Sleepy Jackson and Creepy El Dawah!

Bumper week of HUZZAHs from me - 3 pages in a week! Above are pages 9 and 10 of HUZZAH!!NOIR that I've just finished. Features a new character - Loretta Beretta. Also has Sleepy explaining his 'rope-a-dope' brand of investigation. In some ways I'd rather have had more time to sort the artwork out, but I knew what I wanted to say with the characters and that meant hammering out two pages. It's giving me a real opportunity to work out an approach to black and white stuff. At the moment I'm probably putting too much in, be nice to suggest more and draw less. Fun getting there.

Below is page 35 of HUZZAH!! Tried to tie up a few things with the story. With the art I was looking to find a way of doing the gloom without doing it all black or ending up with a page of photoshop airbrush effects. Ended up using the hatching brush in Manga Studio (also in evidence on my latest Noir pages). At the bottom of this post is the black and white, unlettered version. I've been nervous about putting such a predetermined effect on my pages, but I guess if it works it works. Plenty of 'cheating' goes on in comic strip art, don't get me started on... nah, I'll leave that for another day.