You know the ones.  The guys who carpetbomb their webcomic across every forum, every discussion board, and every blog in the entire comics web community.  We loathe being those guys.

But we love it when our readers do it for us.

So, this giveaway involves a little street team mentality.  Go to your favorite comics site/blog/store and tell people there about Light Years Away and where they can find it.  It doesn’t have to be long or involved, just a quick name drop to get people intrigued that might not know about the comic yet.

The FIRST 5 PEOPLE to post 3 different links to places they posted about Light Years Away will get a signed & sketched Light Years Away poster print!

Some rules:
• Twitter and Facebook posts count, but only one or the other.  You can post to both, but only one will count toward the link total.
• New posts only, please.  Sorry to cut out the older links posted by some of you guys.  We love you for it, but we gotta start on even ground.
• No previous winners are eligible (sorry Barry).  Same goes for close friends and family.
• All links must be posted to the comments section of this blog entry for ease of verification.
• You can stump for us out in the real world as well!  Just post a picture and an anecdote of you getting the word out along with any posts you make about the comic.
• The contest WILL REMAIN OPEN until all 5 prints are claimed, even if Light Years a Day has already concluded.

You guys have already made this our best week ever, so help us continue to blow the roof off of this joint!  Good luck!

-Adam

I’m sure you’ve noticed that updates on both Fat Baby and Light Years Away have slowed down somewhat in the past couple of weeks.  Ethan and I have been making some moves lately, both preparing for Stumptown and some other stuff.  We’ve got a lot of exciting things happening behind the scenes, so once we have something to announce officially, you’ll be the first to know.

I’m getting back into it, but I also want to take the opportunity to announce an event we have coming up right here on the site:

LIGHT YEARS A DAY

That’s right.  For one week in May, we’ll be putting out a page of Light Years Away out for every day of the week.  Sunday through Saturday, you’ll get yourself a fix of LYA.  We’ll talk more about it once we get a little closer to it, but in the mean time, we’ll be getting back to our regular update schedule.  Thanks for reading, and welcome to any new readers coming in from meeting us at Stumptown!

Hey Y’all,
Had a scanner lamp go out yesterday, so yesterday’s Light Years Away update will go up tomorrow instead, along with another page.  I found a service center that would sell me a new one on the cheap, so I’ll be up and running again tonight.  In the mean time, here’s a the cover of the printed preview book we’re bringing with us to conventions, starting with next month’s Stumptown in Portland, Oregon.  Hope to see some of you there.

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.

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.

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.