Death Maze #2

Death Maze #2

Written by Keegan Shiner
Art by Rock BarcelLOS

Colors by KEEGAN SHINER
Letters by Antonio "ToTo" Esposito

Cover design by Keegan Shiner

Based on the characters created by
Alexander Woods and Keegan Shiner

Copyright 2020 Keegan Shiner





The BOULDER... Will not be back.

DEATH

MAZE

Will return!

Will THE ANTI-CAPITALIST VEGAN ACTION
COMMITTEE be the first wicker park hipster yuppies
to infiltrate the evil panda corporation in Death
maze #3?! Or will their recycled vegetable oil-
powered car get towed when they perish? Follow
Dumb Comic Creators and stay tuned for the next
issue!

The Making Of
Death Maze #2

D.I.Y. Comic Colorist

Version 1

Version 2

Editors Note:

for Death Maze #2 I wanted to try
coloring the comic myself. WHY DO
THAT?! Well, almost every forum and
blog about making comics that I have
read online has called for comic
writers to learn how to color their
own comics, or letter their own
comics, or even ink their own comics.
The reason for those suggestions is
that comics are very expensive, even
this two-page comic cost over a
hundred dollars. most comic writers
resent the fact that they have to pay an
artist and they try and weasle free
coloring or lettering from "people
who need experience" doing those
things. This is naturally a terrible way
to go through life, expecting others to
work for nothing…but it happens all the
time. So the obvious response to a
writer asking for "FREE WORK" is to tell
them to "LEARN HOW TO DO IT YOURSELF!"

It's good advice!…Especially for those
who cannot afford to pay more people
to work on their comic..

…but…Like…seriously…

EASIER SAID THAN DONE!!

As you can see -- Versions 1 and 2 are
super boring, muddled, flat, and
hard to read. The robots blend into
the background, the sky is super dark,
the boulder changing is pretty ho-hum.
There's not a lot of contrast, there's
almost no highlights or shading. It's
just not good.

Rather than give up though, I decided
to keep trying. The final version took
another few days to find and complete.

- I studied other comics to try and
figure out what the missing ingredient
was between what I was doing and the
professionals. Instead of allowing all
that negative space to take over the
page, I made the change the focus
point of page 1 and let the "rays" flow
out below the other panels. In my head
I wanted some kind of kirby-varley
hybrid, and I think you can see some of
that intent in the final version. the
robots actually lost color in the fubak
versions. there are a lot of them and
they all blended together. I made them
a more nuetral color and made sure
to highlight their ray-gun flashes. I
ended up really being aware of where I
needed to use less saturation on the
page. Things like the floors and
consoles are not important to be
observed in great detail by the reader,
so I made them less obvious using the
power of color! I also ended up
trying to use similar colors across
both pages and double checking that I
got things the same color. I actually
went back and did things again
multiple times because i kept
forgetting that they had appeared in a
panel before.

would i do it again? If i feel
comfortable with the art-style, I
probably will. after a while, i actually
ended up enjoying coloring these
pages. especially once i had sort of
"flat colored" the panels and was just
in color-editing mode.

…it took a long time, probably longer
than most comic colorists would
spend, but I ended up really liking the
end result!

thanks for readinG!

We’re not
done!

For more behind-the-scenes posts,
pictures, scripts, and videos follow Dumb
Comic Creators on Patreon.
https://patreon.com/dumbcomiccreators

Follow us @DumbComicCreators and
@DeathMazeComics on Instagram

Listen to our podcast on Spotify, Stitcher
or Apple Podcasts!