Yamaha and Comics

The Yamaha project bike, an XJ750R SECA, finally has a tail on it again! This is the first thing I did today in the garage after a 15 month hiatus from working on the bike. I'm very excited to have finally gotten the tail hoop of the frame done (almost) after the first two attempts were so horribly wrong and were scrapped. The hoop mimics the shape of the gas tank and has a slight kick-up in the rear to allow room for the tire if the suspension bottoms out, and it looks pretty snazzy too. Also, because the frame tubes (one from the footpegs going up to the tail, and the other running along the bottom of the seat area) on either side were stacked on top of one another, I did some funny things and tapered the top tube into the bottom. This makes the sides of the tail look like oval tubing, and also reinforces the frame waaaaaay more than stock, and the rear part of the tail is regular round tubing like the rest of the frame. It is strong enough to grab onto an lift the whole bike by the tail, I am so giddy with my welding :)

Also, I had a weird dream a few months ago and it was extremely vivid. I told a few friends about it who said I should make it into a story, as coincidence would have it, I then had an English class at school with our final assignment to be writing a short story. The other class members seemed to be pretty intrigued, and after talking with a few of them they wanted more. So I talked to more people and got sold on the idea of doing an independent comic book :) I have the storyboards done, the writing and rewriting is where I am now, and soon I'll start sketching and making up some page layouts. I want the artwork to be fairly special, a little different than normal books on the market today. In the eyes of a publisher, I'm not sure if this would help or hinder the work, but I need this to be a very emotional and grabbing piece, so every panel is going to be treated like it's own solitary piece but also made to match up with the rest of the story, and without effecting the pace of the story. Should be interesting to say the least!

I'll post up pictures of the Yamaha project and get some more sketches up as well once they're done-ish :)