Early $10+ Preview: Page 223 (Patreon)

Ew!

========

Hoo boy. I committed so many word balloon cardinal sins on this one. Trying to get all those words on here, plus the art, was a difficult task. That plus a pain flare and a general malaise from med switch kept this page a bit late this week lmao. BUT IT'S HERE. And hopefully the next one will be easier.

Anyway, word balloons.

Panel 1: A long string of vertical balloons, which has no dynamism or back and forth. It leads the eye staunchly away from the art/rest of the panel. There is no narrative reason for it to be like that, it's just like that because SQUISHING WORDS. Sin!

Panel 2: No matter whether I put Belfry's words on the bottom or the top (and Tam vice versa), the layout is ambiguous as to which should be read first. Since Panel 1 had such a strong vertical through-line, I figured there'd be a little inertia from that and putting Tam's bubble close to the border would be the best I could do to lead the eye. It's... good *enough* but ideally I would have redesigned the whole panel to work better. I did not. Sin!

Panel 3: Word balloon tails should never cross. Ideally, the layout of the panel would be such that Tam would be somewhat to the left and Bel to the right, so that the balloons fell naturally in reading order. This did not happen. The way it's set now, the tails don't cross *exactly* but it is far from ideal. Sin!

Panel 4: Look at that smooshing of balloons into any free space I can find. Again, redesigning the panel would have been better, or finding more words to cut out. But god I already cut so many words. SO MANY WORDS. The script of this entire scene is probably 3x as wordy as the final. Anyway. Shitty layout. SIN!

Panel 5: Another "let's smoosh balloons into free space" panel. I just could not find a good way to arrange these things. SIN!

Panel 6: This one's actually okay. UwU

I don't recount all of these because I'm mad about it or down on myself about it, of course. I'm educating through my mistakes! In any creative endeavor, but especially webcomics, you're going to find a few pages (or whatever) that fall far short of your expectations and hopes. You just gotta accept it, do your best with what you got, and move on.

So that's what I did here: I knew this page was far from ideal, but you know what? It's readable, it's done, it's out there, and I can do the next page now.

And in reviewing my mistakes, hopefully I can help avoid them later!