Learning from the Best

I'm in the process of roughing out and/or blocking in the first chapter, getting a few pages down every day. Unfortunately, it's a part of the process that doesn't give me much of anything to post, both because the drawings are so fuzzy and because that blue line doesn't photograph well (by design).

So I read some comics this week.

Mike Mignola's AMAZING SCREW ON HEAD

I thought to myself, "who does great page compositions?" and the first name that came to mind was Mike Mignola. You might know him from HELLBOY, but it is a smaller work of his that occupies an important place in my heart.

Back in 2004 (I think), I had written off comics. In the 90s, Image Comics burnt me out on floppies and direct market products and that sort of thing. Then I stumbled into a comic shop one idle day and discovered AMAZING SCREW ON HEAD. Long story short, it made me like comics again.

Anyway, I was past due to revisit the comic. I thought I remembered wild and inventive panel layouts, but I remembered wrong. Mignola uses up the entire rectangle of the layout area on every page, and all the panels are rectangular. What makes them dynamic seems to be the way he composes and balances the image elements in his pages. Very cool.

I also noticed a few spots where I thought, "I would have done that differently." That's always nice. It's another reminder that A) Done is Better Than Perfect and B) I didn't notice it the first time, so clearly these little things are not so much of a big deal.

Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki's THIS ONE SUMMER

I remember enjoying this A LOT when it came out, but I don't remember fully appreciating Jillian Tamaki's artwork as well as I should have.

This is another case where I remember the pages being laid out more dynamically, and again the layouts are, for the most part, pretty standard. It's the in-panel and overall page compositions that are dynamic, and that's without use of any particularly wild angles or "camera work."

I love this book's aesthetic. The character "designs" are all so distinctive and easy to read. The rendering is so natural and easy-looking, but the characters always feel solid, consistent, and again, they're easy to read. Plus, the natural effects Jillian gets out of her ink work are killer. She's so good.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and if you're wondering where the sort of flippant style of presentation in DD1 comes from, one read-through of SCREW ON HEAD will make it obvious. Whether I stole it from there or whether I saw it as permission to do what comes naturally to me, who knows, it's a real chicken/egg kind of thing.

EDIT 2: Thank you to everyone who responded to "how often should I post," except for the small handful who clicked "more often." >:| And I send out my warmest encouragements to everyone who chimed in on the issue of project-related anxiety.