Good Bones - First Pass Thumbnails (Patreon)

Here are the first pass thumbnails for the short story I'm working on with Marta and Luisa - Good Bones! I'm tweaking my story-writing method a little bit with this one, so these aren't the final thumbnails. 

At this stage I just wanted to set out the page count and define the major "beats". The story right now is 8 pages long. So funny how cartooning is almost the opposite of prose...? In the sense that many prose writers push themselves on wordcount and are proud about how many pages are in their book (as they should be)! 

With comics, the process is so labor-intensive that I find myself pushing for less and less. Can I convey this story in 8 pages? Four? One? The faster I can finish with one cohesive story bite, the faster I can move onto one of my thousands of other ideas. It's a wonderful challenge to create a rich and immersive short story that will stick with the reader after only a few pages. At least... that's the goal! It's a high bar. 

This little scribble is showing me that 8 pages is probably doable, and it shows me roughly where I'm spending my time on each spread. It's showing me how much time I ought to invest in development (I should be investing some time into the remote skeleton for sure, and the environment, and less than I thought on the box itself!). 

Next I will have to work on getting actual dialogue into these thumbs to see if the ideas can flow clearly in such little space. 

I'm grateful that I have enough time to invest in the process for this short. Usually with comics that are due for an anthology, I don't have this much time. I'd have submitted my script and thumbnails by now and I would have to be forging on to pencils! It's one of the reasons why I'm trying to invest in tinkering with the method itself, while I'm not under such pressure.