Issue 3 of “Corinne Morgan, Corbie” arrives in expanded and remastered form soon. Here’s a first look at how some of the upgraded art compares to the 2019 version of the comic, as well as what you can expect to see in the extra, all-new pages!
Going wild in the country, it’s the first in a new series of behind the scenes glimpses into the making of Corinne Morgan, Corbie!
It’s hard to believe July is already almost over as I’m recording this! Time really flies when you’re absorbed in your work, and the last couple of weeks have really felt like crunch time. I set myself a goal of having Corbie issue #3 out before the end of the month, and well… I’m not gonna meet that target, but I as it stands I should only be a teensy bit late. We’ll get into it, but first allow me to catch you up on how we got here…
Last October, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of the release of the original edition of Corinne Morgan, Corbie issue #1 with an all new remastered and expanded edition that was released as a digital download. It was a top-to-toe recreation with upgraded art, two new variant covers, and several pages of all-new material that expanded the story.
After that… well, it was a tough winter! But we got through it, and in the spring I emerged to share with you issue #2. This one really put me through the wringer, as not only did I have to put in some serious man hours to upgrade the old pages, but the story as it was originally presented was too short, so I had to come up with nine new pages – hey, I’m trying to give you your money’s worth here, I want every issue to have at least twenty-two pages of story material! Well we got there in the end, and the new issue 2 even received a spiffy wrap-around cover.
Okay, but I wasn’t happy with the long gap between the first two issues. Going into the production of issue #3, I really wanted to pick up the pace, and my hope was that by this point in the original run, the art would be good enough that it would only need minor tweaking on my part. Maybe I’d fix up some of the faces, make a few other adjustments here and there, but I wouldn’t need to do much more than that.
So yeah… about that…
Somehow I had long since forgotten about the great data loss of 2020, when a hard drive died and I lost a bunch of material. Most of it was backed up but one of the things that we parted ways with was the original colour separations for issue 3. And so, when I was going through the archives, to my horror it dawned on me that I had the original line art but would have to recolor everything after all.
With all that in mind, I knew had a bit more work to do than I’d originally anticipated. In order to get the comic over the finish line and meet that self-imposed late July deadline, I had to put pretty much everything else on-hold – so if you’re wondering why I haven’t been streaming recently, or posting much on social media, now you know!
Production on the main story pages finally wrapped a few days ago, so now I feel that I’m a pretty good position to be able to stop, take a break, and fill you in on what’s happening before I begin cobbling everything together for the finished issue. So here’s a few teasers to kick things off – the hype for Corbie #3 starts here!
Most of the work I ended up doing for this issue was on improving the character art – there wasn’t anything egregiously wrong with the background environments, so my inclination was generally to leave them be. This marks the point in the storyline where Corbie is involuntarily transported from the cushy man-made terrain of Southern California into rural Ireland. A lot of effort went into crafting the original pencil panels of the countryside environments back in 2019, and I didn’t want to detract from that for the new version.
Kicking things off, let’s take a look at this panel of Corbie getting knocked through the dimensional portal during the battle in the school. One of my favorite panels I’ve ever drawn, this one was so much fun to work on the first time around, but I still felt there was room for improvement, particularly in the facial details, and I don’t know how noticeable it’ll be in the final comic, but a lot of digital clean-up work was done on the vortex too.
I think each of the old issues have at least a few panels in them that, looking back, I question how I allowed them to make it into the final release. The great thing about the remaster series is that I can take these problem areas and turn them into some major glow-ups. One of the worst offenders in the original issue #3 was this one with Josie and Maxine, I have no idea what went wrong here! As you can see, the new version is a huge step-up, while still being in the spirit of the original. (And if you’re wondering, yes, Josie’s hair went from black to blue in the remasters. Well, canonically it’s still black, but like Morrigan’s, it’s rendered as blue now. Old-school comic coloring rules in force here.)
All of the nineteen pages present in the original version of issue #3 have been upgraded, but as is now tradition for the remaster series, you get some new pages of material thrown in that you won’t have seen anywhere before. For the new inserts, I’ve been experimenting with going back to incorporating rough thumbnails and layouts into my work before creating the final art digitally. My hope was that I could use those early steps to identify potential problems quickly. There was also a big focus on these new pages on having really strong visual composition. I view these pages as testing the waters for when we begin producing all-new content beginning with issues five and six. I’m aiming to get to a point where I can create visually striking pages that have kind of an old-school vibe and be able to take them from script to final page super quickly. So far, so good – these three new pages went from conception to finished product in about a week, and I think if I’m strategic I still have room to further refine my process, and get more done.
Consistently, when it comes to creating new pages that expand these old stories, I’ve found that the extra material always feels like it should have been there all along, and that was the case again here. In the remastered version we get a glimpse into Corinne’s past and her family history. I didn’t know going into this that I was going to end up drawing a very young Corinne who for some reason is wearing what looks like a little cowgirl… country and western outfit? Sometimes you just go wherever the art takes you. Also in this series of flashbacks I was able to incorporate her busy business-girl doing business power suit that first appeared in a pin-up a year ago. Internally this outfit is referred to as “Jet Settin’ Corinne”.
Without giving too much away, we get some interesting friction between Corbie and Morrigan in this issue, and again it feels like a really intuitive part of the story that should always have been there which I think demonstrates a lot about who these characters are and their motivations. Issue 4 is going to have several new pages and without getting ahead of ourselves, I think some of the themes we set up here will be revisited next time.
We always have a few pages of supplemental material in Corbie, and issue 3 is no exception! The tentative plan at this point is that we’re going to continue the Feathered Fact-File feature which we introduced in issue 2 with a trio of new entries focusing on Corinne and Sadie’s schoolyard arch-enemies, Ruby, Josie and Maxine, the IC.
There’s still more work to do – I haven’t even started on the cover art yet, so look for that to be revealed in a future video – but we’re almost there! We’re on track for this issue to arrive in early August. In the meantime, if you haven’t read the remastered editions of issues #1 and #2 yet – and I have the sales figures here, so I can say with near-certainty that you haven’t -they’re still available for you to enjoy if you want to catch up! You can find them on Gumroad, Itch.io, Amazon Kindle, Google Play, Kobo, DriveThruComics, GlobalComix, and Ko-Fi. Thank you for watching and being part of Corbie’s flock, and I hope you’ll join me for the next production diary video!
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