“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”  - Voltaire

I really struggled with my perfectionist streak as I redrew this page. The original was definitely one of my least favorite pages from the first issue, and I was surprised at how hard it was to let go of the new version and say it was finished. I kept feeling that it wasn’t quite right, no matter what I tried. I still don’t feel like it came out exactly how I imagined it would, but eventually I had to just tell myself to stop tweaking it and move on. I don’t often descend this deep into perfectionism, and I started to worry whether this whole redraw project was not such a good idea after all. This is the second-last full page redraw I’m going to do, so I think I’ll just have to exercise some more mental discipline as I go on. 

Here are some details of what went into making this new page:

I don’t normally like one-point perspective symmetry but it felt like the right way to go here. I even had a bit of background machinery forming a faux halo behind Sugar Daddy’s head. I used photo reference for the background, first making a photo collage from five or six different photographs of abandoned factories, and then creating the drawing based on the collage. Early on, I was even thinking of just using the photo collage AS the background, which is a technique that Jack Kirby and other artists used in the early days of Marvel comics. Here's an example:

Once again, I’ve made some minor changes to the dialogue on this page, for reasons of story consistency. I didn’t actually know what the plot was going to be the first time around, since I was making the plot up as I drew each page. At that time, I thought a generic revenge plot was good enough to get the story going, and I would work the details out later. Now I know what the whole story will be, and Sugar Daddy’s motivation is not really one of revenge.

Sugar Daddy’s real name was going to be revealed in the upcoming Issue Three, but I thought it might work better to drop that in here, when the reader is first introduced to him. Of course, my penchant for pun names is on full display here with Manny Cavatese!

The only part of the original page that I was really happy with was the final panel, and I had planned to keep the artwork from that panel unchanged, but once again my perfectionist streak got the better of me, and I ended up redrawing that too. I do think it’s an improvement.

It's time to let this page go and put it out into the world! Thanks for reading and subscribing! Until next time, stay safe, everyone!