Comic Report #40.1 - Revisions

Hello!  I worked entirely on comics this week. I always say to myself, oh, what if I do half-gamedev half-comics for a week and make two Patreon updates, and I never do it because I just get focused on the one task, but last week I did it, and to be honest I kind of rushed my comic page to fit it in under the wire.  So this week I made a bunch of pencil revisions before I got to inking and painting the panels. I'm happy with where I got to this week and I'll be able to finish this page by the end of this weekend.  So for today, I'll make my usual post and talk about the choices I made:

Last week I pointed out how I wanted to change one of two similar panels, and this week I redrew both the penultimate and the final panels.  I picked up on the thread of Stacy slapping Lizzie in the back in the first half of the page to continue with in the last two panels, so I drew a shot of Lizzie holding her busted ribs while Stacy gets to the point.  Lizzie's car crash injuries have been a consideration for the whole of the comic and I always try to keep them in mind when I draw her in action moments, partly for consistency and partly so I don't forget about it myself and then draw a shot where its like she's perfectly fine.  It's been eleven years and I haven't forgotten about them yet.

One of the rules to consider when moving a camera from shot to shot is the orientation of each character within a panel.  In the top three panels the camera is looking on from the right but the last three panels has it looking on from the left, but despite the characters "flipping" in which way they look I keep the shots consistent by keeping each character in the same position relative to each other.  Like Lizzie is always to the left of Stacy and Alice is to the right of them both. I think its called the 180° Rule, where if you have two characters talking to each other you don't want to rotate the camera more than 180° and flip which character is on what side.  I try to keep this consistent in group shots as well as single shots, and it works great.  No matter which way you turn or rotate the camera, as long as you keep your character positions within a panel consistent then the scene will read well spatially.

The last panel of the page felt alright last time, but I threw it out and redrew it anyways to keep the motion between panels consistent.  In panels 2 and 3 I have Stacy's left hand in her pocket, and she brings her hand up to her chest level with a back slap.  Since her right hand is already in that space, in panel 4 I use that hand to draw her thumbing to herself, assuming her left hand is still in her coat pocket.  The shift in pose from panels 4 to 5 gives me a chance to take that hand out of her pocket, since her right hand is continuing its elevation I can just bring the left hand up along with it, and then in panel 6 I can bring both hands down on Lizzie's and Alice's heads.  That's sort of the line of thinking I take whenever I plot character gestures within a comic page, I always want to avoid it feeling like characters just snap from pose to pose and give them a sort of organic flow and momentum to their gestures.  It's a subtle detail that may end up getting overlooked but I believe thinking about my posing in that way helps keep my brain sharp.  

The starry-sky background to these pages is making them pretty easy to paint in so I've been cruising through my panels once the inking is done.  As I mentioned, I expect to have this page finished and posted by the end of the weekend, so keep an eye out for the final no-text page post.  Thank you as always for continuing to support the work I do.  I'll continue to try to do the best job I can for you.