BODY. DOUBLE. (pages 14-16)

These three pages are likely my favorites in the entire book, but they were also some of the hardest to figure out - I knew what I wanted to effectively HAPPEN on each page, but I didn’t know how to lay it out and make it work! I did not manage to do layouts for any of these pages, and had to figure them out very ON THE PAGE, because sometimes that’s what best spurns my creativity.

For instance, I didn’t really know her eye was going to fall out, or at least not in the way it does here. I drew her at the top of page fourteen upright, and then I drew her on her side - and then I realized I could do something fun, and so that’s where the eyeball panels came from hahaha.

Page fifteen might be my favorite in the whole comic. I love how the hand turns to dust, I love her sadness, I LOVE that little panel of Leather Anaïs on the bottom there. Those bottom three panels were really challenging, because I handn’t written the narration and I didn’t know what I was doing - I just knew I needed three spaces with narration to make the storytelling work, and so I just kinda… came up with this. I think it feels really dramatic!

Page sixteen was the last one I drew in the entire book, because it intimidated me so much. I knew she had to stand up, and I wanted the big word ANAÏS behind her. But getting there? She had to move in emotion from sadness to rage (tho the direction of said rage was something I also figured out later, because she had to want to hurt the girl taking her life, and somehow NOT her agent; goes with the theme of society forcing us to hate ourselves in a desire to conform). The narration here is maybe the most active in the whole book. It’s like Orson Welles is in her head telling her to get up. It’s weird, because the narration is actually NOT in her head, but like an outside party watching this happen, just horrified, and yet it is, in some ways, ALSO representing her state of mind. I dunno, it’s just fun lmao.

So with the page I basically just threw down a bunch of panels and then figured out what would be in them. Her name flipping around was, I feel, a pretty inspired decision, primarily just because it is still in so many ways screaming at you, the audience. I liked that! What I DON’T love is that, while the buildup of her ripping her shirt is handled well, the launching/landing of the necklace feels anticlimactic to me. Others have said different, but it definitely feels to me a bit weaker than what came before it, and what was to come afterward. Oh well! I had already missed my deadline by two weeks! 😝

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed these! And sorry for taking so long to serve my $5 Patrons with something new! I won’t let that happen again!