Meet Jackie and Marisol

Note from John: In reading Jeff's post I realized that people reading this aren't that familiar with the characters. I'll try to do a rundown of the main characters and post them later. For the meantime, Jackie Dugan is a grizzled old veteran of the independent circuit. He doesn't like Ace at all, but can Ace earn his respect? That remains to be seen. Marisol Ruiz is the love interest of the story. A doctor of Mexican descent in Laredo, TX and none too happy with Ace putting his body on the line on a nightly basis. OK, now I leave you with the post:

Sorry for the long hiatus between postings. A lot of things have been going down lately, and unfortunately, 60 got placed on the back burner for a bit. As of this past weekend though, 60's back in a big way and John and I are cookin' up lots of cool stuff to get a draft of the first issue of 60 completed in the next few months. First, we need to get all the character sketches done and that's what this past weekend was all about.

John came over Saturday afternoon and we sat down with a mission to get the characters of Jackie and Marisol done. To the upper left you'll see our finished Jackie. I love how he came out. He has a weariness and pain about him, an almost vacant look in his eyes that shows just how much he's been through. This pencil sketch will be refined until I get the simplified look of the comic, but I think this is a great model to work off of.

Marisol's here, to the right. I think she needs a bit more work, but I like what we've got here so far. I need to get her a bit more mature, more Latina, more experienced. I want her more sexy than cute, and this is getting there, but it needs a bit more tweaking. John has the earlier drafts which I'm sure he'll post, and you can see her evolution.

A bit about the process, this weekend: For the most part, John had already given me many ideas of what he wanted for the characters, and I had drawn pages of rough outlines for them over the past several weeks, but just wasn't feeling completely comfortable with where I was going with them. Having John there while I was drawing helped speed up the process because the feedback was so immediate. Once I finished a sketch, I could hold it up to him (he was working on his laptop, tweaking the 60 script) and say, "Whaddaya think?" and he'd be like, "I like the eyes on this one, but the face on the other one," and I could make edits on the spot. I really liked this way of working and I'm very happy with how things came out. I'm thinking once we establish ourselves, we might need to open up an office or get a space where we can work together. That would be ideal.

We have a few more characters to develop, then it's onto more page layouts. Things are getting exciting again!