Nothing to see here, move along...

Oopsie! Sorry folks, there's no Transypoo this week! I've been really busy! I'm told that I'm not the first webcomic to miss a week. (or a day or what have you) This is certainly a first for me... I've got a pretty good track record going, really. The only other goof was when I back tracked during the whole Time Travel story early on where I had to take a page down and rework the direction of the story.

On the other hand I did get a chance to go see UP! 

"What? You went to see a movie instead of working on your comic?!?"

Yes, yes I did. But I did that yesterday (Saturday) and I  try not to work on Transypoo on the weekends because it's the week end! So, like I was saying, I saw UP. It was fantastic!  It goes between really sad in side-splittingly funny! Well, heck it's got a talking dog in it! But really, the three jokes you see in the previews, are not the funniest, and they are much more funny in context. (As you would expect!)

Anyways, yeah, there's no Transypoo this week, but I'm gunna work my hardest to not have this happen again.

Inside the 'poo: The Making of Transypoo

I bet you've all been wondering how Transypoo is made. Let me assure you it's a complex and arduous process! It can, most simply, be broken down into a four-step process. 

 

Step 1: Wrighting Writing!

The writing process begins with a brainstorm session with all the staff writers, usually at 'The Big Table.' We toss around some ideas and finally after much arguing our Director and head writer comes in and finalizes the direction the story will take. Then we divide the pages amongst our writers/board artists and they write two pages with our special "Transypoo Page" writing/story board sheets.    

A lot of the time there are doodles on these pages, we do not discourage these doodles because they keep morale up and at times make for good office jokes. (If not future story ideas ha ha!) In this image we can see Transypoo pages # 121 & 120 as you can see, they were written out of order. This happens from time to time when we decide that one comic would work better if it came in sooner or later. For instance, in this case they were switched to build drama.

Step 2: Pencils!

Once the comics have been written and boarded they go passed our director's desk for final approval. He may make a few changes, redraw the comic, or at

times completely scrap an idea. Once passed his desk the scripts are whisked off to Korea where it is penciled by a highly skilled team over there. After a few days we are sent scans of the pencils, for approval by the art director. At this point he may make tweaks to the art and blocks in the letters and speech balloon shapes.

Here you can see the changes made to Jo's hand and arms, and Amy's shoulder, we work hard to keep these characters on model. Every so often dialogue is changed at this stage, there might not be enough room, or too much, and sometimes a background is thrown up at the last second.

Step 3: Inks!

After the pencils are sent back, our Korean team inks the comics. Recently we found it was cheaper and faster to fill in the black areas in the coloring process, so now we have our team just put an 'X' in the black areas. There's not much we can do when the inks come back, we can erase a line here or there, but we can't make too many changes now, it's all or nothing. Very rarely do we send something back to be re-inked. 

As you can see the speech balloons are empty. For a long time we had an inking team do the letters, but their lettering style was hit or miss, and was frequently fraught with spelling errors which were a pain to fix, and at times we just let them slid on a deadline. Now we have a local team do the letters digitally.

Step four: COLORS!

We have our colors done by a small in-house team. They are broken up into two divisions, basic colors/color selection and effects coloring. With all the sci-fi action in Transypoo we require a lot of glowing effects, they have also taken on the task of adding tone to the characters and not just the backgrounds. They work quickly and can color a page a day. Coupled that with our Lettering team and the comic is finished!

I hope you've enjoyed this look inside the making of Transypoo! Please continue to read/enjoy our comic, there's lots of exciting stuff coming up! Thanks for reading!