ON THE VERGE Webcomic : Meet Jason Smith !

– How old are you ? ( tell it or not !)

I am 36.

I’ve got so many influences (and I’ve blogged about this a couple of times)! For just comics and illustrators: Joe Morse, Dave McKean, Sam Weber, Paul Dallas, Becky Cloonan, Jordan Isip, Jody Hewgill, Greg Capullo, Sean Murphy, Mike Parobeck, Mike Wieringo, Paul Smith, Todd McFarlane… the list could go on and on.

I did go to art school and learned a ton. I went to Sheridan College and graduated from their Illustration program.

I use the Adobe products. My day job is a graphic designer and art director, and I know the programs inside and out at this point. So I use Photoshop for art and then Illustrator and InDesign for lettering and design.

I work in a mix of digital and traditional. I do layouts and stuff on a tablet to start, then pencil usually by hand (though I’m doing more and more of this on the tablet lately). I convert my pencils to bluelines and then print those out and ink traditionally with brushes, pens and quills on paper. Then I scan all of that into the computer and clean it up, add more stuff and colour and letter it all.

– What your webcomic is about, in a symbolic way, the hidden sense ?
ON THE VERGE focuses on the scientific team at Edge Inc, the world’s preeminent investigator of supernatural phenomena. It’s a sci-fi thriller with some humour, a little danger and a talking rabbit. But if you dug a little deeper, you’d find that it’s about the expanding power of science, technology and how it influences our lives, how corporations run the world and how we get information in the media.

– How do you see your future ?
I don’t know. I’m probably going to keep doing what I’ve been doing the past few years — working all day doing design work and then making comics just for me on the side.

I am just starting work on two new comics series — one of which is a new webcomic that I’ve been developing for about three years while I worked on my current webcomic. So my next goal is to really to make those comics the best that I can and keep growing as a writer and artist.

If you want to make comics, then just start writing and drawing your own comics. Practise, practise, practice and keep making comics. There is so much information available on the internet today, it’s incredible. If you don’t know how to do something, go do a Google search for it! I wish I had all of this information available to me when I was just starting out.

I don’t know if I’ve got a secret technical trick. I would say the best “trick” that I’ve started using on a regular basis that has saved me a ton of time is to ink on top of bluelines. That really lets me just ink away and if I happen to mess up or whatever, I can always start over because the original drawing is scanned into the computer.