I approached this page somewhat differently than the way I normally work. Usually, I have an idea for what has to happen on the page, and I will rough out a thumbnail sketch to tell that part of the story visually. I have a rough idea of the dialogue I want the characters to say, but for the thumbnails it’s usually very rudimentary, placeholder dialogue. I include words balloons in the thumbnail sketch to make sure I’m accounting for them as part of the composition of each panel. Then I’m constantly refining, reworking and rewording the dialogue, all the way through the pencilling, and sometimes even during the inking process, to get everything sounding just right. (This also helps me catch spelling errors and typos).
With this page though, I had some specific ideas for what I wanted the characters to say, and so I basically wrote a little script before I drew anything. As wordy as this page is here, the original script was even longer, and during the thumbnail process I realized I was either going to have to cut some dialogue or expand this conversation to two pages. I’m always conscious of how the comic will read when printed, and so adding one page held the possibility of throwing off the rhythm of the story - some pages are specifically designed to be odd-numbered or even-numbered. So I decided that cutting some dialogue was the best option. A few pages back, I realized that I had a good chance of actually ending this issue at twenty-two pages, which is around the standard length of your typical mass-market superhero comic. I don’t know why this is important to me, but perhaps it’s the fact that I always intended this entire story to be completely told in a 22- or 24-page single issue, and yet here we are, 100 pages and almost three issues later, and not at the end yet! So, ideally, this will be the second-to-last page of this issue.
As I pencilled the page from the thumbnails, I laid in the dialogue. I found that there were still going to be a lot of words on this page, and it would be a challenge to fit them all in! I do like to compose my panels without too much “wasted” empty space, but it was definitely a challenge to fit everything on the page and still have it read clearly.
I overlapped a balloon from panel two to lead into panel three, and then did another overlap from panel three to panel four. I also used a technique I’m quite fond of - overlapping one balloon over another, obscuring the text in the second, to convey one character interrupting and talking over the other.
Making my own comic has really given me a greater appreciation for the art of comic book lettering! Good lettering is the invisible glue that holds a comic together - when it’s all working properly, you barely notice it, but lettering that’s not working properly can completely take you out of the story! For more information on lettering, I recommend professional letterer Nate Piekos’ excellent book on the subject, The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering. Nate is also well worth a follow on social media!
As always, thanks for reading! Follow me and my work at any of the links on my LinkTree.
Keep Rolling!
Matt