Art Journal 018: Plotting More Thumbnails

This week is SPX and I’m cutting down to the wire preparing for a big trip but I don’t want to do a “we won’t update this week” sort of thing because that would not be responsible of me, so I’m going to share something interesting instead.  I’d like to keep doing longer lesson-style posts but for easy sake I’m gonna do something simpler for now.

These are my thumbnails for the next three pages.  I scratch them out in Photoshop and I’ll put little notes in the side margins and the insides might not make a lot of sense to anyone but me, but that’s all a thumbnail has to do.  I’m not always very responsible about keeping my thumbnail buffer ahead of schedule but whenever I have a big scene I always want to sit down and knock out however many pages it’s going to take all at once because the timing between panels and what goes on within each page is actually very delicate and very important to plan ahead of time.  If a scene is going to slide smoothly from page to page it needs to be planned holistically, otherwise the pages will feel like disjointed, unrelated moments.  

In this scene the sheriff and his deputies are storming into the diner to confront the mayor on a conflict of interests regarding internal authority within the city’s makeshift government.  Since introducing the idea of a whole-town setting to the comic I’ve taken a lot of time to establish the key characters and how everything fits together- in my head I imagine this as setting up my bowling pins- and now that the setting transition has mostly been established I can start throwing balls down the lanes to knock it all over.  I still want the conflict to be informative, though, because this is still a fairly new environment for the characters to be in  and I don’t want the reader to be left wondering what’s happening, so framing the conflict to be disruptive but also constructive is important.  

The two pages before this were set up carefully to end on specific points.  My comic isn’t really a funny jokes comic but the element of a punchline is still vital and it’s something I include on every page.  The punchline of a page is the last big storyline “hit”, or the important result of the page’s events.  If a page doesn’t have a punchline it doesn’t have much of a reason to exist, and you can usually safely cut it from your script to save work and make your storytelling more efficient.  I’ve cut plenty of pages whose punchlines weren’t important enough to warrant their own page and compressed them down into another page, saving me a whole page’s worth of work.  In the previous two pages my punchlines were “Liz lamenting about Fate cutting her some slack just as the Sheriff enters” and “Sheriff confronts Mayor and reveals internal friction”.  

The three pages I’ve thumbnailed round out the scene, and I split them up in a very particular way so they punch right at the ends.  The first of the three gives the sheriff a moment to elaborate but ends with the mayor playing his hand, sort of the “other side” in contrast to the page before it.  The second of three expands on the mayor’s position and reveals one of the sheriff’s ranks kinda-sorta siding with the mayor, before they’re all interrupted by the appearance of the waitress to come take the new peoples’ order.  It’s uncertain how long she was standing there for, thanks to the shift in the camerawork in the page, but it ties the waitress lamentation page from a few pages back into this new narrative- Liz is just a useless waitress again, but in her position working the town’s center of gossip she stumbles on an interesting bit of conflict, so her appearance is the punchline of that page. The third page rounds out the scene with the sheriff and his guys getting up to leave- since I gave them enough pages being here that it doesn’t feel like they just got here- the mayor puts a whole bunch of money on the table and gives Liz a tip to forget she saw or heard anything.  The conflict was interrupted but in its dissolution there’s an element of secrecy and financial leverage, which plants hooks for the nearby future and ties Liz to something she probably wasn’t anticipating as a waitress.  

Each page has a purpose and hits on an important closing “moment”, something which gives enough information to lead into the next page, which feels weighty and important on its own and which draws the reader to want to know what happens next.  The way the end of one page and the beginning of the next click together is crucial to chaining moments together into a flowing, compelling narrative and whenever I’m doing a scene as a big chunk I make sure my pages click together ahead of time, deciding which key elements (accusation, retort, revelation, interruption, etc) belong on which page and how to pace it out before I start making pages and dig myself into a narrative hole of “oh geez I should have set this up differently”.  In smaller scenes like this diner encounter I’ll plan three or five pages ahead and sometimes in the establishing sections of the story I’ll freewheel from page to page but when there’s a big arc like the van chase, the music scenes or the dozen pages before a 100-mark page I will plan ten or fifteen pages ahead.  For stuff like the van chase I wanted to make sure every punchline was important and the whole scene had the forward momentum I wanted it to have.  The music stuff is extremely important to coordinate because of how deeply it is tied to the lyrics and the flow of the song they’re based on (i.e. pages have to end on natural bridge points in the song which give the reader time to turn the page before more words happen).  And for 100-mark pages I want to time very specific events to land on very specific page numbers (like Monday walking into the back door of the Omnimart) so I have to make sure the dozen or so pages before that convey everything I want them to and compress enough to make sure the moment I want falls on the 100 page, because a 100 page has to be an action page and can’t be a talky prosey page.

So that’s a brief look into the immediate future of the comic and how I plot out the panels, the flow, the pace and the camerawork (the second of three has very crucial camera rotation in it).  Punchlines aren’t strictly for jokes, they’re vital to a good narrative sequence as well, and if I want my stories to be compelling I have to make sure they build up to and leave off on just the right moments.

Thanks for reading!