Hayden Fryer
What have been your personal cartooning/comics highlights of 2012?
After many years of both being on the back burner and more or less in development hell, getting the ball rolling on my "Darkest Night" series through the release of "Act One".
Who are some of the comics creators that you've discovered and enjoyed for the first time in 2012?
That's a tough one, my shelves and boxes are literally overflowing with comics that I've picked up and really enjoyed this year! I'd say the biggest one was finally getting my hands on Mike Mignola's complete (to date) run of Hellboy TPB's. Delving into that world, watching the many layers peel back as Hellboy's character arc unfolded all the while in the midst of subverting story expectations was really a complete joy.
What is something non-comics that you have enjoyed in 2012?
The beach, I most definitely enjoyed going to the beach earlier in the year! (The holiday and break at the time was well overdue.) That and finally getting a chance to really dig into HP Lovecraft's work; "At The Mountains of Madness" specifically was really an eye opener for me in terms of its scope, awe and naturally horror.
Have you implemented any significant changes to your working methods this year?
Visually I've stepped up the size of my original sequential pages from A4 to A3, the follow on effect being the introduction of heavier attention to the backgrounds/set locations, detailed shadows and various digital effects to "finish" the page. As a sideline to the heavier digital focus, I've also stepped out of my comfort zone a bit by experimenting with Indian Ink as a painting medium.
On the writing side, I've been lucky enough to give it a lot more focus this year through a couple of collaborative projects with Paul Abstruse and Ryan Wilton. Traditionally I've drawn from either my own outlines or other writer's scripts; so a core process that the needed to be re-defined this year was finding a different way to bring the smaller detail, movement beats and dialogue stages of the story that were being fleshed out either during or after the final art all the way back to the scripting stage.
What are you looking forward to in 2013?
Rounding out the first arc of "Darkest Night" with the upcoming release of "Act Two" and hopefully later in the year, "Act Three". Also those aforementioned two collaborative projects will either be hitting shelves or getting very close to it, "Enormis" with Paul Abstruse and "A Gun For All Seasons" with Ryan Wilton!
That's all assuming the world doesn't end...
