Issue Two, Page Twenty-Nine

Posted on February 4, 2024 by Matthew Schofield

17th May 2021, 9:00 AM

 

I tend to stick to a pretty conventional grid-based panel layout for most of my pages. The grid layout lets the reader focus on the story being told within the panels rather than the panels themselves - it’s like looking at scene outside your window, rather than being distracted by the shape of the window frame. The horizontal and vertical lines of the panel borders, and the standard space of the gutters (the space between the panels) give a sense of stability and help to create a visual rhythm. Setting up the rhythm is especially useful for moments when I want to deliberately create a jarring effect. I break the rhythm by breaking out of that grid layout. That’s what I’ve attempted here, by varying the size of the first three panels and skewing them. Paige is losing her balance, and so is the page layout, hopefully making the reader feel Paige’s fall more viscerally.

Once Paige is stable again, on the ground, we return to the grid. I wanted to experiment with tall vertically-oriented panels here, as I do tend to do a lot of “widescreen” panel orientation. I was thinking about Frank Miller’s work on Marvel Comics’ Daredevil, and how he would often use tall vertical panels to great effect.


I thought this would be an interesting challenge, and would be a nice fit for the sound effect business I was attempting to pull off. This is a persistent challenge (and part of the fun) of making comics: depicting sound in a silent visual medium. Here, I am trying to depict an echo that gradually fades into silence. I got less confident in my ability to pull this off as the page came closer to completion, but it became one of those “past the point of no return” things - too late to redo the whole thing. Hopefully it worked.

One final thought: I went back and forth on whether to have Paige's punchline in a thought balloon or a standard speech balloon. The story logic suggested that since she is still ostensibly trying to stay quiet and undetected, she would not speak out loud (despite having caused a huge noise)... but for whatever reason, the thought balloon didn't seem as funny to me as just having her say it "aloud". Logic rarely makes anything funnier.

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