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DOING THE WORK // 1.09.03
FLYING WITHOUT A NET Before I get started: thanks to everyone who e-mailed me or posted their condolences on the SAVANT forum. I really appreciate it. Things are settling down somewhat, now that the funeral has come and gone and life goes back to normal, as it always does. I think that's the worst part of the whole process, really; you feel like the world should come to a halt. "My father just died, I think I deserve a little consideration." But you don't get any, and life goes on, inexorably. And there's really nothing to do but pick up the pieces and try to keep up as best you can. And admittedly, I seem to be doing ok. As long as I don't talk about it directly, I can keep my shit together, which is nice, I guess. And as with other parts of my life where the shit hit the proverbial fan, at the very least, it's getting me to work. Because time doesn't stop for me, deadlines keep on creeping up on me. In a development that seems to occur too often for my taste, I found that I had considerably less time to finish up my submission for the second issue of E-Volution, as well as the second issue of BETWEEN THE CRACKS. So, it was time to start burning through pages. Because I'm both writer and artist for my projects, I've found myself re-writing pages on the fly; I'm lucky enough that I can be fairly fluid with my scripts. Since what I write initially rarely looks like the finished product, I thought I'd try an slight experiment: working without a script entirely. I had a fairly basic outline in mind, and I already knew the ending I wanted. In theory, this should have allowed me the flexibility to write without worrying too much about following my script and would save me the time by allowing me to skip a step, just as doing my comics digitally allows me to skip pencilling. I'm never doing that again. When I'm writing for myself, I tend to keep things fairly loose; I separate everything by page number, and keep the action in order by dialogue. It's not something I would inflict on another artist, but it works well enough for my purposes. However, what I didn't really seem to grasp was the fact that just the act of writing all this down helps focus the images in my head. Trying to improve it caused me no end of headaches. The first problem was trying to establish a proper rhythm for the pages. Normally, with the dialogue already written, I can get a basic pace running and things flow from there. Without the script, with only the ghost of the script, I had to continually rework the layouts. Then came trying to fill the pages themselves. I had a specific number of pages in mind, and I didn't want to go over them. And since I had the ending planned out, I knew where I was going, but how fast I was going to get there was a new challenge entirely. In the end, it tied into the pacing; I found that parts were far too rushed and others dragged, which necessitated more deleting pages and redrawing them, over and over again. And finally came the lettering. I'm not an experienced letterer by any stretch of the imagination; I've mostly been learning by doing and trying to follow the examples of Phil Foglio, Stan Sakai and others. How successful I've been is a matter of some debate. As odd as it sounds, having the dialogue written down in front of me helps give it presence, helps me design the panel so that I can accommodate the words. Not having pre-set dialogue made things significantly more difficult and would result in cluttered panels and obscured artwork. And let me tell you, there are few things more frustrating to an artist than discovering that something you worked hard on is going to be obscured by word balloons and text. While I'm definitely pleased with the results of the experiment, I'll never do this again. Even considering how fast and loose I play with my own scripts, having it in the first place provides me with focus. And right now, I could use all the focus I can get. *
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