Comic Report #49.1 - Back At It Again (Patreon)

This week I shifted back to working on the comic page again.  It still surprises me how difficult it can be shifting between animation and painting mindsets, but I find that going back and forth as I have been for the past few years has improved my work in both fields tremendously, so the difficulty in jumping back and forth is worth it. 

Due to the economy of space on this page I opted to put word balloons in before I painted backgrounds to make sure they all fit where I need them to.  Last comic update I shared my dialogue notes but for this page I disabled the text layers so there's still something new to read when the final page is uploaded.  This is a good opportunity to talk about an element of comic-making that I don't think I get to post about often, given the usual text-last order of my operations, and that's about dialogue pacing.

When writing comics your text is mostly going to be written as spoken or thought dialogue.  There aren't really descriptive passages setting the scene in the way you would find in prose, as the artwork itself shoulders this weight, so most of what you write is spoken language.  An important detail to remember about spoken language is that it comes in short simple bursts.  If two people are talking casually you don't really get paragraphs of words coming out all at once, it's little quips and short expressive phrases with space in between for people to understand.  There are lots of examples of poorly-paced comic dialogue where a gigantic balloon is just filled with monologue and a reader's eyes will slide off it like a pad of butter off a hit skillet.  No one really speaks like that except in lectures, and even there you want your dialogue to be short and punchy so people will actually pick up what you're saying to them.  Even though I omitted the text on this page you can see the size of the word balloons- nothing is too large, everything is exchanges of short little bursts I can fit in the spaces around the characters.  This is why I wanted to do the words first on this page, and the nature of spoken language is the biggest tool in my creative toolbox to make it fit.

One of the major details about this comic has been Lizzie's internal monologue.  When I started the comic I wanted to make Lizzie a creative person in a menial job, because that is a reflection of my own experiences, but the decision to make her a writer was so I had an opportunity to put really creative flowery language in my comic.  Inside the square monologue boxes I can write dialogue that goes beyond what a human being would actually say to someone else, since it's all thought and not spoken it isn't as constrained by verbal pauses, breath or time pronouncing it.  I always try to maintain this distinction between Lizzie's spoken and thought text- her internal thoughts tend towards the poetic, and while she likes to put wordplay in her spoken language she still goes uhh and uhmm and speaks more plainly than what she thinks.  It's part of what makes internal thought pages like the ones I had a few pages back so handy, I can just convey this contextual information that would never be spoken without needing anyone to speak to.  Even in that context, though, I try to keep the thoughts concise, since a person still has to sit down and read it so it needs to be digestible in that context.

I should be able to knock out the last of this page over the weekend, so I'm looking at a Monday post date for my target.  Thank you for being patient with me as I juggle gamedev tasks and comics, I always want to keep both halves of the project moving forward but they're both a lot of work.  I'll post again with a finished page.  Have a nice weekend!