One of the things I enjoy about blog posts, which I don't write nearly enough of, is the opportunity to write about process and not necessarily final product. Below is a discarded page, a prior version of page 10 of the book. I needed this page to say more than just what the word balloons offered. I wanted it to feel like a life remembered; a blur of big moments and little moments that had somehow stuck with you for some reason. For Hollis, I imagined some of these moments (none of this is really in the story): the time his dad took him to a ball game, or leaving home for the first time. There was the time he got terminated from the Rocket Company and there was that time when he didn't talk to the girl he may have liked when he had the chance. I liked the idea a lot, but I realized that it just wasn't as effective as it could be. Basically I was packing too many disconnected images that were all detracting from each other. And even worse, by the time the pages were all pencilled, I realized that this just didn't flow. The panels in the bottom right got lost and there wasn't a visual force toward the bottom right corner of the page which is where the panels were going. The page had to go. Here it is. So I came up with this new page 10. With the large black shapes in the lower left, I took out the busy-ness of that part of the page and now the eye can flow from the middle down toward the right. These are things that sequential artists have to learn, and even if throwing away a page isn't optimal, the story is always the most important thing. I found this line much earlier in the text about "life being so short, over before you took a breath," and I knew I'd have to put it somewhere. thought it'd be great to illustrate that more lyrically with the smoke in this page.
What do you think?
1 Comment
Ryan Wong
3/22/2017 08:32:55 am
As Sondheim says, "Less is more." I still like the idea of an explosion of moments and memories. It somewhat reminds me of American beauty when Lester, as he's dying, remembers lying on his back watching falling stars at camp, touching his grandma's old hands which felt like paper, admiring his cousin's brand new firebird car, looking at the maple leaves cascading down in fall, and of course enjoying special times with his wife and daughter. In a graphic novel though, it's much harder to focus the reader's attention on specific images in the order you intend. I'm afraid that explosions of energy only work best on the basketball court when Russell's throttling the opponent. Or when Michael Jackson is dancing up a storm, asking us all to make that change.
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Brandt WongThis blog shows the progress and describes my thoughts on my most recent project(s). Archives
September 2019
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