From The Vault - Exit 6 Working Pages

Here are a few more pages that I will be including in the Exit 6: The (in)Complete Series book I've been working on here and there for the last six weeks.

I knew I had a few false starts when I first started Exit 6 back in 1996 and I was glad I still had at least one page that showed that time in my life. The crucial scene where Ketith Howard enters Courtney McKay's life by crashing through a pizza shop window wasn't the easiest one to figure out. In fact, if I remember right, I might have done this three times, not just two. But, this is the only page I could find that I brought to Colorado with me.

The first try isn't that bad but it doesn't have the same impact of the final piece. I'm much happier with the way Keith's body fills the page as well as everyone's reaction inside the restaurant.

I'm also amazed to see, in both penciled pages, just how much detail I was putting into my pencils at the time. I think a lot of that is insecurity about how the final page might turn out and not trusting yourself with the ink. It is definitely a lot of busy work that I don't have time to do anymore. Even as the Exit 6 series went along (the last two books in the series are still in pencil form) you can see how much looser the penciling got. I think it was a matter of going faster and trying to get the next book out on time so I was leaving a lot more, at that point, for the inking stage.

Still, it's fun to see the work in progress on these pages.

As for the final black and white pages, everything scanned well and the only problems I had was some of the clean up work needed. Because the lettering was all pasted right on the original art boards I had to clean up a few paste up and cut lines on every page. But, most of the old zip-a-tone that is laid down on the pages scanned really great and held up when I printed out my sample copy. The old white zip-a-tone dots, however, didn't work at all. I had to go back in and mimic those digitally but, as you can see in the "crash" lettering behind Keith, it all worked out in the end.

The main things left to do on the book is the actual writing of the text and getting down the behind the scenes stories that went into making the book and doing a new cover for the collected edition.

But, more on that later...