Work in progress by Gareth Hopkins

Gareth has been working on a 96-page abstracted comics narrative called "The Intercorstal." You can see all the pages completed so far here. To whet your appetite, here are small versions of pp. 10-14:



Gareth writes:

Earlier this year I worked on my own abstract comic, called 'The Intercorstal'... Naively, I thought that I was the only person who'd been attempting to combine abstracted art with a comicbook format, so to find out there was a burgeoning movement that shared my ideas is really invigorating...

I got into it by accident. I occasionally do postcard projects, where I'll hand-draw a series of 10 postcards and send them out to whoever wants them, but I'd run out of cards so sectioned off a bit of an A5 page. Once I'd filled it in, looking at it on the page, it looked a lot like a panel from a comic, so rather than cut it out, I added some more panels to the page, filled those in, and had Page 1. I thought it would be interesting to illustrate a narrative that takes place in a non-physical world -- the basic concept is that the central character accidentally slips into a gap between dimensions and is then tries to escape. But because it's between dimensions, and between time, the story's not told sequentially, and I'm not sure what even happens...

I start each page by ploting out the panels -- I try and set the rhythm for the page with those, and then fill them in bit by bit. I usually prepare three or four pages of panels before doing any actual 'drawing'. When I fill the panels, I do them out-of-order (so, I don't start top-left and work my way through). Sometimes I'll include a central background shape -- a face, or a figure, or in one case a kind of alien bag-pipe -- and then work around that.

As well as the 24 'canon' pages, there're two pages I did on A2 paper which were then cut up and sent out as Christmas cards, and two three-panel strips I did for the art magazine XOK. Now that I review my work on The Intercorstal, I don't think I've done any for a few months, because other projects took over, but I'll definitely be taking it back up again now that I'm not totally alone in my endeavours.

(When you check out Gareth's stuff on DeviantArt, make sure also to read his comments on each page)