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I better put this out there, I missed a couple of sketch updates! It might be a little hard to decipher what's going on if you're unfamiliar with the comic and don't have the script but I actually think this ended up pretty good in layout.

One thing I note to Gunwild is that I sorta like having ONE big image per page. This isn't a hard and fast rule of course, but this is more a philosophical thing than it is a time saving thing. Though in some cases, it can save on time as well by simplifying some things.


But the idea of having a singular "big" image on a page is to give the page a kind of balance. And it's something that you can then build around, with panels accenting it and adding to it. Sometimes though, some artists take this to too much of an extreme. It's like they treat the other panels like a necessary evil of comics, that if these other little panels got out of the way their big glorious illustration would be uninterrupted.


I still like this rule of thumb though. When I think of a page, some people think it's like a scene in a movie but I think it's more analogous to a paragraph in prose. In prose, you've got a sequence of events described by sentences. But a good paragraph tends to be centered around one idea with the important information put at the front end of it. The equivalent in a page would be so you can see the big part of the illustration when you turn to it.


I'm not explaining it perfectly, but I think it won't be the last time I try to go over this idea.

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Comments

Anonymous

Well, it's also useful to make each page feel more like an event when you're posting once or twice a week. There's a tendency in some online comix to "write for the trade", so to speak, which is a fine enough philosophy if that's the ultimate goal, but that means the day to day reading suffers. I think if you're publishing online trying to make sure each page stands on its own and has its own impact is important, since the pacing of updates and the presentation on the page is the medium you're working with. Which is too often forgotten, I think.

Aidenke

There's definitely some merit to that kind of approach to a comic. There are times when you want a lot of panels to tell certain events in a way that only a comic can, but there's been a strong push for "widescreen comics" - a comic that feels broad in scope, much like a movie, only keeping a lot of the tricks that can work best in the flat medium. Not a bad approach at all. :)