Backstage Pass #12 (Patreon)

On this edition of Backstage Pass, I’ll be talking about…

Late-stage changes on a page! Which I don’t do often, but sometimes is necessary for good page flow.

You may recall that page 30 looks like this:

You can see on this page, Inigo performs a double kick after summoning rocks via attacking the dungeon environment directly, clocking Drowzee on the head. But this wasn’t always the case! As a matter of fact, the page used to look like this:

It wasn’t awful, but it also wasn’t what I wanted. With only three panels to work with for this manuever, it’s hard to illustrate the full motion of what Inigo is doing. My general idea was:
- Inigo hits the ground with his tail
- The Mystery Dungeon reacts and shoots out some rocks
- Inigo kicks one rock out of the air with his leg via double kick, and
- Kicks the second rock with his tail so he keeps his footing. (Double kick would normally be performed with both legs, but since he’s aiming he needs to be more careful about maintaining balance).
And generally I… Sort of got the idea across? But the rocks look so small, and it’s so hard to follow their path that I was at a bit of a loss for how to make it look more clear.

So, I turned to my beta reader, asking for suggestions on how to save this scene. She looked at the page, and seemed just as stuck. Then, she gave me the hard truth; really, the only effective way to fix this was to either redo the panels, or add more betweens. So, I asked if she would thumbnail new boards over the problem panels:

After some time, she sent this back:

It was really helpful to get out of my own head with re-boarding this, even if it was discouraging to change it so late into the page. Actually drawing the panels wasn’t too difficult; I went straight to lineart in the double kick panel (opting out of a sketch and using my beta reader’s sketch as a general guide), and in the panel where Drowzee is getting pelted with the rock, I just upscaled the original panel for a zoom and drew over that as a base. I maybe could have gotten away with simply upscaling that panel, but over the years I’ve become more picky about visuals and quality of pages.

All in all, it went smoothly even with the delay. The most difficult part of this was accepting that the page needed to be changed, and would likely remain imperfect unless I decided to extend the actions into two separate pages. This just illustrates the importance of being confident in thumbnails before going through with them, because a 3 second sketch will be much quicker to fix than a fully rendered panel! The flow of action still may not be perfect, but I think it works much better and does the job.