2nd Feb 2024, 12:30 PM
I feel like I’m off to a good start with this page. The actual creation of the page seemed to go quickly, once I finalized my layout. I had created a different layout for it last year, but for whatever reason, I didn’t have the usual creative flow when trying to work on it. Trying to draw it was like pulling teeth! Perhaps my subconscious was telling me that it was not the right direction for the story to go in.
I decided to scrap the page and start from scratch. With a completely new layout, I quickly found that the creative juices were flowing again! I felt like the old Steamroller Man mojo was back! Curiously, it seemed strangely coincidental that I was immobilized in my creative journey at the same time as my main character had been immobilized in the story. Coincidence… or something metaphysical?
Panel one is a circular panel, a graphic device that I’ve become quite fond of. I created a round panel border tool in Clip Studio Paint for this panel, and I’m thrilled with how it looks! I had the idea for Night Knight’s line about Rip Van Winkle’s beard a while ago, and have been waiting for an appropriate moment in the story to use it. The story of Rip Van Winkle concerns a man who falls asleep, and when he wakes, finds that 20 years have passed - and he has grown a long white beard as he slept. My dialogue was originally going to be “By Rip Van Winkle's beard!” but as I was typing the word balloon, it struck me as a bit too grandiose to fit with Night Knight’s character. It sounded more like something Thor would say. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Marvel’s Thor comics, one of his go-to catchphrases is “By Odin’s Beard!”
Panel two is a borderless panel with a lot of small inset panels. I was trying to convey a lot of information here, and honestly, I’m not entirely happy with my layout for this one. It’s a bit of a mess and I don’t think the reading order of the panels is immediately clear. I left it this way for expediency, and I think the insets can still work without a specific reading order. Hopefully it’s clear to the reader that Steamroller Man has now been fully ingested by M.A.R.S.H.M.A.L.L.O.W. and is trying unsuccessfully to punch and kick his way out.
I’m going to go quite far behind the curtain on this next point. The bottom tier of panels uses a trick I learned from storyboarding, using tight close-ups to curate the information I’m conveying without showing exactly where the characters are in relation to each other. A major problem I was having with my previous layout for this page was how to show Night Knight seeing two things he couldn’t logically see at the same time, namely Steamroller Man being ingested (on the front side of his head, obviously), and the cables on the back of M.A.R.S.H.M.A.L.L.O.W.’s head. I was trying to use a wide angle panel showing all the characters at once, but logically Night Knight couldn’t be in front of him and behind him at the same time. So the solution was to use close-up panels to keep the spatial relationship ambiguous while still conveying the necessary story information.
So the seeds are now sown for this villain’s defeat, and I admit while I love the character, I will not miss drawing him! He has presented a set of compositional challenges as unique as his physiology in literally every panel he’s in!
As always, thanks for reading and supporting Steamroller Man! I am going to try and get pages done more quickly from now on.
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