Thumbnails for Chapter Two are Underway!

I had a scare yesterday. I wrote about 14 pages of "writing." Yesterday, I finished thumbnails representing the three of those 14 pages, and, if I follow through on those thumbnails, they will be thirty-ish finished comic book pages.

Thinking, "that seems like a lot," I did a quick estimation. At the rate I've been going, turning written pages into thumbnails, Chapter Two will be 176 pages long. That's as long as the entirety of DD1.

Now, I don't think this chapter will actually be 176 pages long. I think it's just that the first few pages of writing were very dense. The next several are less-so. I'm going to keep pushing on, and we'll see where we end up. Certainly not more than 100 pages.

I am fighting hard against an urge to make every page as "efficient," or as dense as possible. If I make every page too dense, then the rhythm of the whole book is incessant and unpleasant. I'm trying to remember two of my goals from the start of the project, which was to "leave more breathing room," and "put in some weird, silly stuff."

I like where it's going so far, though I always have doubts. Right now, if I look through poison lenses at my thumbnailed pages, I might say they are pointless or fluffy, or that I am being an undisciplined storyteller; meandering on too many sluggish tangents. On the other hand, one might argue that I am putting good humour into the story, adding richness and vitality to the characters and their environment. This might be a reader's least favourite chapter ever, and it just as easily might be someone's favourite.

I find myself struggling with this a lot: what is good? What is bad? What is appealing? What is repellent, or exhausting for a reader? And the more I look for answers in advice or (especially) in reading other work, the more confused I become. So I'm following my gut, and leaning on the only rules I trust anymore: 1) contrast, contrast, contrast—in rhythm, scale, pacing, etc— and 2) if it makes me laugh, it stays in.

WEBTOON / TAPAS

I scheduled PDAP's first "episode" to appear on Webtoon and Tapas this coming Saturday! Thank you to everyone who gave me feedback on the "what day should I update things?" poll. Saturday, Wednesday, and Monday all tied, but "Who Cares" beat them all handily, as I suspected it might. :)

Naoki Urasawa's ASADORA!

I picked this up from the library because I saw Tonci Zonjic enthuse about the latest volume on Twitter. I started his Pluto a while back, but it didn't click for me. I didn't know anything about Asadora! going in, and I'm pleased to find it's really hitting the spot.

So far (I've only read the first two volumes) this is a story about a young girl helping the victims (including her own family) of a devastating flood in mid-century Japan, aided by a down-on-his-luck pilot—no, war hero. There's an unlikely friendship, the wonder of flight, and a plucky, energetic young girl. If you enjoyed the Delilah Dirk books, and if you're enjoying PDAP so far, you might really enjoy this. The only criticism I might make is that the dialogue is a bit clunky, but after a while I ended up finding it charming.

This comic is extremely decompressed. I was pacing through the pages at a real good clip. (Aside: my understanding of "compression" in comics is that a compressed comic packs a lot of story into fewer panels, making you do much more interpretation in the gutters. A decompressed story reads more like a storyboard, stepping you through each turn in the action. In a compressed story, a lot of time happens between panels. In a decompressed story, the time between panels is short.)

On a related note, the type of sequence below is used to great effect—I'm looking at the Scary Man here—where, through a series of three cascading panels wherein we "zoom in," and the only change is his pupil direction, he does, in fact, seem super scary. I don't know how Urasawa made it work so effectively. This ended up being one of my favourite sequences. It speaks to the animator in me.

It is also an extremely beautiful book:

When I hear people talk about Urasawa, it's usually with unchecked reverence, so it pleases me to see page compositions like this:

It is not an especially showy page. It does what it needs to, and well. But more importantly, it casually breaks a rule I'd been following for a long time. It's the sort of thing that makes me think, "wait, this guy is supposed to be such a genius, but he's absolutely not comic-ing the eyelines!"

I was told early on that in comics, a character's eye direction should lead you through the composition, even if it doesn't make sense in the imagined world of the fiction.

For the first two panels of this page, we establish a solid left-right relationship between the two characters, and their eye direction plays along. In panels three and four, this left-right relationship is maintained, as is their eye direction. Then, in panels five and six, the characters are composed on the page in a way that conflicts with their imagined positions. In panel five, he looks down, off the corner of the page. In panel six, her eyes are not directing you toward him, she's looking up, off the edge of the page.

Urasawa is giving priority to the character's eye direction in the imagined space. He keeps it consistent within the world. Where it helps the composition, that's good, but if it doesn't, clearly he doesn't sweat over it.

You could argue in the page above that in panel five, his eyes lead you to his hand, and his hand leads you to curve over to the next panel. And in panel six, Asa's eye direction carries us to the next page. Sure. But here's another pair of pages, and (especially in the top-left panel) the same arguments are harder to make.

He maintains their left-right-facing relationships and keeps those strong, but does not fuss over the fact that in the top-left panel, Asa's eye direction and gesture move toward the space off the page. I suppose you could argue that the imagery creates a compositional frame in the corner of the page, but now we're burning too many calories. My takeaway from this was only: sometimes it's okay if a character's eye direction doesn't funnel you directly to the next panel.

Let's see if I can get away with the same sort of compositional tricks in Chapter Two.

(This sort of thing would obviously be much easier to communicate if I had taken the time to do a draw-over or even a video. If that's something that you'd be interested in, let me know!)