Issue One, Page Thirty/Thirty-One – Double Page Spread!

I decided to try a double-page spread for a few reasons. First, I thought the story warranted it. I think having one large image, as large as the physical dimensions of a printed comic will permit, helps to convey the fearsome majesty of this new location, where (spoiler alert!) the climax of this issue will take place. A large image like this makes the reader slow down and really take things in, which is exactly what Paige and Sugar Daddy are doing at this point in the story! One thing I'm learning from making my own comic is how to pace the story using the various tools of comics. Panels of different sizes and shapes are actually read at different speeds by the reader, and so the author can control the pace that the reader progresses by tailoring the space each panel takes up on the page. I already knew a lot of this in theory from reading books like Scott McCloud's excellent and seminal Understanding Comics, but it's been a ton of fun experimenting with these principles myself! My second reason for this double-page spread was as an homage to Jack Kirby. Kirby was magnificent at conveying massive, cosmic scale on the comic page and would often use double-page spreads to do it. Here's one from his comic, Captain Victory. Amazing stuff! He often did this when depicting futuristic machines that had some grand purpose. I even tried to capture some of the flavor of his bombastic prose in my captions. I struggled quite a bit with the text on these pages. Many, many drafts to try and get the Kirby-like tone to it. I discovered that coming up with dialogue for characters to speak to each other is much easier for me than writing narration. I definitely learned the truth in the maxim "Writing is Rewriting".

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