October Experiment: One Panel A Day 17 (Belated)

This panel has been sitting for a long time. I would take it out and kibbitz with it, get annoyed and consider tossing it, but then rework it and put it back into the box to repeat the routine a day or two later. I played with this one more than any of the batch, for good and bad. It looked better in an earlier version, as a drawing it would have benefited by looking at some reference for the setting. But that's the case for a number of the cards so far, in regards to setting, anatomy, hair, clothing. All that deliberation would go against the point of the experiment, to just keep drawing and not hitch. 

If and when this starts to become an actual story, I'd approach the panels with more care, for lack of a better word, and rely less on making things up. The mundane things, at least. This panel got out of hand mainly because I was starting to think about how it fits into things...who this is, what the sac on the ground behind him is doing, how it connects to panels already finished that featured similar imagery. I was annoyed at how many times I whited sections of it out and reworked them, and how less effective I felt the drawing had become. I almost tossed the card, but I felt this creep was someone who has a role to play and might already hook up with some of the other panels. I want to know who he's looking for, if nothing else. Why and how the axe has been used, why his arms have mutated. If there's anything wrong going on beneath that shirt. So I let if go and now it's posted. 

There's no law that says I can't replace this panel or try to do a stronger one in another in the sequence if things progress. One thing Sarah said to me years ago that I've tried to always remember is that "there are no wrong choices".  Insofar that the reader has no idea of your choices, of your process leading up to a panel, a page, a plot point, a detail. They're unaware of the two, three, seventeen disregarded ideas you had or directions you might have taken. 

I would dwell on alternate choices as if everyone knew what I was doing every step of the way and would somehow know that I fucked up if things didn't work as well as I'd hoped in a script.  If you're writing a realistic story and you toss in anachronisms for no real reason, yeah, maybe that's not exactly a great move. But if you're the one making up where Zombie Robot is going and what the weather's like there, or what kind of tank they crash the hoverbikes into, or if the bank robber cracks the one joke you like or the other joke you also like -- it's just not a good idea to get stymied by these kinds of decisions. So don't drive yourself crazy worrying about what might have been as far as the readers are concerned. If it works, it works. Don't hitch trying to impress, or "guess right". Be brilliant another day. Just make the right decision for the story, the character, the moment. You're the only one who has a clue about what might have been. There are no wrong choices as far as the readers are concerned. No one reads a comic thinking, "if only the writer went with the first idea they had for this line". It sounds dopey, but it's something that would stop me from moving forward, and if it happens to one person, it probably happens to a lot of people. And it still crosses my mind sometimes. 

If only I went with my first idea, to post a panel and shut the fuck up. 

Back soon.