EMPOWERED & SISTAH SPOOKY #6 thumbnails, pt.1 (Patreon)

Above are my thumbnails for the first half of issue #6 of 2018's Empowered and Sistah Spooky's High School Hell, a six-part miniseries written by me, drawn by Carla Speed McNeil, and colored by Jenn Manley Lee.  Previous roughs from issue #5 are here; and more info on the overall project here.

To be honest, this long-running feature hasn't been one of the more popular ones on this Patreon, judging by the number of likes and comments. But hey, at least we're at the end, folks! If I get a chance, perhaps I'll write up a post-mortem for this unfortunately ill-starred project, which suffered from a goodly number of very poor decisions on my part. At the very least, I could post some pics of the back-and-forth procedure that Carla and I did on the series' dialogue, which was an unusual feature of the project.

Now, with the previous issues, such as #3,  I posted the thumbnails only in their original "quad" format, as seen  above.  Howeva, it's occurred to me that the roughs might be more  appealing if I cropped 'em to show a single page at a time, as seen below. 

Time for the big finale, folks! In the page's notes below at right, note the unusual adverb "lysergically" (as in, an acid trip, maaaaan) which I am perhaps oddly fond of.

One glaring mistake I made with the series is that I wrote all of its issues' scripts back-to-back-to-back over a month or two.

The mistake, here, was that I should've taken a break between scripting issues and worked on something else between 'em, to give myself time to mull over what I was doing with the overall narrative.

(Many) months after the miniseries' scripts were completed, I had a "come to Jesus" moment in which I began to lament the fact that my Empowered work had become too dialogue-centric, that my comic pages increasingly felt to me like little more than a delivery system for said dialogue.

I became interested in trying for a more balanced approach to my comics storytelling, where the dialogue wouldn't always be the primary driver to the pages. This insight, alas, came too late to be of much use with Empowered and Sistah Spooky's High School Hell, which I'd finished my part of long before.

In theory, I could've tried to rewrite and redraw the miniseries' scripts and roughs for a different approach, but that would've involved weeks if not months of more unpaid work, so screw that.

Another disastrous side effect of writing all the Emp & Spooky scripts back-to-back was that I completely lost all momentum on my regular Empowered production.

When I started writing Emp & Spooky's scripts, I'd just finished drawing Empowered vol.10, and had generated a good head of steam in terms of cranking those ol' Emp pages out. It often takes me months, sometimes many months, to build up that kind of productive momentum on a volume; if I'd gone right into drawing Empowered vol.11 after finishing vol.10, I now believe, I might've made good progress on that challenging book.

That's not what happened, though. 

After taking a good couple of months to do all of my work on Emp and Spooky consecutively, I wound up trying to do a "cold start" on the extraordinarily difficult task of drawing Empowered vol.11.

That did not go well at all, as I'd squandered all my precious productive momentum whilst scripting the miniseries.

In retrospect, I clearly should've alternated scripting Emp & Spooky issues with drawing Empowered vol.11 pages; one week on E&S, say, then three weeks on drawing vol.11 pages, while I still had the comics-drawin' "Eye of the Tiger" in effect.

Both Emp & Spooky and vol.11 would've benefited hugely from this balanced approach to alternating my worktime, I feel. Whoops!

Wellp, only one more half-issue of roughs to go, folks! Next time, perhaps I'll ramble on about some other key problems with my deeply flawed decision-making on this miniseries.