Zander Cannon fans can rejoice, as the first issue of his Oni Press giant-monster series Kaijumax hits shelves on Wednesday. When I first heard about the comic, which is send on an island prison for for kaiju, the phrase "Pacific Rim meets Orange is the New Black" was mentioned. That's certainly an apt comparison.

Creatively this project marks a major departure for Cannon, as all of his work is completely digital for the first time. The cartoonist shared a peek behind the scenes at a page from the second issue, showing the steps from rough layout to final product:

"Hi everybody, and welcome to the process by which I make a page from Kaijumax, America's premier monster prison book!"

"One of the things that is interesting about this book, as opposed to all the previous books I've drawn, is that it is done 100 percent digitally. I am not a reluctant digital artist, nor am I a digital evangelist; this method has some real advantages in terms of workflow and speed, and aesthetically it has maneuvered me into a clear-line style that I enjoy. I do, however, prefer to work on paper when it comes to some of my simpler, less high-concept comics."



Layouts

"I feel like it's a little disingenuous to have the layout be only one step. As you can see from the many copies of the layouts layer, I took several runs at this page. They're not too different from this; I had the large panel 1 in every version, as well as the wide Panel 4, but the contents of the bottom row varied a bit. I like to group panels on pages in little sections, in which the size and orientation determine what's in them to some degree. Those wide shallow panels work really well for closeups or intimate interactions between two people. Three small panels in a row are good for a series of quick, distinct actions. Big squarish panels are great at offering a sense of scale. And so on. When working on this step, I take care to not have my pen be too fine. I like to keep it pretty big so that I think more of the main shapes and the composition rather than getting caught up in details."

"Another point is that I frequently don't design my characters until they show up. Knowing a characters' general type does a lot of the heavy lifting in this kind of book (for example, this character is meant to evoke comparisons to Ultraman and Ultra Seven) and so I'll generally have at least a size and shape for the character -- enough to go on for the layouts."

Related: Zander Cannon Heads to Monster Island With "Kaijumax"

"One other thing that I make sure to do here is create a tone layer. Since this book is color with no solid black areas, I have to define shape and volume with halftones and color values, so I want to get that started early. But instead of simply drawing on a separate layer with a light gray brush, I create a solid gray layer, then put a black layer mask on it, which blocks it out completely. Then, on that layer mask, I draw in white, which lets the gray through everywhere my pen goes. At this stage, the only advantage that has is that it's easy to change the overall color of the gray tones (by refilling the solid layer with another gray), but its other use will become clear soon enough."

"Oh -- and the panel borders I create by doing a marquee around the whole live area, then using the selection minus marquee to cut the gutters into it. Then I stroke the lines with 100K black (True Black). These are 30 pixels wide in a 600 dpi image."



Pencils

"Here I do the pencils. Basically I use the same 'pencil' tool as I used for the layouts, except it's half as big. This is a pencil tool (sharp edges) that uses pen pressure to define both size and opacity, which has an effect that doesn't look like an actual pencil line, but serves my purposes for creating detailed, if unfinished, art."

"I've been drawing comics for a while now, so I don't have to do a lot of roughing out of the anatomy of figures. When a character isn't doing anything terribly complicated, I can kind of create the anatomy on the fly, which can be helpful, since this character -- despite his identity as a magical space superhero -- is meant to look as if he is wearing a just-slightly-ill-fitting wetsuit. I like to put in the same weird wrinkles as they had on the old shows, even though I have none of the same technical restrictions as 1960s Japanese TV."

"I also adjust the tone layer and tighten up the tones on all of the figures. I like to just polish up this layer instead of replacing it."

"One of the things I try to do as frequently as I can in Kaijumax is give a sense of the scale of the characters, since everything is meant to be hundreds of feet tall. I include little animals drinking at streams and flocks of birds flying away whenever it makes sense."

"The letters are done as placeholders in this and the previous step (sometimes, since I'm also the writer of this book, I will lay out a page visually to get a sense for the rhythm of a scene before I spend a lot of time writing dialogue), and I just use all-caps Futura Extra Bold Condensed and Futura Black Condensed Oblique as my main font and emphasis font, respectively. I lessened the normal space between lines so that it would look more conventional for comic books. I place these balloons and move them around (and sometimes rewrite them) until everything fits nice and neat."



Lettering

"Next, I bump the whole image up to 1200 dpi, which is the archival resolution setting I use for the final art. By this point, sometimes I've done a little bit of color roughs, like painting the backgrounds or making the sky a gradient, or working out a color scheme for any new characters. But once I'm up to the final resolution that means I can work on the final line art. The first thing I do is letter the balloons."



"This panel gives a sense for how I letter the book. Working over (but not beholden to) the existing font means that I have an evenly-spaced and regular guide, but hand-lettering the actual letters gives the work a necessary organic feel. The two main drawbacks to hand-lettering are 1) its difficulty in fitting into a workflow (here it's all digital, so it can be inserted whenever -- and I letter Gene Ha's creator-owned series the same way) and 2) hand cramps. Working digitally means I can letter while zoomed in, and on letters that are an inch tall. Whew."

"I use a relatively stiff pen point I created that has a flattened oval shape, which makes the down strokes just barely thicker than the cross strokes, which more-or-less mimics the real-life pens I use on paper projects."

"This is often my favorite part of the process, because 1) a nicely lettered page is terrifically satisfying, and 2) hand-lettering on a screen is just so fussy and perverse and bass-ackwards that I think it exemplifies everything about my approach to comics."



Inks

"I use two pen points that I bought from Ray Frenden's site to ink this book, one thick and one thin. I found that with the speed with which I work on this book and with the level of detail I want in the characters, it suited me best to just have an outline weight and a detail weight and not worry too much about being too fancy."

"And here's a note because I'm sure someone will point it out: yes, I do the whole process in Photoshop (CS5.1 in this case). And yes, I know Manga Studio 5 is better. I might very well have moved to it for inks by the time you even read this. I got started with Photoshop since I already owned it, and I like the way it works with Illustrator and InDesign. Its lines are not as consistent or smooth as MS, and so I have been considering spending the week or so getting used to it so that I could at least ink with it, even if I do all the penciling and coloring with Photoshop still."

"Anyway, the two line weights work really nicely for this style of inking. I have a lot of little tricks and stock details that I can just cruise through and put in there (rocks, brush, trees, grass) with the small brush after defining everything with the thicker brush. At a certain point, when I'm finished with the line art, I go in with the paint bucket, bump up the tolerance, and fill the line art with 100K True Black. This takes away all of the gray aliasing that the brush added to smooth the line. At 1200 dpi this is almost unnoticeable but makes the line art easier to deal with."

"One of the things that is very different about this project as compared to past projects is that it is almost wholly defined by its colors. Brushy linework was one of the main hallmarks of my work before, and I've almost entirely abandoned it for this book. So much of the art depends on the tones and the colors that the inks stage is -- relatively speaking -- pretty minimal."



Ground, Sky and Water

"The thing that I do at this stage is paint any sections of the art that need an organic texture, which usually means the greenery of the island and the water of a waterfall or rippling pool. I'll also create a gradient for the sky. These organic "oil painted" sections let me just eyeball a big section of the art, provide a color and lighting guide, and create a subtlety in the background that makes the more garish colors of the characters pop."



Color Flats

"For this book, Jason Fischer does the flats for the color stage, which is colorist talk for him selecting every section of the art so that the colors are in neat, clean sections. In the case of Kaijumax, he's also putting in the correct colors for characters (if I've provided them), so that the final part of the coloring moves swiftly for me (and keeps the book on time). I delete the sections that define the ground, sky, and water so that my painted work comes through."



Color Shading

"Here's where we go back to the gray tone layer, and more specifically, its layer mask. I go into the color flats layer and make a Hue/Saturation adjustment to just that layer (in the adjustment panel, there's a little switch to make it affect only the layer below it). I crank the saturation up to +60 or so, and the brightness down to -60 or so, then move my layer mask from the gray layer to this adjustment layer. That makes the shadows dark but rich versions of the flat colors, rather than making them drab, grayish versions. It also means that if I happen to change a color, its dark version changes as well."



Effects

"I like that this super-candy-colored monster prison has shiny, sparkly highlights all over its gruesome landscape and inhabitants, and it helps define characters' shapes to pop in a little bit of rimlight and sparkle here and there. It's a very cheap -- but super-effective -- trick to have a warm, gentle glow or bounce-light from the ground and then a harsh, hot rimlight from the sun on the upper edge. It defines the edges of a character really well and gives a nice sense of volume."

"I'll also put a low opacity warm, yellow glow on the light side of the figure to give a sense for sunlight."

Final Notes

"I should probably sum things up. I enjoy this workflow; it allows me to play with color early on and work some things out before I do finished line art. It also allows the line art and the color to complement each other instead of one overwhelming the other. All of this adds up to a style of art that can serve the story as its primary motivation (and prevent me from getting overly fetishistic about every last line)."

"If anyone has any questions about my working style, I happily answer questions both in the letters pages of the print version of Kaijumax as well as on kaijumax.com."