Sigune's How Not To Draw Comics - Part IX
Oh look! It’s less than a month ago since I posted page six, and I’m so awfully busy, and yet here is page seven already! This is to celebrate that I finished the pencils for page 14 tonight. It is a dreadful time: Rufftoon’s deadline is upon me, and the story isn’t ready… I have to cut it short for publication - it will run only 17 pages instead of 19/20, meaning no Dumbledore (*sob*) - but I will do my best to continue it to its projected ending here at LJ. Mind you, the last few pages may possibly have to wait till real life calms down a little :/.
Anyway - here is number 7 for you.
The Comic So Far:
Page One
Page Two
Page Three
Page Four
Page Five
Page Six
You Are Here:
Snape, tired of being the butt of the Marauders’ weird sense of humour, is plotting revenge. His hopes of getting the quartet expelled are rekindled when he overhears Peter and Sirius talk about a meeting by the Whomping Willow after curfew. Unfortunately for poor Snivellus, Sirius becomes aware of the eavesdropper thanks to Evan Rosier and his gang of Slytherins waltzing in…
12. Talking Heads
I seem to remember - but maybe it’s only in my drafts for these entries - that I usually start off by announcing that I have very little to say this time, and then end up writing pages and pages. Well, not now. Today I present a page about which I really have little to say, because it consists of “talking heads”.
Talking heads are rather frowned upon in comics, because they are considered visually boring. I disagree, because I like heads; and I also think the heads are only as boring as the lines they get to speak. In the hands of gifted writers like Colleen Doran in A Distant Soil, the heaps of text she spouts are very simply a delight. Who wants action if they can read Seren and D’mer’s bickering? Not me. Unfortunately I can make no such claims for my own dialogue. I just have a page of talking heads because the plot has to move on :D. That, and I adore drawing heads!
So, for page 7, I do not have great numbers of sketches. My main concern was to get the dialogue sorted out, and to fit all the text onto the page. That is why, on the scrap below, for once you find a portion of words among the drawings.
Just ignore the faces on the right hand side - they don’t come into play until page seventeen. (It’s McGonagall with or without a hair net; I still haven’t been able to draw her to my satisfaction in the Night Scene.)
The text above the drawings is the final version; the balloons that go with the sketches have hints of a more extended dialogue. If drawing this were my job, or if I had lots of time to spend on it, I might very well have opted for more text; as it is, I’m trying for the first time in my career as an amateur comics artist to actually finish a story, and therefore I must condense it a little. That meant I lost Rosier’s dig at the fact that Snape doesn’t come out looking quite as brilliant as his archenemies Potter and Black, and therefore hasn’t earned himself a special status in Slytherin House. Too bad.
I do like the businesslike, authoritative look of the full-length Evan Rosier, and the startled Snapes at the bottom. Maybe I should also confess to having a soft spot for Snape the foul-mouthed adolescent - my sketches and scripts do contain their fair share of four-letter words, but I always end up taking them out because I’m afraid of giving offence. In any case, there was no space for either.
Oh! The hand with the wand (a.k.a. my hand with my stylish, modern paper knife)… I seem to remember I drew that long before everything else, and I was determined to have it somewhere. I didn’t know how I was going to arrange page 7, only that this hand was going to be in it :).
The above is my thumbnail for the page. I didn’t need much except for some idea about the positioning of the heads and the text balloons, so it is all fairly simple and visually uninteresting. I’m not sure now how I managed to understand those arrows and pluses and things - in any case they seem to have served as a guideline, and I did construct the final page from them :D.
The funny thing about this thumbnail is that it marks the moment where Wilkes walked into the story. I did say last time that I suddenly got it into my head that the boy with the curly hair in the one but last panel of page 6 was Wilkes; I thought the realisation only had its relevance if Snape mentioned him. So, in the last ‘panel’ on the thumbnail (I don’t know if it’s legible if you don’t know what it says), I had him say, “Oh, and thanks for being such a staunch ally, Toby.” Then, of course, I realised that nobody was going to understand that Toby was Wilkes, because he had never been named in canon, and I’d only just baptised him Toby when I wrote that line down. I’d have to refer to him as Wilkes instead, but from that day on, he was Toby for me, and still is, despite the fact that we now have another canon character of the same name.
Now that I had given Wilkes a first name, I thought I might as well give him something to say. (I have a thing with names. I don’t understand how some authors can write a whole novel about characters A, B, and C and add the names afterwards. I have the name first, and the story follows.) I’d also established him as Snape’s friend, which I think is a good thing because without him the story would turn into a tear jerker - “poor lonely oddball beleaguered by nasty pranksters, and nobody who understands him, he fights alone!” No, I thought it would be better and more interesting to have “stubborn oddball refuses to listen to reasonable friend and walks headfirst into half-loony prankster’s trap”. So I gave Wilkes a line that was originally Rosier’s, and gave it a slightly different twist; he also got a little extra in the last panel, where I can show off his beautiful curls and nose and eyes - he’s such a cutie! :D
Okay, enough - here is the finished page:
When my amiable friend and beta Elfie first set eyes on the second panel of this page, she said, “it’s obvious! Slytherins stink!” In fact, I was just looking for different ways of filling up the backgrounds, but I suppose that if you want to read it that way, you are free to do so ;). The mistake of this page is in the same panel: the “yeah!” should be to the right, but stupidly enough I didn’t leave enough space there :/.
Finally, I love the one but last panel for its utter simplicity. Shame I had to add text.
Next: Sirius has an Ingenious Plan.
Now that you’ve seen my latest treasure, I must ask you the special favour of helping me out with my title. This story is going to press, and I am at a loss for a good title. I KNOW I have an f-list chock full of geniuses because I’ve read your stories, seen your art, perused your theories and adored them all, so I KNOW you can help me. HELP!
For clarity's sake, of course I hope you will all vote "Other" and offer your own brilliant suggestions; mine are pretty lousy, but I had to fill this poll up with something.
Poll
Anyway - here is number 7 for you.
The Comic So Far:
Page One
Page Two
Page Three
Page Four
Page Five
Page Six
You Are Here:
Snape, tired of being the butt of the Marauders’ weird sense of humour, is plotting revenge. His hopes of getting the quartet expelled are rekindled when he overhears Peter and Sirius talk about a meeting by the Whomping Willow after curfew. Unfortunately for poor Snivellus, Sirius becomes aware of the eavesdropper thanks to Evan Rosier and his gang of Slytherins waltzing in…
12. Talking Heads
I seem to remember - but maybe it’s only in my drafts for these entries - that I usually start off by announcing that I have very little to say this time, and then end up writing pages and pages. Well, not now. Today I present a page about which I really have little to say, because it consists of “talking heads”.
Talking heads are rather frowned upon in comics, because they are considered visually boring. I disagree, because I like heads; and I also think the heads are only as boring as the lines they get to speak. In the hands of gifted writers like Colleen Doran in A Distant Soil, the heaps of text she spouts are very simply a delight. Who wants action if they can read Seren and D’mer’s bickering? Not me. Unfortunately I can make no such claims for my own dialogue. I just have a page of talking heads because the plot has to move on :D. That, and I adore drawing heads!
So, for page 7, I do not have great numbers of sketches. My main concern was to get the dialogue sorted out, and to fit all the text onto the page. That is why, on the scrap below, for once you find a portion of words among the drawings.
Just ignore the faces on the right hand side - they don’t come into play until page seventeen. (It’s McGonagall with or without a hair net; I still haven’t been able to draw her to my satisfaction in the Night Scene.)
The text above the drawings is the final version; the balloons that go with the sketches have hints of a more extended dialogue. If drawing this were my job, or if I had lots of time to spend on it, I might very well have opted for more text; as it is, I’m trying for the first time in my career as an amateur comics artist to actually finish a story, and therefore I must condense it a little. That meant I lost Rosier’s dig at the fact that Snape doesn’t come out looking quite as brilliant as his archenemies Potter and Black, and therefore hasn’t earned himself a special status in Slytherin House. Too bad.
I do like the businesslike, authoritative look of the full-length Evan Rosier, and the startled Snapes at the bottom. Maybe I should also confess to having a soft spot for Snape the foul-mouthed adolescent - my sketches and scripts do contain their fair share of four-letter words, but I always end up taking them out because I’m afraid of giving offence. In any case, there was no space for either.
Oh! The hand with the wand (a.k.a. my hand with my stylish, modern paper knife)… I seem to remember I drew that long before everything else, and I was determined to have it somewhere. I didn’t know how I was going to arrange page 7, only that this hand was going to be in it :).
The above is my thumbnail for the page. I didn’t need much except for some idea about the positioning of the heads and the text balloons, so it is all fairly simple and visually uninteresting. I’m not sure now how I managed to understand those arrows and pluses and things - in any case they seem to have served as a guideline, and I did construct the final page from them :D.
The funny thing about this thumbnail is that it marks the moment where Wilkes walked into the story. I did say last time that I suddenly got it into my head that the boy with the curly hair in the one but last panel of page 6 was Wilkes; I thought the realisation only had its relevance if Snape mentioned him. So, in the last ‘panel’ on the thumbnail (I don’t know if it’s legible if you don’t know what it says), I had him say, “Oh, and thanks for being such a staunch ally, Toby.” Then, of course, I realised that nobody was going to understand that Toby was Wilkes, because he had never been named in canon, and I’d only just baptised him Toby when I wrote that line down. I’d have to refer to him as Wilkes instead, but from that day on, he was Toby for me, and still is, despite the fact that we now have another canon character of the same name.
Now that I had given Wilkes a first name, I thought I might as well give him something to say. (I have a thing with names. I don’t understand how some authors can write a whole novel about characters A, B, and C and add the names afterwards. I have the name first, and the story follows.) I’d also established him as Snape’s friend, which I think is a good thing because without him the story would turn into a tear jerker - “poor lonely oddball beleaguered by nasty pranksters, and nobody who understands him, he fights alone!” No, I thought it would be better and more interesting to have “stubborn oddball refuses to listen to reasonable friend and walks headfirst into half-loony prankster’s trap”. So I gave Wilkes a line that was originally Rosier’s, and gave it a slightly different twist; he also got a little extra in the last panel, where I can show off his beautiful curls and nose and eyes - he’s such a cutie! :D
Okay, enough - here is the finished page:
When my amiable friend and beta Elfie first set eyes on the second panel of this page, she said, “it’s obvious! Slytherins stink!” In fact, I was just looking for different ways of filling up the backgrounds, but I suppose that if you want to read it that way, you are free to do so ;). The mistake of this page is in the same panel: the “yeah!” should be to the right, but stupidly enough I didn’t leave enough space there :/.
Finally, I love the one but last panel for its utter simplicity. Shame I had to add text.
Next: Sirius has an Ingenious Plan.
Now that you’ve seen my latest treasure, I must ask you the special favour of helping me out with my title. This story is going to press, and I am at a loss for a good title. I KNOW I have an f-list chock full of geniuses because I’ve read your stories, seen your art, perused your theories and adored them all, so I KNOW you can help me. HELP!
For clarity's sake, of course I hope you will all vote "Other" and offer your own brilliant suggestions; mine are pretty lousy, but I had to fill this poll up with something.
Poll