Albert the Alien in RWP v2 – In Progress

As I announced last week, Albert the Alien is going to be my primary comic focus in 2013. Partnering with regular artist Gabriel Bautista, we will be doing a story in the Reading with Pictures Graphic Textbook as well as launching a webcomic sometime in March.

To give you guys a preview of the work being put into the project, below are some sketches and sample pages for the RWP story.

As you may know, Reading with Pictures is a non-profit organization getting comics into classrooms. In 2010, Albert the Alien made his first appearance in the all-ages educational anthology, which was nominated for two Harvey Awards. He will be appearing in the second volume: The Graphic Textbook.

The story is called It’s a Figure of Speech, and it’s about figurative language. Since English isn’t Albert’s first language, he takes figurative language literally. This allows for a fun playground within a visual medium – and we’re taking every advantage.

First off, we’re going to have some new characters that are going to play a big role in the upcoming webcomic series….

New characters for Albert the Alien. From left to right: Jack Greyson, Gerty’s astronaut father; Miranda Tam, student reporter; Draven Darkmoon, the artsy kid

Detail for Draven and Jack Greyson

Additionally, we just received editorial approval on the inks! Below are some pages and excerpts from the upcoming story, setting up the conflict and overall plot of the story.

For the kickstarter pledge drive for RWP v2, we had 3 slots for pledgers to be drawn into the comic. These pledge options sold out within days of going live, so they were extremely popular. On the page 1 example below, you can see two of the pledgers – the adults in the room.

Inks for page 1 of Albert the Alien in It’s a Figure of Speech. Art by Gabriel Bautista

An excerpt from page 2 of the RWP story. Art by Gabriel Bautista

Albert the Alien is coming along nicely, and we’re making tons of progress on this front. I look forward to sharing more with you guys as we continue to put together the RWP v2 pages, as well as the webcomic work!