New Comic Progress

Five pages of layouts done over the past few days, as well as some more development sketches besides the ones I did the other day. That's on top of a quickie inking exercise and taking care of lythandra, who was quite ill today.

I think, perhaps, that I may be back in the swing of things. :) I'm likin' this. (Well, not the lythandra being ill part. But the rest is good!)

-The Gneech

Writing Comics Is Hard. Also, Water Is Wet.

My biggest struggle with writing comics (well, second biggest, after actually coming up with a story) is that I am a very wordy writer. I always want to shove giant chunks of dialog into whatever I’m writing. I can’t help it– I’m a very texty sort of guy, and I do a lot of my expression of character through dialog. Take for instance, this interchange from the piece I’m working on now:

Tanya: It was a shantak. C’mon, we need to move before the surprise wears off and it just gets mad.

Verity: But… I need to stay put, they’ll be looking for me…

Tanya: Ha! You bet it will! And you don’t want to be here when it does.

That’s all in one panel! Granted, the panel takes up a quarter of the page, but still, it’s a lot of dialog to fit into one comic panel, but in the scope of my writing, it’s a tiny little piece.

The panel size limitation is probably a very healthy thing for me as a writer, as it forces me to economy. Of any given script I write, when I have acres of blank screen to write on, probably a good 10-20% of the words get chopped as I do layouts by simple virtue of having to force the story into pages and panels.

The problem comes when I get to a passage that I just don’t think can be chopped without losing an important piece. In that situation, I end up having to break chunks of dialog up into multiple panels, or squeezing a ton of exposition into a tiny space because I’ve run out of room.

The main thing I’ve got to remember as I go is to be prepared for things to take more panels (and therefore more pages) than I expect as I’m writing them, and plan accordingly. I can’t expect to tell a full story in an 8-page teaser, for instance, and I certainly can’t expect a single page to cover more than one plot point.

-The Gneech

Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.

The Last Bit of Blather About Comics This Weekend

I've done layouts for 11 pages, which is all of the script I've got so far. Assuming a publication rate of 1 page/week, that's almost three months' worth.

I need more scripts! I don't want to draw actual pages until I've got at least 16 pages of layout and 24 pages' worth of script (i.e., a complete 1st issue).

On the other hand, this is already more than I had of Arclight Adventures. I'm taking this as a good sign. If I can keep up the current rate of progress (or at least something like it), a launch by AnthroCon is a real possibility. I'm not making any commitments yet, tho-- there's still a lot of development to be done.

Meanwhile, bedtime. G'nite, world, and have an awesome tomorrow. :)

-TG