TM524- comp and notes (Patreon)

You can see how much I suck on some pages, haha, this is a good example. I inked the whole thing then realized I forgot the ledger and had to add it back in. I also tried some text in the last panel butttt... yeah idk.

Try reading the inks page with the extra word bubble there, and then without it on the colored page. You feel it, right? The first thing your eye wants to jump to is the bubble, then you pan down and look around at some stuff. The point of the panel with that choice is to focus on the text, then support it with the words (the text was "what's wrong?" if you're curious). Obviously someone is talking so you'll probably look for them and find them as specks at the bottom of the page but, it just feels like the art is supporting the text at that point. In the revised version, Luca says we're going to the beach, then BEACH panel where the first thing we do is just recognize it's a beach, then look at the cliff, then either up or down at the building or at the beach itself and then probably spot the people there and note the fog and the water and whatever. There's a natural exploration for your eye to undertake and the empty panel lets you do it, whereas just a stupid word bubble in the last panel arrests all of that and makes you focus on the meaning of the text instead, which is disproportionately called out because it is the only text in the panel... anyways, this is the sort of shit that drives me crazy when I'm constructing pages, every other day I'll change my mind on what effect I want to create and then by the point I've made up my mind, I am stupidly late XD oh well...

Oh, and the beach is based on Mavericks beach in CA, if you've been there you might recall the jetty in the bg here and the cliffs. The top of that cliff is actually a secret naval base IRL (in reality that cliff has a big white sphere on top of it, which disguises a classified missile-detecting radar dish of some kind that they don't want normies to look at). We may or may not be past the point where I have to hide the fact that a lot of the locations in the comic are real places, so I'll just point you there so if you're ever in the area you can go "oh cool yeah the first thing that springs to mind is an esoteric webcomic."