Someone asked for some process insight on this strip, so let’s do this!   With 1 exception, every Sadman strip has been done on a piece of 9×12 150lb bristol cut in half down to 6×9.   Without putting too fine a point on the meaning, the idea was to show inside the blackness, and see Sadman being repeatedly subjected to his history.  The initial idea was to draw a smooth funnel of scenes down to sadman lying in the middle.

After removing the perspective center point to make room for the figure I decided it would be more appropriate to have it look more like a broken surface, like pieces of glass, rather than be uniform.  Thankfully the perspective lines served as a good starting point for the new design.

I use a variety of different inking tools for the strips.  depends on what i’m drawing, what feel I want, how much fine detail I’m going to try, etc.  for this strip I used a .35mm micron for almost the whole thing.  The spot black in the center was done with a pigma brush pen.

Next came selecting the scenes.  There were a few specific ones I knew I wanted to use, but also wanted to cover the span of the strip.  For a fleeting moment I actually considered re-drawing every panel, but then decided that I valued my sanity and went with digital post production.   I went through strip by strip and picked out some choice representative moments and dropped them in to semi-matched shaped panels.