FOWP: Update Twix drawing is hard

So yesterday I was raiding Harvard's bookshelf for instructive drawing references, and only finding books about the art of advertising in near pristine condition (ladies if you are worried about your youthful beauty date Harvard, he will dust cover you and preserve you like nothing else, hoping to sell you one day to a rich online collector) and he got out an artbook of Takehiko Inoue, the only Manga artist who's work I have actually paid to own (Slam Dunk, which will be handy for indoctrinating my children into basketball) and I thought, man that dude's the fucken best. And started to flick through it, to discover the book was more an art folio, with completed works and no instruction.
Luckily Harv's (as nobody calls him) had another trick up his sleave and produced what I now retrospectively realise was the legally savily named DVD 'How did he draw' where one can watch the master at work.
I mean Takehiko Inoue, sure, for doing a graphic novel is aiming a bit high for instruction. The dude is one of the best and most original writers of manga, and ontop of that like the milkman on top of your mama he is one of the best artists.
So when I put on the DVD I did get to see how he draws 'Vagabond' and discovered that he draws it with a skill and ability that is beyond both my lower and higher brain functions.
Furthermore there is nothing explanatory or informative about the DVD. He just seems to have the finished artwork in his head, and almost randomly goes about transferring the image to paper.
And I can see, the guy has gone to art school, done about 10 years of hard slog as an assistant to a published artist, scored a gig in Shonen jump, been drawing essentially the same principle characters for 20 years. Understands anatomy and composition so that with relative ease, in 20 minutes can lay down with ink and brush a masterpiece.
So back to Fear of a White Planet. I scanned in the component features last week. Spent a day or Twix with the lasso selector, copy and paste into grid after grid after grid much like this one of rejects:
watch he doesn't steal your watch

Then it was back to the old fashioned pen and paper. Thank god for modern scanners and illustrating tools. I would have spent A) weeks experimenting until I was satisfied or B) minutes giving up.
And came up with a monster for my good old fashioned monster sci-fi so hideous I can't post more of my progress because you don't show the monster too soon, because well JAWS proved that.
The other oddity is writing for comics. It is easily some of my worst writing ever. The only bit that I have to do up to any standard is the dialogue. You realise though that writing a comic is the reverse difficulty of writing prose.
For example it takes less than 10 seconds to write:

'Everyone flew into a panic'

And then it takes 10 minutes to write:

'As the sun fell upon his face, he was struck with the sudden realisation of his own mortality, he had fallen this day, his bloody stump of a hand pumped a last drop of blood onto his surprised expression. The moment of truth had arrived, he was dead and he knew it. Peace. At last.'

Whereas it takes about the same amount of time to just draw a stunned face looking at the bloody stump of a hand, it takes 6 hours to draw specifically everybody flying into a panic, their stunned expressions, composing the chaotic directions of the people in the picture and so fourth.
Straightforward actions are suddenly the enemy, abstract emotions a cinch.
I'm still tossing up how to write it, I think I'll go MI2 style and just anchor it in a couple of crucial scenes/sequences and then work the overall plot (pretty simple) around it.
As of tomorrow I stop drawing for the monster and get to work on the principle cast. Oh joy!

btw, this not blogging is working so well for me, I'm going to keep it up at least another week.