Both Scary Go Round fan comics started the same way, John Alison announced the contest and Robert and I agreed that we needed to enter and went off to brainstorm, so we went off to The Hurricane to plot our victory. We tossed around a few ideas starting with who we wanted to feature, picking Esther agreeing that the comic should involve the supernatural.

I suggested something about a ghost going trick-or-treating dressed as a classic sheet draped over the head verity, I wasn't to keen on the idea but Robert liked it and so we started getting an idea for pacing and made some sketches.

A traditional ghost would not work, nobody is frightened by them and the comic would not be very funny if the ghost was not a little scary, I wanted something with long long curve tendrils which really seemed to fit the SGR aesthetic, the first thing I drew looked like Cthulhu the next looked much closer to what I went with, except it had eyebrows and cat's eyes.




When I was back in Moses Lake I started working on a more finalized storyboard and Robert sent me a more finalized version of the dialog. The ghost in the storyboard was spectacular, I think it was even better then how it turned out in clay, however Esther didn't look so great, I'm so bad at drawing. Not that it matters once I have a storyboard I know what I need to do, it's an essential that I make one or I'm sure whatever I worked on would turn out in the same state as my room, a terrifying mess.

After the board was done Robert and I got some feedback from trusted friends and I started sculpting Ester. I found some amazing goth pants on Ebay that I used as a guide, for the rest of her I went back re-reading all her story arcs. I was somewhat disappointed with her hair and face, I didn't feel that I really captured as well as I had for Tim or Amy in the last comic. I loved the way her pants turned out.

The Ghost is very large, he has a aluminum armature with a big lump of foil for his head. If you straitened his arms out they would be a bit over two feet long.

Both puppets were shot against my awful green screen and that was then keyed out in Visionlab Studios. Shots that featured the ghost overlapping Esther had to be shot twice, once with just her, and once with both of them, that way I could control the transparency of the ghost.




I created the comic template in Illustrator and made the backgrounds and speech bubbles using it's nice vector tools, the mouths (and the ghosts eyes) were also created in Illustrator. However I couldn't import the pictures with transparency (not sure if this is a limitation of the program or my ignorance) so I had to import the vectors into Photoshop.

In Photoshop I went to town on the ghost, I started off with just some opacity, but even though it was transparent it did not seem very ghostly. I experimented with different with multiple layers that had different levels and type of blurs until I came up with this somewhat Ghost Busters green look.



I then removed the bow tie from the clear layers and added it as a solid object, because, if a ghost can't were a solid bow tie, how can he have a sheet draped over him?