their personalities.

Click for larger image.

I needed to set myself a design rule book. I looked at all my favourite comic artists, and stole the parts I liked out of all of them, jamming it all together into something new. I poured over comics from the 50s and 70s looking at colour palettes; I tried to digitally duplicate the inks of renowned artists like Bernie Wrightson.

I started looking at the best way to present my comic as well. I knew there would be an online component, and I hated the way most long-form comics were presented on the web. The vertical format often found in print comics translated horribly to the online avenue. There was nothing relaxing or easy about reading a long form comic online. I choose a landscape format, almost 16:9 ratio, similar to a widescreen tv and most modern computer monitors.

I found I was struggling with the nuance of design that I wanted. I needed to get in there with my hands and start moving things around. I’m not big on clay, so I began to sculpt my characters in a 3D Animation program called Maya. I built them bodies, faces and few select props. They would be naked, hairless and lambert-grey. I took forever. Then I rigged them (giving them bones and controls to as to pose them) which I had to relearn from scratch.

During this period I was re-re-rewriting my scripts. I know… just give up right?

Eventually I complete 4 pages of finished art, had a plot and 30 pages of finished story (not in script format this time, but prose).

Click for larger image.

And it had taken forever… perhaps I wasn’t going to be able to freelance and do comics on the side. So I started looking around and found Creative New Zealand which is an arts funder here in NZ. I thought the chances were low, but I bundled up all my work, contacted a few authors I knew and begged for help, filled out a lot of forms and submitted them to the Literature Fund.

Rejected.

I called them – “why no love?” Answer – “get a publisher interested, then come back”

So began the hunt for a publisher. Not to publish the comic, it wasn’t even finished yet, but simply to say (formally) that they thought it looked cool and had potential and they’d like to look at it when it was finished.

I got one, a good one. A real good one.

I went back to the funders, they consulted and ummed and ahhed and then said yeah.

Click for larger image.

Shit. I have to tell all my clients…

During this period I was sneaking Moth City work into my early mornings and after work. This was quite a challenge considering that the standard work week at Weta is 50 hours. I was often creatively drained by working on all the amazing projects that came through the door. Progress was slow and I was getting burnt out.

I wanted time to work on Moth City, and use all the skills that I’d developed, but I wanted a bit of a change too. Enter Korea. My girlfriend and I packed up our stuff, said our goodbyes and journeyed to Korea to try our hand at teaching English. Best part about teaching English in Korea (aside from Korea itself) was that you only work 4 or 5 hours a day.

And I needed that time to write my Moth City Animated Series proposal. Because I was pretty bad at writing. Rubbish, I was crap at writing. But I bought all the books, listened to all the podcasts and rewrote everything 9 times over. After nine months I had the bulk of a plot and all my characters locked down, and the first episode scripted out. And I had changed the setting. Unsurprisingly, I had changed it to my new setting – Asia, or in 1930s speak, ‘the Orient’.

Click for larger images.

This opened up a world or opportunities. There was a lot of political positioning going on in the East Orient between the world wars; the Empire of Japan started flexing its muscles; the warlord era in China had finished, but a communist rebellion was threatening the Nationalist Party who ruled there; Russia, Germany and America were sending military and political envoys into the Orient to sway events to their favour; and the people themselves were being forced to choose not only how they were going to live in the coming generations, but how they would get there.

Our time was coming to an end and we wanted to journey through more of Asia. We had already visited Japan and China, but we figured we could travel for another 9 months in the cheaper countries of South East Asia before we needed to stop for work again. So I packed up my laptop, and with the intention to continue working on Moth City, we hoped a plane back to China, this time, to Beijing.

We went off on our mighty adventure. We planned to visit China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Thailand, and Burma with the intention to write.

I actually did more writing that you’d think. Mainly in small beach shacks with the sound of waves and lizards. Hate me? Even I hate me at this point.

I was focused on creating a ‘Pitch Document,’ a 2 to 3 page document that summarised everything Moth City was. Its characters, its story, its audience and its genres. It looked a little something like this (Note I have covered some parts that may be considered spoilers):

Click for larger image.

I had intended to send this back to NZ to garner interest while we continued onto the UK to find work. Then two things happened, one – I got appendicitis in India, and two – we realised we couldn’t enter the UK for work without returning back to New Zealand.

Both things were not as bad as they sounded. No that’s a lie. The Appendix thing was pretty bad, and I have a pretty tight 30 minute expose on the whole thing which I can rattle off after a few drinks. Buy me a beer after a con, and I’ll let you have it.

So we came back to NZ and suddenly going to the UK didn’t seem so important. It was nice to be home after 2 years and we told ourselves that we’d go to the UK in another year or so. Then the UK economy tanked (hard), and I got some traction with my Moth City pitch (kinda).

A company Richard Taylor co-founded with Martin Baynton agreed to take my Moth City pitch over to New York in their stable of IP. This was a big win, though not as big as I hoped. People liked it, but there was some concern about the tooney nature of the designs, and the darkening nature of the plot and scripts.

I would later reach the same conclusion myself, as well as the conclusion that waiting for millions of dollars of funding to get in behind your story before you can tell it is a funny way of business.

Perhaps I could tell the whole story by myself, perhaps I could finally write and illustrate a comic? Except I’d never done that before…

Like all good ideas it started years ago in a completely unrelated manner. I was working at Weta Productions, on a children’s animation show, having finished my Design Degree. I was earning my first real money and I spent a lot of it on Designer Toys to perk up my desk. They also kept me company during the long animation-hours that creative industries are known for.

I came up with an idea for a character, a horribly disfigured killer who nevertheless had all the soft spots of a hero. Jun, as he’s known now. He was to be a vinyl toy that I would 3D model in Maya, print using Weta’s 3D printer before manufacturing.

Here’s what he was to look like:

After a process that involved a lot or re-designs, he was modelled by moi, and rigged by the disgustingly talented Stephen Lambert. I posed him in a suitable bit of contrapposto, printed him, sanded him (yup, sanded him) and painted him in the same workshop that makes all your favourite Middle Earth creatures and monsters.

Click for larger image.
 

Click for larger image.

Then I realised that this little fellow needed friends, a whole cast of miscreants. I had always been interested in Cuba and its leader, Fidel Castro. Perhaps a pseudo Cuba could be the setting of my story. I wanted an island, it would allow events to occur on a small restrictive stage, forcing the story back in on itself, compressing the tensions. I called it ‘Moth City.’

So Moth City all started as a Vinyl toy line (Wha???) with a Cuban backstory (Huuhh?). Read on as I’ll show you what happened next and name drop an Oscar winner who supported it though it’s next stage of evolution.

So at the same time as I was disrupting the talent staff of Weta Workshop from their important Hollywood work to make 2 duplicates of my figurine, I was working hard on expanding my universe.

I knew there needed to be pulpy elements. I love old horror and crime comics, and the 1930 held a lot of opportunity for genre fun. The audience of the time had a burgeoning interest in Science Fiction, Ghost stories and creepy tales where capturing the imagination of the world, and the worlds politics were in turmoil in between the two World Wars.

I created an American Tycoon to play the foil to our heroic killer, the tycoon was given a daughter, the killer a love interest, and there were two rival scientists. There were some other strange characters, eight in total, but I’ll keep them under wraps for now.

McCaw, with design help from Leri Greer and Andrew Shaw

At the same time as the scope of my world was expanding, my research into collectible manufacturing was providing me some wake up calls. Vinyl figures needed to be manufactured in a process that involved creating a custom metal mold, injecting liquid vinyl inside, and then spinning these molds in all directions, causing the liquid to settle on the outer shell of the mold and leaving the centre hollow (basically using centrifugal force). And it was really expensive.

At the same time, my multi-Oscar winning boss, Richard Taylor, was kindly offering the use of his facilities and his staff to help me make my prototypes. He was taking a bit of an interest in the expanding world of Moth City, and I decided that I was going about it all wrong. Moth City should be an animated series!

A good idea? Find out next time –