Sorry for the sideways jaunt into talk about real art yesterday. When asked, I offer my opinion, but mostly try to stay away form it. As should you. Back to comics…
The final page breakdown on issue 2 is going to hit right at 32 pages. I thought I was actually going to come in closer to 28-ish and have a few pages to fill… but ultimatey the story told me it needed 32. So that’s what it’s going to be. Unfortunately, that means no bonus goodies like pin-ups from other artists or fans or lost pages or the like. I’ll just have to post that stuff on the website and give it to you for free. You win!
While I don’t want to dwell on the fact that the last page I actually posted was in APRIL of 2010, it’s important to note that this time has actually allowed me to solve some of the story telling problems I was having at the point in the script that I had reached.
For the most part this story has been characters talking to each other interspersed with some mild action here and there. I gotta be honest with you, action is hard. If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons or any traditional, turn based, role-playing game you know what I’m talking about. To depict the action in ANY story telling medium and do so in a dramatic way you have to break the action down to the moments as they occur chronologically and make creative decisions on how much time you need to spend on each moment and how much you want to show to the audience.
When I break down the script, the first thing I have to think about is just that: what exactly is happening? How quickly? In what order? I need to know precisely. It’s easy to say in the script: “Stick-Man punches a guy.” But to actually tell that story you need to know where the camera is, how hard he’s punching him, WHY he’s punching him. There are a lot of variables at work and most of them are determined by HOW you want to tell the story.
Back in April when I posted Episode 57, I got stuck on the next page. I had set up the action that is about to happen so the WHY is taken care of, but the specific breakdown of what happens when those Kiloraxian Guards pursue Stick-Man in the panels that follow, it got complicated. I found it very difficult to decide what the pacing of the action was and how to just get out of the way and let the story tell itself. My number one priority as both the writer and the artist is to make sure that I am telling an interesting story, but if I’m not telling a CLEAR story, interesting doesn’t matter.
I made several thumb attemps at Episode 58 and even got as far as penciling and inking it (at some point in the last 10 months) but never really felt the confidence that I had SOLVED the action. Were this my full-time employment I probably would have just let it go and pressed on with a page that I wasn’t confident about and tried to think of a different way to solve the problem the next time I found myself in that situation (it wouldn’t have been the first time).
Fortunately, I DID have a 10 month break (that’s how I have to think about it) to let that page go away and come back as something that makes sense for both the pacing and the tone of the story. After that, the other 7 pages practically thumbnailed themselves. The rest of the action was set and all I had to do was transcribe it, the camera angles, expressions, effects and everything… it’s almost like they’re already on the paper and all I have to do is pull them out.
I’m incredibly excited about getting these last 8 pages out (for THIS story) and know now that there is no doubt that I’ll get this done on time because I really WANT to draw them.
Which brings me back to my tease from my post 2 days ago about how YOU could help fill the remaining pages… yeah.. about that. 32 out of 32 pages in the book are accounted for and the inside front cover already has a layout. I’ve got *1* spot in the book left to fill at this point and it’s the inside back cover. So, if you’ve got ideas for what you’d like to see there, I’m all ears. Throw your ideas out and if it’s better than what I already have in mind, I will gladly use it. And if you happen to come up with the same idea that I have… I’ll pass the credit on to you.
Chatter