TM525- comp and notes (Patreon)

Hi guys! I was away on vacation for the past week, and decided to do zero work for that entire time. I haven't had a real no-work day in about 3.5 years, so it was nice. Thanks for your patience while I was away taking a billion ref pics, lots of waves and lava refs, haha. 

Anyway, this has been one of my favorite scenes for a while, and I was excited to get to it (also to funnel some of my frustration about [everything] into a page for a while, fictional bad stuff is so much easier to deal with than news). Just some fun stuff:

• I wrote this scene back in 2007 while on a big Mario Puzo kick. In one of his books, The Last Don, the Don says that anyone who doesn't agree with his plans "can swim to the bottom of the ocean." I thought that was an interesting concept, obviously~
• I've been reading a lot of Boulet for the first time... his style is very loose and has a lot of fun camera angles, which was good timing for fixing the boring first panel
• Just a general comics tip that I learned over time, I never make the "meat" of the panel the same over several panels if I can avoid it. The bottom three panels on the oldest page are a good example of how repetitive and boring it is if all of the eyes or general volumes of the figures align too well over several panels. It sort of makes your eye fall asleep... I always will vary the sizes, or at the very least lift the eyes onto a different horizontal so that my readers eyes always keep moving. Same for the bubbles of course, but the space that your subject takes up is also important to vary. 
• Luca's sitting on a chair because his prosthetic isn't as awesome as a modern day one, and can be difficult to stand on for long amounts of time. Keeping balance on sand is not a fun exercise. I watched a documentary with the first man with a prosthetic who climbed Mt Everest, he had to keep stopping to drain the cups because the interface between the stump and the cup continually tore open with his exertions and he had to drain the blood out because it kept freezing and lowering his body temperature. Anyways I imagine Luca's leg also continually supparates as well to some degree, and anyways this is tmi isn't it lol, bye