Lars Martinson's Blog, page 4

Come see me in Tokyo on November 23rd!

Mark your calendars! I’ll have a table at the International Manga Festival in Tokyo later this month! This will be the only show I’ll be doing for a long while, so if you’re in the area, stop on by and say hello!

Details:

What:

International Manga Festival

Website / Facebook

When:

Sunday, November 23rd, 2014, 11am to 4pm

Where:

TOKYO BIG SIGHT (Tokyo International Exhibition Center), East 4 Hall

Address: 3-11-1 Ariake, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0063

Access Info: English / Japanese

Admission:

¥1000 per person (This fee also gains you admission to the Comitia Comic Expo.)

Come see me in Tokyo on the 23rd!

Mark your calendars! I’ll have a table at the International Manga Festival in Tokyo later this month! This’ll probably be the only show I’ll be doing until Summer 2015, so if you’re in the area, stop on by and say hello!

Details:

What:

International Manga Festival

Website / Facebook

When:

Sunday, November 23rd, 2014, 11am to 4pm

Where:

TOKYO BIG SIGHT (Tokyo International Exhibition Center), East 4 Hall

Address: 3-11-1 Ariake, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0063

Access Info: English / Japanese

Admission:

¥1000 per person (This fee also gains you admission to the Comitia Comic Expo.)

“Tonoharu: Part Three” Progress Report (Fall 2014)

Whoops! I totally dropped the ball on updating this blog for the latter half of October. I’ll try to get back into the swing of updating every week again, even if it’s only a youtube video or a funny photo or something like that (though I’ll try to intersperse those with more significant updates as well).

As I just did a progress report recently, I hadn’t planned to do another until next year sometime. But I’ve been happy with how things have been going recently, so I wanted to toot my own horn a little.

For the past two months, progress on Tonoharu has been spectacular. My “page a week” goal for September and October would have had me finish 8.75 pages. Instead, I managed to complete 15.75 pages; a whole seven extra pages! That’s like a month and a half’s worth of work. So I’m really happy about that. It’s been literally years since I’ve managed to finish more than a page a week for such a sustained period.

And things are looking good for the rest of the year too. The next stretch of Tonoharu has a couple of multi-page conversations that take place in the same location, which will allow me to reuse several backgrounds. So I expect I’ll be able to outperform my “page a week” goal into November and December as well.

In the new year, things will get a bit tougher. I’ll be starting on the epilogue, which, like the prologue, is narrated. In practice, this makes it so almost every panel takes place in a different location, which takes longer to draw. But even so, I think/hope I’ll be able to finish at least a page a week, so I shouldn’t lose any ground at least. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

The next progress report will come sometime in 2015 (for real this time). Or if you just can’t wait for that, follow me on Twitter, as I tweet every time I finish a page. Toodles!

“Tonoharu: Part One” Review at The Comic Book Bin

Leroy Douresseaux review Tonoharu: Part One for The Comic Book Bin, giving it an A-! From the review:

Allowing the readers to grapple with Dan Wells on their own terms is what makes Tonoharu: Part One both interesting and appealing. 

You can read the full review here:

http://www.comicbookbin.com/tonoharupaperback001.html

“Tonoharu: Part One” 5-Star Review at Comics Bulletin

Daniel Elkin reviews the Tonoharu: Part One paperback, giving it five out of five stars!

From the review:

At its heart, Tonoharu is a book about communication, about connecting, about learning through our shared experiences and defining ourselves through the eyes of others. The story of Dan becomes the story of us. This is the thematic sandbox in which artists build castles and Martinson is building Neuschwanstein.

You can read the full review here (about halfway down the page):

http://comicsbulletin.com/tiny-pages-made-ashes-1032014-comix-dont-take-crap/

My thanks to Elkin for the coverage and the kind words!

Come see me in Tokyo this November!

Mark your calendars! I’ll have a table at the International Manga Festival in Tokyo this November! This’ll probably be the only show I’ll be doing until Summer 2015, so if you’re in the area, stop on by!

Details:

What: International Manga Festival

When: Sunday, November 23rd, 2014

Where: Tokyo Big Sight, 3-11-1 Ariake, Koutou-ku, Tokyo

I’ll be posting more details in the coming weeks, but wanted to get a quick mention up on the blog now. Hope to see you there!

“Tonoharu: Part One” Paperback–Now Available on Amazon!

Cool news! The Tonoharu: Part One paperback is available right now on Amazon.com! Here’s the link if you want to pick it up or write a glowing review or whatever:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0980102367

Another cool piece of news: I got a royalty check for the Tonoharu: Part One paperback, and apparently almost ten percent of the print run has already sold! Not too shabby, considering I didn’t even know the book was “officially” available yet. We’re off to a good start!

Blast from the Past: “Creating Tonoharu” Series

Man, I completely forgot about this week’s blog entry. I had to work on Saturday, that threw off my whole weekend routine, so the blog entry totally slipped my mind.

Anyway, no time to write an entry now, since it’s already past overdue… so instead, here’s a series of entries I wrote in 2007-2008 about the creation of Tonoharu. They were posted so far back I assume many people haven’t seen them, so there you go!

Creating Tonoharu–#1: Laying The Groundwork
Creating Tonoharu–#2: The Idea
Creating Tonoharu #3–Writing the Script
Creating Tonoharu #4–The Design (1/3)
Creating Tonoharu #5–The Design (2/3)
Creating Tonoharu #6–The Design (3/3)
Creating Tonoharu #7–The Drawing
Creating Tonoharu #8–Inking
Creating Tonoharu #9–Computer Stuff
Creating Tonoharu #10–Final Edits

“Tonoharu: Part Three” Artwork Preview (Summer 2014)

As promised, here is the Tonoharu: Part Three artwork preview. Next artwork preview… I dunno, next year sometime probably. Cheers!

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152685207948913.1073741831.594318912&type=1&l=bc22253804

 

“Tonoharu: Part Three” Progress Report (Summer 2014)

The last Tonoharu: Part Three progress report was written in 2012. Wow. I mean, I’ve never been super diligent about updating, but that’s ridiculous even for me.

As one would hope, I’ve made a lot of headway since then. In fact, just last weekend I passed a pretty significant milestone. The artwork for Tonoharu: Part Three proper is now done.

This is really awesome of course, but unfortunately I still have a ways to go. The third and final volume of Tonoharu will be made up not only of Part Three proper, but also a set of appendices and an epilogue. These sections will be comprised of about 54 pages of comics, and I still have those left to draw.

If I’m able to finish a page a week (a big “if”, but I’ll do my best), the remaining pages will take a little over a year to draw. Then once all the artwork is “done”, I need to do all the post-production edits. Those edits shouldn’t be nearly as extensive as with the last two volumes of Tonoharu, but they’ll still take time. Those, along with the cover design, should take… six months maybe? Then I’ll work with the book printer and wait for them to produce and ship the books and blah blah blah. That’ll probably be another six months or so I would guess.

So at present, I’m projecting that Tonoharu: Part Three will be available for purchase in about two years, so Summer 2016. Amazingly, this is the same projection I made twenty months ago. Usually my projected release dates keep getting pushed back ad infinitum, so it’s encouraging I’ve actually managed to have one hold this long.

I’ll do another Tonoharu: Part Three progress update entry next year sometime I hope. Or if you prefer, I tweet every time I finish a page, so you can follow me on Twitter if you prefer updates that are more frequent and less meaningful.

But next week, I’m going to have the first major artwork sneak peek from the new book. Exciting! Stay tuned!