MI422- Notes and comps (Patreon)

A comparison of all the pages! If you were at the Saturday stream, you probably saw that I spent almost the entire time on bubble placement. On a page like this it's important that the flow of the panels makes sense (of course), that the flow of the text inside the panels also is tiered and makes sense, that the camera angles aren't flopping all over the place like dying fish, and that there's enough room for the art to breathe once all the text walls are in place. Text placement is pretty much non-negotiable, and requires wrangling the relative position of the speaking characters at the same time, so it's worth spending a little extra time on it. 

This is also a sort of pivotal page since it's the one where it's revealed that LEVi's personality isn't "organic" if you want to call it that... he has a sort of irreverent way of speaking and like the other two, often makes imperfect decisions. I had a hard time deciding where to put this info... originally it was going to be included near the end of Chapter 1, but it seemed like way too much to introduce on top of Mike, Bex, the setting, their personalities, the fact that there's a LEVi at all, and then the cave-in. In Chapters 2 and 3 we don't know that LEVi has any point to the plot other than as some MacGuffin corpse thing, and then in this chapter we DO know about him, but it's in the confused context of Bex trying to make sense of a flood of new info on top of very very little sleep (which I've been kind of alluding to throughout the chapter, but she's exhausted right now and afraid to stop moving for very long). I wanted to wait until both of them were in more of a lull moment, where they are both a little bit more vulnerable from an environmental (not aggressive) threat (in this case, gravity), to bring up the fact that LEVi is also not the type of robot AI you'd maybe expect. 

Sort of like with wrangling text bubbles and art, knowing when and where to reveal certain plot points can be tricky and awkward, especially for a story like this where the mysteries are contained inside the characters themselves. I can only hope that in the end the entire thing reads the way I wanted, without confusing the readers too much or expecting too many leaps of logic. 

I could write more but maybe I'll make a LEVi-only character post and put it all in there.