We at Floodworks want to extend a happy holidays to you and yours. I am currently visiting family out of town, so Fat Baby and Light Years Away will update on New Years day instead of on their regular update schedule. We hope you take the time off and use it to give your family members a call and let them know how much you have forgotten about that time that they held a knife to your neck for ransom money. See you in the new year!

Because you demanded it: zip-up unisex prison speed suits.

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Fat Baby Strip number 12 is live over at http://www.fatbabycomics.com

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Well, it’s finally here.  Everything’s a go, and the comics are launching. We’ve been working on getting a robust webcomics line-up going since April, and the fruits of our labor are now here for you all to enjoy every week.   Most important of all is the strip that launched today:  Lightyears Away.  It’s our long-form space opera that stands in contrast to the short storytelling exercises of Floodworks Presents, and the silliness of Fat Baby and Friday Funnies.

Work on Lightyears Away started for me in June, though it’s been one of those projects that Ethan and I have discussed at length ever since our first collaboration years ago in Ghosts of Floodtown.  Artistically, its very different from my usual work.  From its conception, I knew that I wanted to use the project to flex a very different set of storytelling and aesthetic muscles than I’m accustomed to using on our print projects like Breaker, Breaker and The Troubleshooter.  In those projects, I try to maintain a very grounded approach to my design work.  If something appears on a page, technology or otherwise, I’ve often given it more thought than any reader would likely realize just looking at it.  I think “Ok, this ship is a cargo ship.  How would a cargo ship function in a zero-G environment?  What kind of propulsion systems would work best?  What would be the best way for a cargo container to be offloaded or on-loaded?”  Asking myself these questions as I work refines the design and cuts away a lot of the useless visual clutter.  I also tend to think of things such as ventilation systems, deck placement, etc. etc.  This goes for buildings, city planning, pop culture, clothing, everything.

You see where I’m going here.

With this project, however, its a rare foray for Ethan and myself out of the hard science fiction range and into a universe with physics and technology on the rubbery, faster-than-light variety.  This is a chance for us to cut lose and have some fun without that nagging in the back of our heads calling for us to research every minute detail.  And I want the art to reflect that.

Going into the project, I studied the work of Jean Giraud, Enki Bilal, Philippe Druillet, Juan Giminez, and many other 70’s and 80’s bande dessinée artists.  This was the “voice” that I felt best suited Lightyears Away, so I studied the visual language and storytelling used in these artists’ works, and married it with my own sensibilities.  It’s still a bit loose, but as the strip goes on and I get my footing, it will no doubt become an interesting mix. While I wouldn’t call my regular work a particularly American style, I do have a creative voice that has been tempered by growing up in American culture.  So I’m trying to see from outside my own point of view on this book.  I’m attempting to let my lines be freer, as well as my design.  Practicality and functionality is not job 1 in Lightyears Away.  Hopefully as I marry the two schools of storytelling, they work in symbiosis instead of fighting with each other.  We shall see.

Colors are another area where I’m treading into unknown territory.  I’m used to doing more natural colors in my work, so switching to something with a lot more neon-saturated punch to it took a bit of practice.  I did a number of test runs on this first page to arrive at the look it has now.  I’m trying to attain a dyes and airbrush look in Photoshop, so as with the style, it’s a work in progress.  I began to think about what were the various aspects of dyes, and how did they get the color effects that they did using them.  With the next strip, I’m going to try using layers of multiplied color in a limited palette to achieve results closer to what I have in my mind’s eye.  All of this refining will inform not only my work here on Lightyears Away, but my other comics work as well, so it will be a valuable learning experience.

So with that, welcome to Floodworks Webcomics.  While this is a new step for us, we’re glad to have all of you along for the ride.  Feel free to comment on anything we put up, both good and bad.   We’re excited for what we’ve got coming up, and we hope you enjoy the journey as much as we do.

Just a reminder to everyone, Floodworks Presents, our webcomic series, launches on June 3rd, and updates every Wednesday.  It rolls out with Creation Science, a silent story about creating and manipulating a fully realized world.  We’ll be posting updates of 2 pages a week.  While I’d love to do more, I’m just not fast enough.  These are heavily detailed stories though, so check them out.  Also, be on the look out for any month where there is a 5th Wednesday in the month.  We’ll be mixing things up on those days with 5th Week Funnies, written by myself, and drawn by Ethan.  It’s KEEEERAZY!

So come on back on June 3rd.  Or just RSS us at http://blog.floodworks.net/feed.  We’ll let you know what’s going down.

Well, we’re here.  Site is live.  This ship is shambling toward toward your internet boxes.  We bring a few kinks in tow, but the most important thing is that we’ve finally got our home on the internet after years of shanking transients for storage space with a melted and sharpened toothbrush in the slums of your deviantarts, bloggers, myspaces, and facebooks.  Long-winded metaphors aside, Floodworks will be the place to go to find out just what the hell is going on with me (Adam Rosenlund), Ethan Ede, Adam Bennett, and Dillon Woods.  We’ll be giving you loads of  content, whether it be here on the blog with frequent updates, weekly on our web comics section, or in multimedia projects that lie outside of our usual comic fare.

In addition to what the others contribute to this section, I’ll be using this blog to show process work, share my experiences in getting the various projects up and running, as well as just talking about comic art in general.  I haven’t really been open about my process before, so it should be a new thing for all involved.

Stick around, y’all.  Things are gonna get interesting.