Spot the Difference - Space Camp Pages (Patreon)

So! I made both a lot of changes and also kept a lot of things exactly the same between my two drafts of the Day Two chapter from my Letters From Space Camp book! Let's dive in to that, eh? For reference:

• Day Two: First Draft (16 pages) 🔒 Comics Tier Patrons
• Day Two: Revised (22 pages) 🔒 Comics Tier Patrons

For my first draft, I was copy-pasting my text from the script into my comic page template as fast as I could go. I didn't have any art directions in there as I wrote, I was just transcribing my handwritten notes and then dropping those chunks of text into the comic template until it looked like there was "enough" for one page and then I'd repeat the process into the next blank page. That means I was figuring out the visuals looong afterwards, while normally I simultaneously write and sketch out my stories as I go, so that the words and pictures can best tell the story together.

The first draft is fine as it is; it communicates the story clearly enough. But it's not particularly good comics because I wasn't really utilizing the art and page space to reinforce the text.

Like, there's a difference between an essay with illustrations and comics. 

If you take the illustrations out of an essay, the essay itself is still a whole, complete story.  If you take the images out of a comic, the text left behind will probably be incomprehensible. And, likewise, if you take the text out of a comic, the reader will be missing a huge chunk of the story. Both the pictures and the text need each other to tell the full story. (Yes, yes, for my beloved pedants in the audience, this is not a hard rule that applies to every single comic. But, you know, generally speaking I think it's generally true. Generally.)

Comics is about making the text and images rely on and enhance each other to tell one united story that couldn't be communicated as well without the two working together.

One of the super fun things about a comic page is that the space of the page itself is part of the story, mood, timing, and probably some other elements that I'm not thinking of. Your eyes have to physically travel over the distance of the page in the correct path in order to consume the story in the correct order- just like in a paragraph, you read each sentence in its chronological order, one after the other, starting on the first and ending on the last. You don't read the third sentence first, jump to the sixth, loop back to the first, then hop to the second, and finish on the fourth. Likewise, a good comic page guides your eye across the layout to read the text/images in the correct order instead of just bouncing all over the place. 

That physical space your eye is traveling over also can be used to convey time, distance, and mood. Uhg, oh my god, I'm just summarizing Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics from years' old memory now. Tell you what, go out and read his actual book and I'll just get on to explaining the changes I made between the first draft of the Day Two chapter and this inked version (which is probably still going to get edited and redrawn again).

Since this is the start of a new chapter, I wanted a really clear THIS IS A BRAND NEW DAY kind of page. That original first panel stretched out to fill up an entire page. In the revised version, I drew myself with a slightly stronger power stance and no background to grab the reader's attention and convey that my confidence was an internal feeling by not locking me into a physical place. 

Like I said above, you want the pictures and text to enhance each other so I took the original bottom sentence in panel 1 and gave it its own panel to show some acting and details that couldn't be conveyed by the text itself. 

The sentence is "AND I bring a COAT for those freezing air conditioned rooms." My drawing shows me smirking at the aggressive air streams literally breaking in through the panel boundary to saw away at me futilely. I also added the though balloon "Nice try." to give my character a tiny touch of personality, so she's more of a person the reader can care about, somebody with her own internal dialogue going on independent from the narrator. 

The background I added to this scene is also introducing the reader to an important and reoccurring element of the scene: the clipboards and work sheets. In the original version, panel 2 jumps to my hand filling out my actual sheet. In this revised version, the reader is now entering the room with me and picking up the clipboard casually, which is communicated because the Erika character isn't even looking at them because she's smirking at the air conditioning. So these important objects aren't even the focus of the panel, they're just part of Character Erika's routine. So, what started out as an isolated sentence that had no relationship to the art in the first draft is now a full fleshed out scene that provides a backdrop to the reader seeing the Erika Character interacting with her space and demonstrating her personality.

In the revised version, if you took that sentence out from the panel, the scene would be confusingly random. If you removed the art from the panel, well, technically the information about bringing the coat would still get transmitted, but the reader would lose out on location and character building.

Finally: in the revised version, we go from feeling (character emoting in empty space in panel one) to reality (drawn in a specific, recognizable location in panel two). I think it's a fun little visual transition.

Next I took my worksheet and let it fill out almost an entire page so the audience could more easily read it. In the original, I dropped a large chunk of floating text explaining the different sections of the worksheet off to the side of panel 3. In the revision, I placed each sentence that explains each section of the worksheet next to that space on the paper and even over the shape of my hand. It's not my finest layout, there's still some confusion over which path the eye is supposed to travel to go from the first caption to the last one and I'm hoping I'll smooth that out. But generally, I was trying to position each worksheet caption to draw the eye from the top of the worksheet down to the bottom, before landing on the Erika Character's word balloon. This also serves the purpose of explaining the worksheet as it's being read. The worksheet and the text are reinforcing each other. 

For the final original panel 3, I stretched it out to cover the bottom width of the page and had it overlapping the worksheet to strengthen the connection that the sheet Character Erika is reading is the same one that we are still looking at. 

All that for turning one page into two. 

I've got way more diagrams to share but this is already criminally long so I'll save it for another post /:)