The Making of Execution

Behind the Scenes 07.2024

Well, this one took a while.

The entirety of Execution was a very special experience for me. I’ve never made comics of that complexity and size before, or in a manga-like format for that matter. Predictably, the whole process was very messy, so I thought it’d be fun to look back on how it unfolded!

Let's start from the beginning.

The short story

I think my first writing snippets for what would later become Execution come from 2021, if not the latter half of 2020. While the plot was pretty much the same down to certain lines of dialogue, there were a couple little differences.

Firstly, Nikita’s patronymic was Alexeyevich instead of Danilovich. Alexeyevich can also be briefly seen on this arrest report from Strike 3:

So why was it changed? Plot reason: he legally changed a part of his name after incarceration to avoid unwanted attention. Technical reason: Nikita Danilych was shorter to write. Though, Danilovich does appear in later iterations of the short story.

“I know who you are.”

“Hm?”

Nikita Danilovich blinks. The boy in front of him smiles, teeth nervously clenched. His face looks sickly under white electric lights. 

“That’s good. Knowing your teacher’s face oughta be useful.”

“No,” he shakes his head. “No, you know what I’m talking about.”

“Oh, do I?”

Nikita Danilovich is ready to leave. It was his last class for today, he didn’t expect to be held up by the weird kid of 9B. True, he’s come to harbour a certain fondness for this type of social outcast - the seemingly cheerful, mellow kind. That said, staying at work for longer than was necessary has never appealed to him.

“You’re one of those,” Beletsky fiddles with the coat-check token in his hand, “freaks.”

Another name difference in those older writings is Arthur’s surname, which used to be Nikiforov instead of Sokolov. I think I saw some piece of Russian fanfiction give him the last name of Sokolov and it felt very fitting somehow. It made me think of USSR pioneers and something sharp (that last part’s probably because of the literal “falcon” meaning).   

The short story was primarily told from Nikita’s perspective, which is probably apparent by the way Execution is presented. Certain dialogue segments were moved between scenes (for example, Yura recalling his experience with a classmate spitting acid originally happened at Sergei’s) and extra scenes were added: namely, the walk to the teacher’s office, running into Arthur, the balcony scene, and everything following it.

Attempts at adaptation

Considering how dialogue-heavy my writings are, I thought the perfect way to adapt this one would be a short visual novel. I did some rudimentary tests for the first scene in Renpy, but I disliked how it limited the characters’ expressiveness. I wanted to convey the scene that played out in my head as precisely as possible, and that required more deailed visuals.

So I decided to make it a short sketchy comic.

I drew it in the style of my sillier doodles and honestly I still think that version has its charm. The thicker lines and simple high contrast shadows really make some pages pop. But switching to a more detailed style was ultimately for the comic’s benefit, particularly when you take into account the more serious tone of some interactions.

Here are some more comparisons, so judge for yourselves:

Evidently, I ended up using those early pages as a sort of storyboard for the later redraw. But even so, the redrawn pages you see on the right were far from my first attempt at drawing Execution in a pseudo-manga format.

The Execution comic as we know it actually began at the Arthur scene.

Execution beta

I was starting to realise that Execution would most likely be significantly longer than 20 pages, so I thought it might be better to switch to a more “serious” style. 

The Arthur scene I started with was one that I wanted to add to the short story at some point, but never had a proper script for. I just wanted to put it in there to avoid the question of “why doesn’t Nikita just straight up kill Yura”.

I thought it’d be easy enough: some random banter for a page or two and that’s that. But this singular scene ended up having at least 5 different renditions, all of which required it to be redrawn to some extent. 

It didn’t help that the initial version was drawn when I was very rusty (haven’t drawn seriously for a couple months) and both Yura and Nikita came out looking like alternates.

First version of the page and its published version. If I were making the layout now, I’d make Yura’s and Nikita’s heads peek outside the big panel.

I remember thinking they looked uncanny when I first drew the page, but figured that fixing them would be future Ferry’s problem. You can tell that I had major difficulties with making the screentones look good, too, since the old page looks flatter and less balanced. I still struggle with screentones sometimes, but at least it’s not as bad as it once was. 

Since I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, I drew the scene with neither a storyboard nor a proper script. And as I tried to fix the flow of the dialogue later on, I found it difficult to adjust the existing layout to it. This resulted in extremely cramped and hard to follow pages, such as the snippet you see on the left below.

Random stuff from scrapped versions of the scene: cramped page snippet (left), random scrapped panels (right).

Some versions of the scene also had a strange, almost antagonistic tone with Yura acting pissy towards Arthur to get him to bugger off. I ended up going for a more lighthearted vibe you see in the final edition, since it felt more natural for the characters.

In any case, I kept drawing from the still unfinished versions of the Arthur scene until the end of the dialogue in the kitchen. At that point I began to realise that something had to change about the process, because the way I was doing things just didn’t feel efficient.

I decided to distract myself a bit. When working on the kitchen scene in Execution, I also sketched a different kitchen scene from the novelized version of PAFL I’ve been working on. The first two pages of it looked like this:

Rough English translation:

You can see that the panelling is more narrow than usual and the panels aren’t aligned to page borders. But this little comic unlocked some hidden chakra in me. To be more specific, it made me:

• conscious of how much better stuff reads when you segment big chunks of text into smaller bubbles; 

• aware of how much interspersed scenery shots improve the flow of the scene;

• how much easier it felt working in a comic archive document as opposed to having every page in a separate file.

These are all very beginner-level observations, but they completely changed how I went about making Execution. It pushed me to rework all the existing pages in both subtle and drastic ways. 

I also started looking more carefully at panelling in the different manga I read, which led me to realise a couple more things about layouts:

• every page should optimally have at least one panel that stretches beyond page borders to prevent layouts from looking claustrophobic (unless that’s the intention);

• every page should optimally have at least one panel with an element going outside the panel borders to make the comic feel more lively (speech bubbles don’t count);

• blank space between panels matters - you can control the reading pace by grouping panels on the page;

• big character portraits can be very effective with minimal screentoning.

Now armed with these newly discovered principles, I wanted to start fresh. So as I was finishing the kitchen scene, I decided to go back to the very beginning and draw the classroom scene proper.

Reformatting and polish

This is where I finally decided to reformat the whole comic into a singular publishable document. 

It ended up being pretty damn tricky, mostly because the 40-something pages I had already drawn were taller than the standard comic format. So I had to adjust the layouts to be more readable while avoiding the cramped look that would normally come from simple resizing.

Initial and published layout comparison. A lot of expressions were redrawn before publishing to Patreon.

New scenes were drawn from scratch to fit the updated format. These were:

• the classroom scene;

• the walk to the teacher's office;

• the Arthur scene (aside from its first page);

• everything from leaving the apartment block until the end.

I started publishing Execution pages on Patreon when the classroom scene was already complete, the teacher’s office scene and the final version of the Arthur meeting were being drawn, and everything up to the end of the kitchen scene only needed readjustment.

Before and after publication. RIP chibi Yura, anxious hands were deemed more cinematic.

So I didn’t need to do that much work from scratch on a week-by-week basis - I could do all the necessary edits to existing pages over the course of about 2 days (3 if I was indecisive). The only time I needed to draw everything weekly was in the very last stretch of pages, starting from the balcony scene.

Once the Patreon run of Execution concluded, I started preparing the full release. I did another run over the comic and fixed some smaller mistakes: Nikita’s scar being on the wrong side of his neck in places, some off expressions, minor background stuff, etc.

I also did the russian translation, which took about a week (and was only half-translation, since some parts of Execution were originally written as that). Then I finished the cover art, and that was that!

How a page was made

My process for individual pages was about what you’d expect from any other comic (after I started doing storyboards). I use the same workflow for Rough these days.

First comes the basic layout. Everyone looks kinda like an egg.

Next I do an actual sketch that can be lined.

This is an older page – these days I don’t rewrite the text for the sketch; I also draw clean panel borders right away. Sometimes I don’t even resketch the bubbles.

After that I do the lineart. I know a lot of people hate it, but it’s probably my favourite part.

Another part of the process I enjoy is backgrounds. This example page doesn’t have any, but I usually dedicate about a day to lining backgrounds in Rough - I think it was about a little less for Execution since I didn’t go as hard on the details.

Even if you use tracing (and I REALLY implore you to do so if you’re no good with perspective or are working without an assistant), making it look good takes a lot of meticulous work. But I think it’s 100% worth it, backgrounds add a ton of texture and atmosphere to your world.  

Anyways, next come screentones!

Screentones are honestly the hardest part of the process for me. I understand what I’m doing a little better now, but it still takes a lot of effort for me to make them look right. Someday I’ll learn… 

Afterword

The overall production of the comic took me a bit less than a year and a half - that’s with all the rewrites, redraws, and formatting changes. It’s crazy to realise how much I actually learned along the way, and it’s funny to see that despite its full release happening less than 6 months ago, I already see a lot of stuff that I would’ve done differently today. 

I think the biggest takeaway from my looking back at the making of Execution is how I’m absolutely rawdogging Rough in comparison. You bet the full release will have a ton of redraws.