Hey there everybody!
When my wife saw me working on this page, she said "Wow! You're putting so much more detail into your pages these days!" I hadn't really thought about it, to be honest, but I suppose she's right in the case of this page! It wasn't a conscious decision - it never is. I just draw the page how I feel it needs to be drawn. It just comes out how it comes out.
With this page, I had to draw a city street scene, at night, and what I had in my head was David Mazzuchelli's phenomenal and definitive work on Batman: Year One. Of course, mine came out completely different, and I'm no Mazzuchelli, but I was at least trying to convey a sense of life in the city going on around Paige and Steamroller Man as they walked.
This meant adding some passers-by, all of whom I designed straight on the page. The challenge was not to have any of them upstage our main characters - the main focus of panel one had to be "Paige and Steamroller Man approach the opening of a dark alley". So I posed each bystander as though they were too busy in their own routines to notice a superhero with a humongous head walking right by them.
This page was similar to the previous one, in that it's also about moving from one point to another. The agenda here was really all about getting to the ominous reveal in the final panel. I realize now that I could have really just used two panels to convey the same information. Why use as many panels as I did? Upon reflection, I believe it was about the rhythm of the page. The British film critic Mark Kermode often uses the phrase "quiet, quiet, quiet, BANG!" to describe the way jump-scare moments are set up in horror movies. Comics can work in a similar way. To paraphrase Kermode, the panels on this page would go "banter, banter, banter, GUN!" which I think works better for that final payoff than would a two-panel "banter, GUN!" The build-up makes the payoff work... in this case. Ultimately I think every comic artist just has to go with what feels right for the moment they are trying to convey.
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