Redrawing Page Three

Here’s another side-by-side comparison of the same page, separated by three years. When I first decided to redraw some of my early pages, I was going to skip over this one. I thought the original still worked pretty well, and the tightly-cropped compositions meant that the original artwork wouldn’t look too bad compared to the newer pages that would eventually be on either side of it. 

However, one thing that always bothered me about this opening sequence was the fact that I never showed Sugar Daddy actually putting the heart on the Gingerbread Golem’s chest. My prime motivation for redrawing this page was rectifying that.

As with my earlier redraws, I tried to make the new page more dynamic and interesting by varying the panel compositions: changing the size of the character in each panel, changing the camera angles, and adding background details to give more of a sense of place. The original page was pretty simple, a continuous action in one place. On the new page I wanted it to feel a bit more like a film montage, with the action jumping forward a bit more, from panel to panel. I was able to reuse some of the original artwork for panel two, and I think it blends well with the more varied angles of the new panels around it. 

You may notice that once more, I have made slight changes to the dialogue in this new version. I broke up the original speech into phrases that seemed to suggest separate visual ideas, such as showing Sugar Daddy actually placing the heart on the Golem’s chest as he says “atop your chest”. I think that’s one advantage that redrawing the page gives me: this time, I already have the dialogue and I can more specifically tailor the images to it. When I created the original pages, I was only working from a plot, coming up with panels that told the story’s events, and writing the dialogue after the artwork was done. In professional comics, the plot-only method has been known as the “Marvel method” because in the early 1960s Stan Lee would come up with a short plot description for his artists to create a 22 page story from. Even though I am both artist and writer here, it’s been interesting to work in both “plot first” and “dialogue first” methods.