Comic Report #125.1 - Space (Patreon)

Hello again! I'm happy to say I have progress to share with you this week. I've been crunching away on my Kitsune Tails tasks, and if you've been looking forward to that game, I am happy to say that I'm hitting some kind of milestone this week. I can't say what, I can't say a lot of what I've been working on, and I really wish I could, but the line is "it'll be out before September of this year" and I am working hard to ensure my art tasks complete early enough to make good on that. That game releasing will be a huge item off my plate and, hopefully, a bit of relief, but I gotta prioritize things for a little bit so we can launch a good game. I'll keep up my monthly comic deadlines, and after that work is done, that might coincide with something in the comic where I can work on pages a bit faster. We'll see how that goes, but I'm doing my best!

One other service announcement I'd like to make before moving forward: after this post goes up I am going to move my Patreon post days from Friday to Saturday. The reason for the change is: there's a boxing class near me that runs at about the same time I type up these posts, so instead of crunching myself to get them done before that class, I figure if I move it over a day I can enjoy some physical exercise. I treat this platform as my creative transparency to you, so in the spirit of that transparency, that's why I'm planning the change.

Now, onto the actual page! This week I've moved from the thumbnail phase to my pencils, and my big consideration here is actually plotting out the space I need to fit the words I'm planning to add at the final phase of the art. In the thumbnails I popped in a bunch of ovals to try to get a relative sense of how much space it'd take up. In a thumbnail it's all relative, but actually plotting out my panels in a page, the long-and-thin panels can end up a bit cramped for space if I'm not careful.

The real workhorse of this page is going to be the second row of panels, and I think I have ample room to handle what I need to say. The tall panel on the left has an up-shot at the ceiling, so I don't have to worry about a ton of detail getting covered up there. On the right side, those tiny little panels aren't going to hold a lot of words on their own, but I plan to overflow into the middle panel, so it's effectively two larger dialogue spaces, like this:

 I'm not too worried about the bottom set of panels, that's a soft-spoken moment, a few-words kind of setup for the page to follow, so I'll be able to fit what I need to just fine. The top half is my bigger concern, and I think I got it framed how I need to.

The reason I do things in this order, rather than writing in all the dialogue now to make sure it fits, is I place a lot of emphasis on body language in my comics. I plan a comic to tell its story emotively, with camera angles and character expression, with the intent of it conveying an idea. I also don't like to cover up character art where I can avoid it, since it's the real "dialogue" of my pages. At the end I'll phrase what I want the page to say in a way that fits the space allotted, I have a pretty good internal thesaurus so I can re-word things to fit right. Body language is important to me, so I always do that first.

That'll be it for today. I am close to a big Kitsune Tails milestone so I'm gonna focus on that this week and see it through to completion. I'll work on the ink and flat tones too, so I should have things to share next Saturday, but I do need to put more time into something I can't talk about yet... but soon! Soon... soon it'll be out there and you'll see it for yourself. Thanks for being patient with me. Next Saturday! Until then, have a nice week out there.