Flight volume 8!

It’s out there for you to find, and it’s also the very last one. There are so many beautiful stories in this book, I am sure you’ll agree that this last one is definitely one of the best volumes in the whole series.

My story is called “Encore” and it was mostly an attempt to capture that bittersweet feeling I get every time I think about the end of the Flight series. I really want to thank Kazu Kibuishi again for giving me the chance to be part of these amazing books. I feel so grateful!

Here is a 4 page preview of my story:

The process of making this one was such a different experience from my previous Flight story. Much less organized often to the point of pure panic. I was working between 16-18 hours per day to meet the deadline (I got a late start!) and I was all over the place, correcting and editing stuff until the very last minute. I was so tired at some point, I actually fell asleep while working with my eyes open! Not being able to get too much into things like pacing, layouts, characters might make your work suffer at times but it gives you a strong momentum and the pressure of making such decisions on the fly can be really educational simply by forcing you to realize what needs to be done, what can wait and what’s not needed at all.

This is actually all the preliminary sketches I did for characters. That’s it. I just jotted down a basis for a design and worked from there. I realized afterwards that I’m pretty inconsistent concerning the design of the main characters throughout the story, but since they are just two, I don’t think it causes much trouble in the reading process. All secondary characters were made straight into the final page.

And as far as the actual pages I did these chicken-scratches just to get a general feel of the page, made all my layout decisions on them, and then moved straight to the final page.

While working on this, the rest of the guys at the studio started making jokes at some point. I think my favorite was…”You are starting to resemble an office furniture”. Another thing they kept telling me while working was that based on my overloaded visual approach to the story I hardly acted like someone who’s short on time. I totally understand why it might looks that way, and when I tried to explain it, the only answer that made perfect sense for me at the time was that Mark Twain quote…
“Please excuse the size of my letter, but I didn’t have enough time to write a shorter one.”

Cheers!

Oh and, If any of you happens to be at San Diego Comic-Con, drop by the Flight booth and say hi!

Check out more posts from the rest of the Flight crew:

Sonny Liew

Nicholas Kole
Scott C.

Jake Parker
Der-shing Helmer
Katie Shanahan
Kyla Vanderklugt
Tony Cliff

Corey Godbey