Airbury Volume III Complete

After months of slaving away at the graphics tablet, Volume III of Airbury Academy is finally complete and I must say I'm pretty happy with it! The drawings are better than anything previous, and there has been an improvement in the colour styling in general because I'm no longer using a mouse to do the Photoshop dodge n' burn. The page count comes to 80, one page shorter than Volume II last year (although Volume II had a couple of 'filler' pages so let's say they're the same size).

As before, Volume III contains six stories: Lisa, Cologne, Psycheswap, Chalkface, Mutiny and Shutdown. So will there be a Volume IV? Not for a while. I'll be taking a break from comic-making for the time being and try to gather more story ideas, while I send out samples of Volume III and the Special Edition to various people. Not that there won't be anything to see on this blog. Well, enough talk. Here are some of the highlights from Volume III which I present to you below.

The front cover.

My friend Megan told me on my deviantART page that Jezebel is a big crybaby, so I had to get that line in somewhere.

Some life-drawing, as mentioned in an earlier post. Hey, why not draw a pear cut in half. There's one in every drawing room.

Lisa, a bad-ass pot-smoking 23 year old. She pops up in the opening story to tell her secret exam cheat method.

Maya goes to the festival (half-)dressed like a circus ringmaster.

Miss Evy tries to bond with her students, but it doesn't always work. Chris, you will find this scene familiar!

This panel of Jezebel looking sad actually appeared in Volume I in 2007. I just changed her clothes and put it in again specially for a page to send to publishers.

Maya: one ligature short of a typeface.

Psyche disguises her younger sister as her so she can sneak out of the school. Can you predict what happens?

As mentioned in an earlier post - the teddy bear prank from my design class days.

A real-life cameo! The guy on the left there is my old uni mate Fashion Boy, so called because he's Taiwanese and someone had to cop all our stupid anime nicknames. Well done FB, you've made the comic and pulled Miss Evy too, it seems.

Gertrude and Erica's conversation here is, word for word, the same as two of my graphic design classmates had in 2006. As for the "FBI - Female Body Inspector" T-shirt, a female friend of mine has one and asked me to put it in.

And finally, I couldn't resist putting in this background joke to take a dig at various things via the book spines.