Behind The Ballad

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Behind the Ballad where we will post behind-the-scenes artwork and videos to highlight the creative process that goes into making The Ballad of Lumber Jackson. We've got quite a little saga building up here, and we're excited to share not only the story with you, but also the trials and triumphs of the hours, weeks, and months (there goes that time stuff again) of script-writing, concept art, original line work, and finalization it took to make this story a reality.

This week is a bonus three-in-one as we take a look at Jake's original pencils for pages 8, 9, and 10 of Issue #1.

Because these pages are the reader's first interaction with our two primary protagonists, Langston and Law, we knew they were some of the most critical to get right. We wanted our readers' first glimpse of these characters to occur in a high-action setting, and we couldn't think of a much more tense situation than getting chased by a foamingly angry Giant Molizard! We also wanted to plant some narrative questions in our readers' heads: Who are these guys? What are they doing in this strange, misty jungle? And just why is that Molizard so angry? Well, we're not telling, but it's no accident that Langston uses the word "heist" to describe this little misadventure.

We also wanted to showcase Jake's incredible penciling abilities (That first shot of the Molizard at the bottom of page 8, tho!). When it comes to The Ballad of Lumber Jackson, crew, you can always expect all kinds of gorgeous and fun artwork from our resident artistic genius. Additionally, one of the most exciting parts of this project was to watch Jake's ability to forgo traditional paneling structures to create all kinds of insets (pages 8 and 10) and jagged cuts (page 9) to electrify the structure of the page with the kind of energy a chase scene demands. The dude's got skills.

We hope you enjoyed this insight into the narrative and artistic processes of this story. To read the comic and sign up for our mailing list head to www.lumberjacksoncomic.com. If you have any questions, comments, fanart, or would just generally like to chat (who doesn't like a good chat every now and then?), hit us up on Twitter and Instagram @lumberjacksonco or email us at lumberjacksoncomic@gmail.com.

If you'd like to see more creator commentary, check out our Patreon page.

Thanks for reading!