warp factor awesome

Last week, I got the rough layout sketches for my Star Trek Manga story from my editor at TokyoPop. It's mostly wireframes and basic pencil sketches, but it's clearly my story, right there for me to look at and love like those goddamn rabbits, George. If anyone was wondering, seeing Kirk and Spock standing next to each other on the bridge, doing exactly what I told them to do, is just as awesome as you think it would be.

This particular batch of drawings is for pacing and layout only, so there isn't too much detail. The characters are all simple models without faces or details, just their names or initials written on them so we know who they are -- except for Mr. Spock, who totally has pointy ears in each drawing. I suspect that E.J., is just as much a fan of this stuff as I am, because if I were drawing it, I couldn't help but put the ears and haircut on Spock, even in the roughest of rough drawings.

When I did my script, I wrote it just like a teleplay, and left out panel and page designations. Because I didn't have a whole lot of any experience in this area, I thought it made more sense to leave it to Luis (my editor) and E.J. (the artist) to establish the pacing and choose a layout that would work in the Manga format. There are a few places where I really wanted a close up, or a two shot, and there are a couple of two page spreads where I did specify the layout, because I had something that I really wanted to do. I mean, why write something like this if you can't have fun with it, right?

I held my breath and flipped to those pages first when the layouts arrived. There's this one thing that's incredibly important to me, and I wasn't sure if I'd adequately described in my script what was in my head . . .  but I was thrilled to find that E.J. had taken exactly what I wanted, and translated it into art.

After I ran around the house for a little bit, I sat down with my original script, Luis' script-to-layout script, and the layouts. I read the whole thing start to finish, and I know I'm not the most impartial observer, but I could really feel the story I wanted to tell, and it's exactly the way I saw it in my head when I wrote it.

So, uh, yeah. I'm pretty freakin' excited about this, and deliriously happy at how perfectly the whole thing is coming together. I can't wait to get the okay from TokyoPop to preview something from my story in the months to come.

Speaking of the months to come, TokyoPop has invited me to San Diego Comicon to be on a couple of panels, and get my geek on, so I'm totally going.

NEEEERRRRDDD PRRRRROOOOMMMM!!!!11