Comic Report #112 - Composition (Patreon)

It's another Friday and we're back on the comic grind again.  I spent a bit of time this week working on gamedev tasks but I made sure to get the framework for the next page up for today, that way I can get the ball rolling and try to get this page finished before my invisible little deadline.  This layout took a little bit of hacking to try to achieve what I wanted in just one page, so in today's writeup I'll talk a bit about planning my page compositions as I go through the gist of what's going on here.

The last page ended with a bit of a cliffhanger.  Lizzie and Alice were scanning Marty Mulgrave's office for clues, trying to figure out how a book from Marty's family collection disappeared without being signed out by anyone, when a person enters the office calling Marty their dad.  Following that ending, the opening for this page has Marty calling out to the trailer's front door, saying something like wait there, I'll be right out, before excusing himself to Lizzie and Alice.  Both of those moments, I felt, work best if the camera is somewhere between the girls, looking straight on at Marty, but cramming it into one panel wouldn't capture the loud energy of hollering into the next room and then the quiet energy of speaking in the current room, so I needed to split the moments up.  I didn't want to draw the same panel twice, though, so I set this opening moment up as a panel-and-a-half composition.  The two panels side-by-side are each about 2/3 of the shot I want, with one being the left 2/3 and the other being the right 2/3, with each shot sharing the same middle third.  Rather than cramming a Lizzie and an Alice into each panel I can put Alice on one side, pan over and end the shot with Lizzie on the other side, and I have plenty of room for my word bubbles.  Additionally, the gentle panning of the camera moves to the right, which is where the door to the office has been in the previous pages, so it kinda moves the energy of the shot towards where that voice is coming from.  It's a lot of very small details but I think it helps make the panel-and-a-half setup work nicely.

The next two panels are where I hit my layout difficulties.  What I want to convey is Lizzie and Alice leaning back in their chairs to peek outside and listen in on the conversation.  I broke a comic rule moving from the top two panels to this one, the 180 Rule, where you generally don't want your camera to do a 180 and flip which character is on which side of a conversation, to help keep panels consistent and easy to follow.  Lizzie and Alice weren't talking here, and I've drawn enough detailed backgrounds that I think it's okay to bend that rule a bit going from the top paragraph to this one, but I tried to keep the rule consistent here.  I needed the camera in front of them so I can get a shot of the two looking to each other, communicating silently.  In the fourth panel I tried to find a camera angle that would keep Alice on the right side, same as in the shot above.  Trying to get the leaning back in their chairs is a bit tricky with the flat horizontal panel shape, but I think getting enough of Lizzie's chair back in the shot helps imply that Alice is leaning back as well. 

I have an idea on how to letter the dialogue in the previous panels in such a way where they can be decoded with effort but will be choppy and seem muffled before the listening-in focus takes place, I'll see about executing that plan once I get there.  The next block of panels is meant to be fully audible, and more clearly reveal who the third Mulgrave is- specifically, it's Snake-Eye of the Gravekeepers.  He's talking to his dad, telling him he should stay home tomorrow.  Marty is giving him a not-again type speech; he doesn't like his son Nathan being caught up in this dangerous work he's doing for the Mayor, he invites him to come work utilities with him instead before he gets hurt.  The main hook of the moment is here, where our friend in the eyepatch, having just taken a call from the Mayor about Monday, is inviting his old man to lay low and stay out of the way tomorrow.  His dad doesn't like it.  Lizzie and Alice are listening in.

The last panels, this is the part where I have to kinda deal with some choices I made in the past.  What I wanted to do was have Snake-Eye look directly at the camera for a moment, like he was eyeing Lizzie and Alice peeking in on him, like he sees them snooping around, as the big moment of the page.  The problem I created for myself is he has an eyepatch on, so now it's harder to pinpoint where his eye is pointing without the second eye visible to zero in with.  The reason he has an eyepatch on, behind the scenes, is because he got pistol whipped in the back of the head by Monday and it's hurt one of his eyes, so he's wearing a patch to help take strain off it while it heals.  Now, though, I need him to clearly be looking directly into the camera for a moment, and I need to achieve this with just one eye.  I'll figure it out.

That's what I got for you for now.  We got some gamedev progress in the pipe, I'll type up a report on that in a moment.  Now that this page is blocked in I can get the inks and paints going, so I should have more to share on it in the coming weeks until it's up on the main page.  Thanks as always for following along with my work.  Until next time, take it easy.