Comic Report #27 - Sorta Sketchy

I got a page all done up this week, and in a surprise twist: I'm gonna keep working on it and try to finish it for next week. I think it's doable and I want to prove to myself that it can happen, so I'll knock out this page and then resume game sprites the week after.  

This page compresses a couple details into a few panels.  I want to have the lead-in involve Lizzie finishing up recapping her knowledge of the Omni-mart crew, which she brought up to Lee on page 544 as potentially useful information Maria would like to hear.  The reader already knows those details, having read the comic through that point, so I don't need to go fully in-depth; a recap should suffice in conveying what is being said.  During those pages I had Lizzie write a bunch of stuff in her little notebook, so I made a reference to myself to go archive-diving and find one of those moments to put on the notebook page in Maria's hand, just to connect the thread of then to the thread of now.  One of the secrets of writing long-form stories is you don't need to have every detail planned out fully in advance, if you leave yourself enough breadcrumb details you can go back and be like oh, I can use this and connect that to what I'm doing now, and when read front to back as a complete work it will appear that you had tremendous foresight when all you did was reread your own archives and pull a string you left yourself. I've done that a lot (that was where the Police/Army mixup over Alice's police hat came from) and I'm doing it again here.

When I started drawing this page I almost put Lizzie on the left side of panel one and Maria's hand on the right.  My thought there was since Lizzie was talking she'd be on the left, and then the eye can pan over to the right and see -what- she's talking about.  When I have a conversation in a panel I try to keep the characters on the same sides of the frame regardless of where the camera is pointing, that way the reader can more easily keep track of who is talking to who- this is called the 180 rule or something similar, which basically means don't suddenly flip the camera 180 degrees mid-conversation. Anyways, when I plotted that first panel I had the camera pointed one way, but turning it 90 degrees yielded a whole bunch of benefits.  For one, putting Lizzie on the right side facing left has her back to the wall, so to speak.  We read comic panels the same way we read sentences, scanning from top left to bottom right.  By putting Lizzie on the right side she's on the defensive, as the reader's eye is moving against her and not with her. She's pleading her case with Maria so putting her on that side gives her a bit less visual authority and the flow of the scene better matches the power dynamic between the two women.  

The other big benefit of pivoting the camera 90 degrees is that it's now pointed at the wall rather than out in the open.  In the pages prior where Maria and the Mayor were talking the camera pointed outward into the depth of the diner so I could have Lizzie noodling around in the background leading up to her appearance on the previous page (she holds up three fingers when she leans over the counter because she was reading Maria as someone who likes three creams in her coffee, which she shows up with shortly after).  For this scene I have the camera pointing at the wall, which sort of boxes the characters in more. I don't necessarily need anyone doing anything in the background and the more claustrophobic framing makes it feel more like an interview with your boss than a meeting between peers.  But most important of all, pointing the camera inward, making that one little change at the start of the comic, means that the backgrounds will be very easy for me to draw on this page!!! That's a big reason why I want to jump in and just finish this page, I don't have to render the entire depth of field and every object in perspective in the background of all nine panels, a lot of it is just walls and picture frames!  Yahaha!

I actually got more work on this page done than just the image posted above. I got it inked and flatted and prepared to paint, like I shared with the last page. I think the sketches have a certain character to them, though, so I wanted to share that.  Here's what the page looks like inked, for comparison

I've been keeping up with my previous revelation to play more fast & loose with my artwork and I like the added character it offers so I'm gonna keep doing it.   I'll get back to work on this and I hope by next week to have a finished page to share with you.  Thanks for sticking with me!