Behind The Comics II - Simon H

After Lars Sjunnesson recently gave us an insight behind the making of his comics for the upcoming š! #10 'sea stories' we now snoop around Simon H's comics.

Simon H has been working in various crafts from signmaking to screenprinting and in 2005 made the official change to full-time drawing. Landing in the very active comic scene of Eastern Austria, has granted him with shows and work in groups like Tonto or Kabinett, as well as the opportunity to work on his own drawing and comics - luckily for us also a sea story for š!, of which he now tells us how he created it:

When I can, I work on toned papers I find, or ones that come as wrapping of other stuff. The grey or beige tones make up for some nice contrasts and structure.

The digital corrections through scanning and making the work print ready, will come in early enough, so I'm glad about every haptic element that will happen by way of the basic materials.

My sketchbooks are also folded from these papers.
I tend to make little new ones for every project, so I don't mix things up - which happens enough already...

I'm not a big character developer, but through various mess-ups, I've found that it's better for me to work some basic cringes out before starting with the final draft and drawing of a story.
Anatomic and narrative quirks always happen for me, so I'll just give them enough air to take place in the making. 

As with most of the other drawing I do, I try to not be to concrete with the sketches, but work things around in my mind as much as I can, taking short notes and making scribbles around the text. 

Everything gets moved around a lot, back and forth...
I hope for it to be more like writing put to pictures, rather than finding text to go with drawings - or the other way around.


Usually I start out with more dialog and then cut it down to one or two phrases. Finding out that I'm better off putting what is said into the drawn part of the story.

I had three drafts, all are somewhat different, but still circling around two people living on a isolated beach, with not much going on.

Ideally, there would be as little dramatic action as possible, just following the inhabitants on their daily routine, finding a moment to start and stop my intrusion in their lifes.
It sounds more literate than it actually is, it actually being pragmatism to get anything done...

Goodbye from Lost Shore Beach!

Thanks a lot to Simon for this great insight. Don't get lost at the beach! To see the complete comics by Simon, you need to wait for š! #10, which will come out in the end of February and is already available for pre-order. This series will continue soon...