The Situation: Eric Orchard's Thumbnails

Er, of his art, that is. Eric's just about done with the rough sketches that match up to the script I wrote and turned in to him last week. After this phase, once it's all been gone over and approved, Eric will begin inking for real. (Here's more info on the project, which is for Tor.com, and Eric's blog.)Here are four samples, with the text that roughly corresponds to the image. I really love the looseness of these drawings. Also note that the story itself has changed quite a bit in dramatizing it visually. I've had to write new scenes, discard some, compress and expand. It's been a wonderful experience, because it's made the story fresh for me again.Mord and Wick in the strange elevator, but now Wick is facing away from Mord, and you can see Wick is wearing a slug on his back, in the slit in his uniform. Possibly we get closer in to Wick while they’re talking.[Dialogue:]Mord: Does it hurt?Wick: No. It itches.Mord: Like fleas.Wick: No. Like a slug. It’s wet.Mord: Wet’s better than dry, Wick. Dry crackles.[Narration, which should be shortened:] Even before the problems with my Manager, I had indeed grown apart from Leer and Mord, to say nothing of Scarskirt. Several new employees had been hired, some flesh-and-blood, some not. Human Resources made Leer’s office larger by demolishing the adjoining offices, some with people still inside them. The new employees took up positions all around Leer and Scarskirt like some kind of defensive perimeter. Scarskirt ran linking worms between all of them, and thus became intimate friends with them overnight. These worms hooked into their ankles and allowed them to communicate soundlessly amongst themselves. No one had thought to invite me, so at night, I sent non-combat interceptor flies to try to tap into the worm links, but they were too tough and none of the flies survived. From that moment forward, I was shut out of their network.[General setting:] Images of working on the fish by hand—just a panel or two. If the ghost-image of Scarskirt’s smiling face can be watermarked underneath this, her death-stare, that’d be great.[Narration:] For a while, everything went well. We built the fish by hand and it took shape with a coherent design. I noticed a certain reluctance on the part of Scarskirt and Leer, but in general everyone seemed happy with my efforts. Then the Manager finally got wind of what was going on.[Specific setting, wordless]: Mord. Elevator. (Fast, in a flash, all one panel or two.) Manager’s office. Mord standing to the side like a monster, just part of his belly and a huge arm/paw visible on the left hand side of the scene. All attention on the Manager, who has burst into flames and is clearly reading Wick the riot act about the fish. Perhaps a speech bubble comes out of her mouth showing the fish as she imagined it, with her face? From the story: “All of the paper had already burned off of her, and by the light of the thousand phosphorescent fireflies I had created and painstakingly inserted into the walls of my office over the years, her plastic seemed impossibly bright and lacquered, more like armor than it ever had before.”Slowly the edges of the panels dissolve into flame, like the Manager, and in the final panel Scarskirt’s eyes again ghost through the backdrop...and dissolve to...(this depicts just the beginning of the scene set out below...)[Narration:] And it got worse. By now, my spy beetles had begun to report back, and what they saw, before Scarskirt started to destroy them, shocked me...Through the lessening flames of the Manager’s displeasure, seen through the eyes of the spy beetles Wick sent out, thus a perspective from ground level: “Mord and Scarskirt in a forgotten part of the third floor, among the musty ruins of some sort of outdated cathedral. They stood upon a crumbling platform decorated with gold leaf, leaning toward each other, connected at the forehead by the disembodied siphon of a long-necked clam. I watched them for half an hour, noting the bliss on their faces.” A couple of panels where they’re kissing that way and dancing through the ruins and embracing. Mord looks both giddy and huge and secretly terrified. Scarskirt is triumphant and cruel and sexy-looking. Maybe under their feet, there are all kinds of discarded remains of abandoned projects. And at the end of this scene, Scarskirt’s foot comes down on the spying beetle.