Finishing Chapter Three and Four Thumbs

This week:

• Looking at some of the thumbnails for Chapters Three and Four
• I read some more Asadora! — Some thoughts on pacing and "shot selection."

As of this writing, I've made a complete pass through the next chapter plus the one after, all in thumbnail form. I'm going to leave it to "settle" over the next few days while I'm on Toddler Duty and revisit it next week.

I'm trying to keep it lean, and so far each chapter is about 40 pages, so relative to Chapter Two I'm doing okay.

But I also return to one of the original principles behind this project: making sure the story has a chance to "breathe" and has a life of its own. I won't name names, but I read a graphic novel recently which was well-told with a solid story—it ticked all the boxes—but it had very little "flavour." It felt too lean. I took it as a reminder to let the story stick out in a few spots, as long as it doesn't make the whole thing fall over.

^ The thumbnailing process starting out tough, crossing out a bunch of options that weren't working.

^ Sticking true to the working method I've been using so far: doing a lot of writing on the thumbnail sheets. Wherever you see a hand-drawn star, that's a note-to-self meaning, "remember to include this."

^ Thought I'd use this "funneling" series of panels to suggest the feeling of "coming to a conclusion." Alexandra is formulating a theory to explain the events at hand, and this layout felt like it supported that idea.

^ For all my new-found love of using markers to indicate values, most of the time I got too wrapped up in things and just ended up using pencil.

^ There's a lot of mood and atmosphere in these two chapters. Lots of darkness and shadows and spooky mist, so considering the light/dark values is more important than ever. And it was important before.

If I can get to a happy place with Chapter Three next week, then it's time to start drawing pages on paper.

I'm going to complete Chapter Three with all its inks and colours before I start drawing Chapter Four, even though Four is all thumbnailed-out. I want Chapter Four to be especially strong—to hit especially hard—so I'm using my most reliable technique for getting good results: just letting it sit for a while. Thumbnailing the chapter has given me a good, concrete idea of where it's strong and where it's weak. By letting it marinate at this stage, I should be able to come up with at least one brilliant solution to improve the chapter even more. It's a time-tested technique with only one (big) downside: it takes a while. But it works. So I might as well lean into it when I can.

- - - - - - - -

I picked up two more volumes of Naoki Urasawa's ASADORA! the other day. With thumbnailing on my mind, I noticed some interesting storytelling approaches.

^ Look how he uses two panels to draw our attention to this un-done door latch. This is something I would expect to see in a film storyboard—the one-two push in on the latch. But it surprised me to see it in a comic. It's effective, but I wonder if it's good "value." The idea here is "a suspenseful sequence where dude notices door latch is undone (and later, other evidence of intrusion)." Would that idea communicate if we only had one panel showing the latch? Maybe, but having two certainly sells the idea.

I'm not sure how I feel about it. One part of me is pulling in one direction, saying, "you could be using that space more effectively! It's too simple an idea to spend two panels on!" But another part of me says, "the idea reads well with less ambiguity done this way, so it's totally worth it."

^ Here's a similar example. The girl looks, we see the umbrella, then we see her concern. The idea here is trickier—she notices something unusual, but technically/realistically, there's no reason for her to be suspicious or worried. It does, however, tell the reader "she just narrowly missed making a connection with her friend (who dropped the umbrella when something bad happened to her)."

Again, to sell the idea, we "push in" on the girl's reaction (which is difficult to read exactly). Two panels to reinforce the idea that she's noticed the umbrella, using repetition of essentially the same image to tell the reader, "notice this!"

It feels like a luxurious use of page space to me, but I think that's just the style of the storytelling. These are very filmic, very "decompressed" comics. The reader is not asked to do a lot of filling-in-the-blanks between panels. They read super smoothly, and it's easy to rip through each 200-page volume real quick (which, to be clear, I think is neither strength nor weakness).

Urasawa has a documentary series where he looks at various artists' comics-making process—you might have seen more of it than I have. I should dig into it at some point.

- - - - - - -

Chapter Two starts going up for civilians this week! Thank you, Dear Patrons, for continuing to support this project and making it feasible to offer it on the web for everyone.

See you next week,

TC