I wasn't super-enthused about this page as I started it, but I'm pretty happy with how it ended up.

The first panel was kind of fun. Since the characters were so small in the panel, I was forced to keep it low in detail, and focus on only what was needed to convey the story point. This is the second time I've used "PAF" as a sound effect (here's the first), and this comes directly from all the Asterix comics I read as a kid. Goscinny and Uderzo would use that sound effect a lot when a Roman legionnaire got hit. I always liked it. It was so different from the "POW" or "BIFF" you'd normally see in American comics. I can't be certain but my schoolboy French has me thinking it would be pronounced more like "puff" by a French speaker. I still pronounce it with the flat "a" sound like in "cat", though.

The drawing on this page went relatively quickly, allowing me to retain the momentum I feel I built up while working on the previous double-page spread. I'm sure the lack of backgrounds helped. I normally don't like to leave the backgrounds out of so many panels on a page, but in this case it didn't feel like it needed them. The compositions of each panel told the story well enough with just the characters. Of course, the building starting to break apart in the last panel was a story point, so a background was necessary.

I also read a tip somewhere this week about composing comic pages, which advised artists to compare the size of a character's head from panel to panel - a good variation in size from panel to panel, and across the page, meant that the composition held more visual interest. So I decided to try and put that into practice here. In my original layout, panel three was a medium shot of Paige, cropped at the waist. She was doing a cool hand gesture, and I really like drawing hands, but she was about the same size as she is in panel two. So I decided to enlarge her to close-up size for the sake of the composition. I think it worked.

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