I originally intended the blog portion of this site to be Author’s Notes – some inside information or commentary of some sort as I went along. And that’s what most people that use the Comicpress system use the blog for. So, let’s see if I can keep this up. I’ll try to throw some thoughts down for each page as I go, moving forward.
- I’m not a very dynamic artist (I’d be terrible at drawing a superhero book) but something that’s really hard to do in comics I think is three pages of someone talking on the phone. There’s a pretty strong temptation to start getting tricky with the panels and camera angles. And, it looks like I gave in to that temptation already. Hopefully the bottom middle panel works. The idea of tilting the camera with Casey as she drops back into the bed worked really well in my head and would probably work better in film or video. It might just be confusing here. One thing that helps make this scene more than a phone conversation is that I’m trying to depict Casey’s fragile, over-medicated state of mind. That will maybe become more obvious on the next page.
- As far as panel arrangements. I’ve steered away from over thinking any of that stuff throughout this book. At one point I almost decided to make every panel the same size to make it easier and maybe more web-friendly. But I think the picture frame called for this treatment in this case. It actually illustrates Casey’s last line in the panel above it and Rusty’s dialogue in the panel to the left of it so it does well occupying both spaces at once.
- What I like about this page is that it probably tells you everything you need to know about Casey and Rusty’s relationship. They’ve been together since high school. He was the star of the football team and still longs for those days. And there seems to be a gap in their communication as a couple.
