The Eltingville Club #2, Page 20: Layouts, Writing, Finishing, Regretting (Patreon)

I found the layout for this page after pulling it from the portfolio to pack up for an art customer. Thought it might be of interest for the process folks.

I never scripted any of the Eltingville comics. I pretty much wrote all of my solo projects during the layout stage, or winged it on the board with a basic idea of what was going on for however many panels (laziness, not confidence). 

I tend to work my pages as complete sequences, even if they're part of a continuing scene, I guess maybe lots of folks do that, if not most. I like a rhythm to each page, a beginning, middle and ending beat. When I write a script I'm even more rigid in structuring things on the page, it's like a pattern my brain sets down, finishes and starts over again on the next page. Every page is a self-contained story structure that connects and transitions, often the page is the entire scene leading to another sequence. That's the idea, at least, so the reading experience is smooth and doesn't hitch or "bump" anywhere. I hate a clunky transition to the next page, in particular-- there's one in Beast of Burden: Occupied Territory #2 that still bothers me. But things tumble the wrong way sometimes and you have to live with it, the art or the script or both step on some storytelling toes. Hopefully it doesn't knock the reader off track and disrupt the story flow. You don't want the reader to have to stop to figure out if we're in the same sequence or location, if it's not clear we screwed up (unless it's obscured for a reason).  

Anyway, when I'm making my own comics, I usually write through doing thumbnails, designing the characters and jotting down plot and dialog notes as they come to me. I make fewer notes nowadays, I'm less anxious about everything, which is good, because too many notes led to idea overkill and way too much material to make sense of. 

Often I'll  improvise ideas on the page when I'm penciling, and I'll just go with it, this would happen most often with Milk & Cheese. I'd start doing a layout, then get bored, and start penciling and just throw crap in until I had a page. They do what they want to and resist editing. It would also happen with the Eltingville Club because of all their fighting and out of control horseshit, I'd always be getting new ideas that I'd shove into the pages, which were already overstuffed. Another reason I'm glad I'm done with Eltingville, because it was far and away the most stressful stuff for me to work on. Especially the last two issues.

So, yeah, this is an example of a not very tight Eltingville page layout. Some images were decent enough for me to enlarge and throw on the light pad and work from fairly closely. You can see where I was sitting there with big cartoony ???'s over my head and basically shrugged and/or panicked on the page, not sure which line worked for me or what detail was worth adding in. You can see the back-and-forth I do with script notes all over the layouts. All of it is mental scribbling to make some sense of. I rolled a very low Discipline score when I made up my character.

I worked pretty loosely during the SLG days because I could always add extra story pages if I was unable to wrangle things like a disciplined cartoonist (I wasn't able to, usually, especially with Eltingville). Sometimes I had to try to be an adult and fit things into a specific page count, for a Wizard strip, for a Dark Horse Presents issue. When I worked on the last two stories I pretty much lost control of the process. I was horribly stressed about sticking the landing and not sucking, so I kept adding stuff and overcompensating and the second issue ended up being a year or so late. It was ruinous, emotionally and financially. No one made me work that way. Structure on the page is one thing, discipline on a project -- and a life -- is another. Still working on it all.

I'm pretty proud of the last two Eltingville stories, as overdone as they are. I think I pulled off some good-looking cartooning in them, by and large, and I think the writing's solid, if forced in places. I take some pleasure in looking at those pages, even thought I wince at all the texturing and detailing and revising and frustration and worry and anger that went into them. If I had it all to do again I would have definitely approached it differently. Or not have done it at all. I made a lot of mistakes working on these stories. On and off the page.

Speaking of a lack of discipline, this was supposed to be a quick, simple post showing a layout with the finished page. Holy goodnight. It's 6 a.m., time to do the insomnia thing for an hour or two after being in front of the monitor too late and too long. 

More soon later. Later, skaters.