Things I have learned

After laying out fifty-odd pages of story I think I am finally getting a handle on pacing the story. As I mentioned last time, I try to end a page on a scene cut or a dramatic moment. Sometimes that leaves me with a lot of business to cover in that page and sometimes it leaves not very much. When that happens I have to look at whether to stretch or condense the action. Do I squeeze it into one page or stretch it out over two, and if so how much goes on page one and how much goes on page two?

I don't think I can explain how I make these decisions right now. All I know is, it is getting easier to make them. But here are a few things I have learned in the process:

1) More panels on a page means more work for me. This may seem fairly obvious but it wasn't to me. For example, Christine's fight with the goblins at Puck I used a couple of sixteen panel pages. I asumed that more smaller drawing would be take the same amount of time as fewer larger ones because the pencil mileage is the same. I was wrong. Perhaps the drawing time is the same but I didn't account for how long it takes to work out the composition. (Significantly longer that it takes to do the drawing.) So extra panels ends up being a lot of extra time per page.

2) Size matters. The size of a panel does influence the seeming passage of time. In Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner states that a longer panel will seem to occupy more time than a shorter one. Even though I had read that, I thought that the number of panels is more important than the size. Now I have to conede that Eisner knew best. (I quess that is why he has an award named after him.)

3) Blow by blow action is really boring. In a movie it is great to see a fight in intricate detail. Fast cutting can make any number of shots feel as fast or slow as you want. But in a comic, too many drawings slows things down. Even though I know this, I still imagine that action as a movie, which I then have to distill down for the comic.

4) Planning is essential. Not just thumbnailing out pages and panels, but taking the time to really think about what the story needs. I tend to thumbnail out twenty or so pages at a time, then draw them, then thumbnail out another twenty, and so on. By the time I get to the twentieth page of any given set, I have been thinking about it for weeks more that the earlier pages, and they (not surprise here) turn out better. The pacing is better and the story works better. So, as in all things, measure twice, draw once.

Is this thing on?

Testing, testing. Is this thing on. It is. >cough, cough<. When was the last time anyone dusted around here…

Oh, hi! Patrick here. It’s my turn to welcome you to Cold Iron Blog, where Stephen and I will talk about stuff related to the comic, Cold Iron Badge. You’ve been hearing from Stephen about CIB for a while now so I thought I’d horn in on the limelight. So… where to begin? A logical place would be the beginning: Page one, panel one. Puck. What the hell was I thinking with that building. I had originally decided to keep the backgrounds minimal because I was more interested in drawing the characters. They were what was really interesting to me, since they drive the story. But since Puck is a major set piece for the story ( there are several scene set there), I wanted it to be more than a big concrete box. However, I am not an architect, not by a long shot, and I was having a really hard time coming up with a design for it. Then I walked past this great building. It had a distinctive shape, and was surrounded by a heritage area; it even had a cobblestone street running along one side. AND, it had a club in the basement. Perfect! I thought. It was only slightly out of my way coming home from work, so I walked around it a bunch of times, and took some reference photos. Now, I am a pathetic photographer so my reference photos were all but useless. Fortunately, I found what I needed on the good old internet, and started to draw. And draw… And draw. What the hell was I thinking? It took me about three days to wrap my head around the perspective. Anyway, I finally got my act together, took a deep breath and got started. Once I got rolling it ended up being what you see. I was so frustrated by the amount of time it took to get that on panel down that when the club appeared again on page four, I reduced the first drawing and traced it. Although, from the new angle we can see more of the environment and a have to admit that I goofed up on that. I mixed up the angle of the intersecting street and some of the buildings. A colleague of mine said no one would notice, and since it isn’t critical to the story it wasn’t a big deal. Maybe he was right, but I still get grumpy when I see those half assed Bgs. If Cold Iron Badge ever comes out in print, there’s a gonna be some fixin’ a happenin’, let me tell you. So the question is, can you name the interection where Puck is? If you can, then I guess the drawings are good enough.