Disintegrity 101 remade ! (Patreon)

Probably gonna write a lot again cos just like yesterday I'm using this post as a pause from drawing. Expect the third One Piece page this week end ! Or don't cos I never fit the estimation I give.

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It's strange how little the old page inspires me, and yet it mostly stay the same in the remaking process. I guess it was a page on the cusp of looking okay but just missed its mark. The text in the middle of the page could have tied it all together and made it look cool (like a movie poster) but the nasty choice of color and ugly font just failed it.  Although I didn't even try to rectify it in that way when remaking since I removed the text altogether in the new version.

Instead I changed the pacing of the page, at least the upper part of it, the change highlights the difference between "importance" and "time". The old page's first panel looks more important than the first panel of the new version because the panel is bigger. But it feels like the moment lasts longer in the new version since there's an added panel depicting the step in between the first panel and the main attraction of the page.

The placement of the text was weird in the old panel one as well. I'm very much a westerner in that regard, I don't like for speech bubbles to step over the image too much whereas mangas often place text over characters without a care for the image's integrity but that also is a way to pace a comic better. Cos the bubble guide your eyes through the page, so by having the speech in the middle of an image, you're taking in the action WHILE reading the words. That's something that makes manga feel more dynamic and thus more fun to read than a lot of western comics.

What I did back then is the exact way how not to do it. I wanted to imply that the action depicted takes a while (because, as stated previously, the size of the panel is no indication of the time the moment lasts) so Zee's dialog in staggered in chunks, but instead of spacing them out within the panel, it's all laddered on the side. Which doesn't guide anyone's eye anywhere ! It sucks ! It's dumb ! It just feels and looks weird to read ! And it's not even a good looking dyyyyck anyway so why bother trying to keep the speech bubbles away from it !

So it's all sorted out in the new version. It's not frontloaded with speech, instead dialog and picture sequence each other.

The bottom of the page didn't change anywhere near as much cos it was fine enough. The way Larsen's body was laid made no sense but it wasn't obvious since his head was the centerpiece, still I fixed that in the new version. I put an orange overlay on his bottom parts because it broke the composition of the page too much. With the orange, it just fades into the background more which makes the important parts more legible but the booty is still there so it's a victory in my book !

Last panel is basically the same just redrawn because it was already all good, all I really changed was uwu-ing Zee's lips.

It's not specific to that page but you can clearly see how rushed most of the old comic was here. A lot of the shading doesn't look refined because I wanted the pages to be done fast which led me to try and do things with the least amount of brush strokes possible. Ew.

anyway that's probably more words than this page deserved, time for me to grab some drink and draw