I'm here visiting my father and stepmother, who live in the foothills of the Santa Catalina mountains...and find myself musing on how many Concrete stories I've set in the desert, although I really haven't spent much time there. A new one is germinating...
I'll try to run some of my sketches once I return home to scan them.
In the meantime, here's a link to an interesting Andy Clarke article on comics design elements that can be used by web designers, which uses Dave Gibbons panels from Watchmen along with a couple from Concrete as illustrations. If only I always enjoyed such elevating association.
It reminds me of an interesting thing Gibbons said during his presentation on The Originals in San Diego a couple of years ago. When he was nineteen, he saw Barry Smith's first work for Marvel -- an Englishman of the same age. It made him realize he could do that, too.
So he sat down and took a Smith-illustrated comic (Nick Fury, I believe he said) and pencilled, inked and lettered all twenty pages of the story over -- his way. Same script, but different layouts. With those samples he got professional work.
Can you imagine having that discipline and motivation at nineteen? Twenty pages in continuity!
Me neither.